Is this idea too crazy?
Last year, a friend of mine started a business (a startup idea, actually) with other non-technical guy.
He offered me a position as a technical co-founder since the startup would operate in a saas model.
At that time, I was involved with other projects and, sadly, couldn't help.
They opted then to hire a dev shop to develop the mvp.
The project was not that bad, but after a few months without any investor interest, they ran out of money.
A few weeks ago, this friend invited me to a beer, and we talked about the experience.
Then he proposed to me a crazy idea, to develop a wix for mvp.
The app would have only a few features more when compared with these landing page builders (just some app like functionalities). The significant differential would be that, after the mvp validation, this "page-builder" could generate a downloadable code (doesn't matter the language), so the startup could continue to develop the project in a "self-hosted" solution.
I saw several challenges to make it work, but I would like to know what you think about this idea?
Too crazy? If you are a non-technical founder, you see any value on this?
Do you know any software that already does something like this?
Thank you guys.
This is pretty much the idea behind divjoy.com. You can pick your tech stack and customize the UI within a low-code editor before exporting as a React codebase. Would love to hear your thoughts on it or if you had a different idea in mind.
Thanks for sharing Divjoy. The flexibility to choose your preferred stack is pretty cool.
I'll play around with it. Get back to you soon :-)
On top of a basic page builder, what other functionality would be provided in the builder?
I'm curious to hear what gap might exist between what's out there today and this idea.
I would assume authentication, registration would be provided, plus some form of data collection.
How would any form of business logic be handled though? Allowing arbitrary code submitted by someone on the web is a nightmare for security and that alone might require a tremendous effort to sandbox.
I think the downloading functional code at the end could be difficult if you offer a 'pick your language' option.
Otherwise if the builder is built on top of laravel, rails or django, then I could imagine it would be easy to package the custom app as an app for that framework, plus the project and supporting apps/plugins and such in the downloadable code.
It would have to come with serious documentation on how to deploy the package though.
(shameless plug, I am working on a set of django applications to help me and others bootstrap SaaS. The first one is https://github.com/poitch/django-saas to manage registration and subscription)
Well, the idea here is not to create a fully-fledged software, but a validated mvp. Like you said, something with security (register/login), CRUD, some logic like (page sequence for example) if a field is filled, or if the value is greater than 10, go to this screen or appear this field. Something simple, but good enough to validate the idea.
But the most important part is the code generation at the end. Several incubators/accelerators have a demand for an intellectual property (software) in some point in the process. So, even if a wix site can do the job, it is worthless as a validated mvp.
Its not "that" difficult to generate code, there's a lot of scaffolds out there. Of course, it would demand a lot of work to make it right.
The idea is good, but, like our friends kindly commented here, maybe the effort does not worth it.
Hey I actually had talks with a few folks who spent years working on a solution like this.
They built out the backends but struggled to build a good UI it seemed.
Even companies like Webflow and Bubble are notoriously hard to learn with millions in funding.
https://www.budibase.com/ is a recent company they use to post on IHs a lot.
https://versoly.com/ took me 19 months full time two developers. And it doesn't include a backend for our customers to use.
Yeah, I agree with you. I think the idea can growth real quick and have a huge acceptance but code time is a problem indeed. I still think it is doable, but will demand several hours of development.
I, personally would look into Webflow. Then, what the site does is up to you ?
Why do guys want to use a website builder, because of time and budget?
Depending how complex the UI is you might even go for templates because a website builder takes some time to learn and make it responsive.
Now, I am going to be sort of bias.
I am working on this templates.
This templates are only made with HTML, and a CSS framework, like Bulma or Tailwind.
They are built with the CDN and ONLY using the CSS framework classes.
You van download the free ones and see what you think.
Free Templates.
With Tailwind.
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With Bulma.
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The biggest difference with wix, webflow or even Wordpress with elementor or something like that is the ability to generate code at the end.
I know is difficult for people that have the ability to create products and code to understand the motivations for tools like that. But believe me, this pain is more common than we imagine. Look at the wix revenue from last year (almost 800Milion). There are a huge marketing of people wanting a "no-code" solution even if it is only for the start (mvp generation)
Oh, I believe that. The no code community keeps growing and growing.
Have you heard about persp.info ?
Looks impressive this software. The lacking feature here is the code generation. Today in the market we have the "no-code" proposals like webflow (you can do whatever you want and never need to code). This idea I'm describing here is more focused on "we don't want to code now", "but will in the future". It's more to validate the mvp idea (iterate), fulfill tight schedules (as you have if you are being incubated for example) and don't have time, money, and/or expertise in software to create your solution.
I really don't know why big companies like wix and webflow didn't want to invest in this niche.
Ok, I get you, what about @Gabe 's Divjoy?
That sounds like it could help. Divjoy.com
Yeah, it looks pretty close.
Hey, founder of Divjoy here. Let me know if I can answer any questions.
Hey Gabe, how close to a simple mvp your software can get?
It gives you a simple SaaS app (so auth, db, subscription payments, form validation, marketing pages, react hooks for data fetching, and many other small details). Goal is to give you all the things that are fairly common across apps so you can focus entirely on your custom logic and features.