[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) - Build internal tools fr...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) - Build internal tools from data without
code
Hi all, we're Darragh and Simon, cofounders of Noloco
(https://noloco.io), a no-code platform for teams to create
internal tools from their business data. Noloco lets you create
internal apps from data sources like PostgreSQL, Airtable and
Google Sheets without writing any code. This makes building
internal tools and configuring views a lot faster than building
them with code and SQL queries. It also enables non-technical team
members like those in ops, customer support or sales to make
changes without having to rely on engineers. Building internal
tools is time-consuming and resource intensive, not just for the
original build but the ongoing maintenance as well. It's also not
the kind of work that developers typically want to do, nor usually
the most valuable use of their time. From our prior experience at
tech companies like HubSpot, TripAdvisor, Revolut and Flipdish, we
experienced some of the pains around internal tooling first hand.
As a PM leading the Payments team in one company, Simon would have
to prepare SQL scripts every week to update customer data, and
hound developers to run them. Most of the time, businesses simply
didn't have the resources to invest in updating tooling. Since
launching in November 2021, we have a wide variety of customers
using Noloco for internal tools. For example, one real estate
company is using Noloco to manage payment approvals to contractors
hired across their property portfolio. An accounting firm uses
Noloco as an internal practice management tool to keep track of
proposals made to clients and relevant pieces of work. And a lead
generation business used Noloco to build a sophisticated CRM and
customer portal to track leads provided to their customers. Most
platforms that enable building internal tools are either targeted
at developers, or are 'low-code' and still require some coding
expertise to build something useful. Other no-code platforms
typically connect to more no-code backends like Google Sheets and
often focus more on B2C use cases, enabling building of publicly
accessible websites, for example. Often these solutions fall short
when it comes to building sophisticated internal tools around data.
Noloco is a fully no-code solution focused solely on web apps. We
connect to relational databases like PostgreSQL as well as no-code
backends like Airtable and Google Sheets, enabling companies to
build powerful apps on top of their existing business data from
multiple sources. We believe that we've got the balance right
between simplicity and enhanced configuration ability for power
users who want to go deep with customisation: filtering, validation
rules, database permission rules etc. It took us a couple of
pivots to arrive at this system. Initially we were building a
feature-rich full-stack website and web app builder--but no one
could build anything useful with it. We decided to revamp the
product to make it much simpler. A few weeks later, we had our
first version of our client portal builder. This was a step in the
right direction, but our value proposition around centralising
customer interactions in a custom-made client portal wasn't
resonating with prospects. Finally we realized that what our most
successful customers wanted was to share their existing data with
their team or customers. This led us to revamp the product once
more to make the focus on connecting your existing data. Once you
do so, we're able to automatically build an app around your data
meaning that you can launch a whole lot faster with much less of a
learning curve. The starting point for building an app with Noloco
is adding data. If using an external data source like Airtable or
Postgres, you provide your connection details, choose what tables
you want to import and then Noloco syncs your data across. Once the
initial import has finished, Noloco instantly builds an app for you
around your data--including collections, forms and record pages for
each database record. From there, you can customise the app and
select the most appropriate layout options to display your data
like tables, kanban boards, calendars and charts. You can set
database permissions by user role to control what records different
users have access to and what fields they can view and edit. This
means that you can confidently invite your team or customers and
allow them to view, create and update data. In case you're
interested, here's a video of us building a Lending App from
Postgres data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVDHCvPqgsg If
you're interested in trying the product, we recently launched our
free tier and you get a free trial of all premium features when you
sign up. Here's a link to our sign-up page:
https://portals.noloco.io/register We'd love to hear from the HN
community about your experiences using and building internal tools.
Author : darraghmckay
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-10-24 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noloco.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (noloco.io)
| aargh_aargh wrote:
| https://sso.tax/
| haolez wrote:
| Agreed. Not having SSO is not a show stopper for me, but if
| there is an alternative with SSO included at a fair price (as
| there are with other no-code tools), I'd go with that instead.
| vosper wrote:
| To be fair, integrating with enterprise SAML isn't zero-effort.
| There are engineers/IT on both sides going back and forth, and
| the provider is going to have to deploy a test environment for
| the customer, possibly debug things there, then there'll be
| questions to answer about federation etc...
|
| I wouldn't do it for free, either.
|
| But standardized SSO like Google or (presumably) Office 365 -
| yeah there shouldn't be a tax on that.
| simonalexcurran wrote:
| We actually do offer Google Sign-In as an option across all
| plans that users can enable for their apps (I know this
| probably isn't clear on the website).
| metadat wrote:
| Love the domain "noloco.io", is this an intentional nod /
| reference to "SoMoLo" (as in Social, Mobile, Local) from the show
| Silicon Valley?
| simonalexcurran wrote:
| Haha first time someone made that connection! It's more around
| no-code / low-code, but we also like how it means 'not crazy'
| in Spanish.
|
| Another benefit is that it's generally easy to spell as well,
| which loads of businesses have a problem with when it comes to
| search.
| sudoit wrote:
| I love the name. And I immediately read it as the Spanish "no
| loco"
| darraghmckay wrote:
| Thanks! Definitely somewhat (after being a play on no/lo code
| obviously). I'd be lying if I said that scene wasn't one of the
| first things I thought of after coming up with the name.
| codegeek wrote:
| I would guess No-Low-Code
| hoosieree wrote:
| The German TLD seems to be available.
| darraghmckay wrote:
| Do you mean noloco.de? We actually do own that. I just need
| to setup a redirect
| hoosieree wrote:
| Yep, that's what I meant. Nice job.
| bonsai80 wrote:
| Do you have the capability to enable automated testing of the
| system built with the app builder? In my experience continued
| success with an app builder quickly becomes dependent on some
| testing capability to avoid breaking things over time. This is
| similar to unit/integration/system tests a "regular" developer
| would do, but trickier since it means making that available to
| users at a lower technical skill level. I'm interested to hear
| what solution you have for this, or even just thoughts on how you
| might address it in the future.
| darraghmckay wrote:
| That's not something we currently offer, but it's certainly
| something I've thought about a lot. One of the benefits of no-
| code tools like Noloco is that you define, very explicitly,
| what your app should do, display and how it behaves under
| certain conditions. This really does allow for completely
| automated integration tests. such as verifying that a filter in
| the UI does filter the data, verify that when User X logs in,
| that the permissions for that user are respected, verify that
| when a record meets certain conditions, a tab isn't accessible.
|
| Defining the rules for the app could (and will) allow you to
| programmatically verify that it's still working as expected.
|
| However, I think another large appeal for no-code/low-code
| solutions is not having to worry about testing. You can assume
| that because you're building your application within the rules
| of the platform, that everything will function as you tell it
| to.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I am not sure I follow your logic on why a low code tool
| should generate apps that don't need to worry about being
| tested. Even regular software _should_ function the way we
| tell it to but the point of testing is that sometimes this
| changes to no longer be true _unintentially_. If I generate a
| low code program with your tool that should have some desired
| behavior, but then someone makes changes it for it to do new
| things, how can I be sure the old things still work and a
| regression has not occurred? I think there is a need to
| package tests along with the app, even though its being
| generated somewhat at a high level.
| darraghmckay wrote:
| I see what you mean, I guess the best and only way to do
| that would be to write integration like tests with
| something like Cypress, as you could with any web-app.
|
| If you want to verify that it works how you want vs how
| it's setup to work, then you would be better leaning on
| existing tools that can do that.
|
| My point about not needing to test it was about the
| implicit trust you would put in a platform like this, just
| like you would trust that a library you import behaves how
| it describes. It's not expected that you should write unit
| tests and integration tests to verify the behaviour of an
| external library
| mason55 wrote:
| I wouldn't write unit tests for an external library but
| any integration test will implicitly test any external
| libraries that are in the code path. That's one of the
| points of integration tests - catching cases where the
| underlying code still works as it's supposed to but the
| way it's supposed to work has changed. Whether it's an
| external library or code you wrote, your goal is to test
| that all the pieces still fit together like they're
| supposed to.
|
| In the case of something like Noloco, I imagine it would
| be more like "we need to change this DB schema, can we
| update the schema in a test environment and make sure
| that we didn't break our Noloco app?" There's nothing to
| unit test there but if you don't have a solid set of
| integration and e2e tests then you might have a form
| that's halfway through a flow that suddenly stops working
| and you don't notice until your conversions crater to
| zero.
| simonalexcurran wrote:
| The majority of our customers are not developers so the ability
| for them to write and run their own automated tests actually
| hasn't come up as a feature request before to be honest!
|
| Like other platforms, you can of course build and test out
| functionality and even see what it looks like to users with
| different user roles before publishing to your user base.
|
| We have workflows functionality (where you can trigger emails
| and webhooks when data is updated in your app or when action
| buttons are clicked) and that would probably strike me as one
| of the first areas where tests could be focused as these things
| happen more in the background.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| How does this compare with some of the more 'enterprise' style
| tools like Alteryx? What would you say are the main
| differentiators?
| simonalexcurran wrote:
| Alteryx in particular seems to focus more on analytics. You can
| build dashboards and charts with Noloco but our focus is more
| on CRUD operations - enabling you to give other team members
| access to data and control the permissions they have (read-
| only, update, create records) via permission rules at database
| level.
|
| In general, we tend to see that existing enterprise-focused
| tools tend to be more low-code rather than no-code and often
| more aimed at developers rather than non-developers.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| Got it, that makes sense. Thank you and good luck!
| orliesaurus wrote:
| It's a crowded space out there, I think Retool is a beautiful
| crowned beast - leader of this space - but personally I tried and
| failed at using it many times. It was just too much UI/complexity
| to even get through a simple hello world! Nonetheless good luck
| folks, there's definitely a market there and a lot of hungrier
| builders who wanna build stuff
| darraghmckay wrote:
| Thanks, we totally agree. Retool and the other internal tool
| builders can be great, but only if you're already able to write
| code
| sunjester wrote:
| https://guides.noloco.io/getting-started/quick-start
| rmbyrro wrote:
| $240/mo for a starter plan is a bit salty for such a tool, isn't
| it?
| codegeek wrote:
| Strategy is simple. Get free users and then go for Mid-
| Tier/Enterprise. No startups paying $15/Month stuff. I have
| seen this with others and it seems to be a working strategy ?
| simonalexcurran wrote:
| I see where you're coming from - we actually previously had
| cheaper plans but decided to remove them in favour of a Free
| plan which we introduced last month. We want people to use the
| platform, see the value they can get from it and then upgrade
| when they are ready (and content about the impact their apps
| are having in their organisation).
| pavlov wrote:
| Sounds similar to Retool which has had quite a lot of success in
| this market. How are you different?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Also open source options:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840355
| simonalexcurran wrote:
| Retool's an awesome tool but is very much aimed at developers
| so an understanding of SQL / Javascript is required to build
| dashboards using the platform.
|
| Noloco in comparison is no-code first, meaning that you don't
| actually need to write any queries or know how to code at all
| to build different views. In fact, Noloco actually
| automatically creates the basic app for you once you connect
| your data (list views, record pages and forms). This reduces
| the learning curve and by being no-code first is accessible to
| non-developers as well.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I see someone has asked one of my classics for low code (how to
| test it thoroughly) - I'll ask the other: how is change control
| managed? Can another person review a change, be it in behaviour
| or visual, in a diff, as well as running automated tests, before
| a change goes live?
| darraghmckay wrote:
| Good question, these are definitely on our radar and very
| possible with how it's currently setup.
|
| For us, we're trying to strike the balance of nocode and
| lowcode so a lot of the advanced features of version control
| and approval flows are not a priority for a lot of our users. I
| imagine this will change as we grow though
| andrejguran wrote:
| is someone keeping track of all the no/low-code platform YC
| invested in?
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-24 23:00 UTC)