Idea Validation — "Almost-no-code" automation
Greetings IH !
Alright, I’m coming to you with a newborn idea that I think might be worth exploring, and I hope you can help me dig a little bit deeper into it. I’d like to talk to you about automation. There are many players in the field, but afaik, none of them truly answers the need I’m thinking about.
So the problem of no-code automation, in my eyes, is that it lacks flexibility. The problem with all-code automation is that the time you gain from the lack of flexibility is lost in deploying, hosting and maintaining your scripts. I think there is a middle ground here:
Automation with code but actually not too much code (sorry that’s the best headline I could think of for now)
The idea is to provide multi-disciplinary profiles and jack-of-all-trades with a simple interface where they can:
— Create scripts that are automatically deployed, hosted and maintained
— Trigger those scripts with simple CRONs and / or webhooks
— Call APIs with a huge added layer of simplicity (HTTP wrappers for custom back-ends, Slack/Google/Twitter/Whatever API wrappers) (think how Google AppScript simplifies this for example)
— Treat their data with a set of tools (Code snippets to sort tables, for example)
— Export what they need with a set of connectors to various services (Email, Slack channels, Texts, etc.) : text(phoneNumber, message) or slack.send(channel, message)
This way, we’d provide them with an automating tool that is truly flexible (As an example, Zapier doesn’t allow me to do things with my personal back-ends), and still removes the pain of having to deploy + host your custom scripts somewhere. Plus easy to code and easier to maintain.
Basic usecase for example:
— Send yourself a text when a new customer signs in to your app
— Populate a GSheet with name, email and plan of said customer
— Email your customers automatically when Stripe bills them
— Email your customer automatically when his plan is about to come to an end
I know that you can do these things by aggregating several services (in this instance, for example, Intercom + Zapier + Google Sheets + Mailjet / Mailchimp would do the job), but this gives you way more flexibility, and doesn’t take that much time to set up.
Ready to answer your questions, and eager for your feedback.
Cheers!
Do you know Integromat.com? I don't know or this is matching your expectations, but they offer much more possibilities then other services as Zapier and stuff.
This looks like an absolute beast. Why isn't this much more popular? Seems like you can automate the whole internet with this.
Yeah its insane, no clue why. The possibilities are endless!
Sounds similar to the concept of https://darklang.com/. I think a product could exist, just using a standard programming language.
I currently use Integromat for the following use cases:
The biggest value I see from this kind of tool is that I don't have to code all the API HTTP requests by hand. I currently don't have a use case where I need to add custom code.
On the other hand, there is a particular class of problems where all visual tools fall flat on their face and where a coding tool could be helpful:
These things are incredibly clunky / impossible to build visually. And oftentimes, in code, it's like the most basic for loop. Although I hadn't had these use cases yet in my current project, I used to encounter them often in Unity, for example, when I was trying to use visual tools like NodeCanvas.
Hope this is helpful to you.
Hey @pavlomarko, thanks so much for this (very) detailed answer!
Yeah exactly, we think about a flexibility-first product, with a huge emphasis on quickwins in coding, testing and deploying your scripts. I know Zapier and Integromat and similar products offer A LOT of possibilities to their customers but I feel they're missing the flexibility that one could require when building such small quickwins, making them not quickwins anymore because of the added complexity.
Thanks again!
No prob! Also, an interesting thing to think about is: what happens when you start building with no-code, you get some traction and then you want to grow from there. Most likely you don't want to throw away your no-code infrastructure, so it would be great to have the ability to inject custom code where needed, instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
I have set up some webhooks and prepared some cloud functions and cloud run instances. These are serverless and easy to maintain, but I still have to maintain the code for them (on GitHub). If you can remove that process (of hosting my script), I would use it.
That's the whole idea, building, testing and hosting all in one place, with the right webhooks, wrappers and interface to make the whole process painless and easy to use.
If you have 5 minutes, would you mind sharing one or two usecases for your automations ?
all I can say is we need a great drag and drop app building software.
Can you elaborate a little on what you mean by "app building software" ?
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
Email sent! Thank @nikersify!