Turreto
Build webapps for your team without the hassle
Turreto is finally ready for users!
Two months ago I had a working prototype on my laptop that captured the essence of what I want to achieve with Turreto. Since then I've focused on all the scaffolding: account management, onboarding, documentation, a landing page, UX improvements, and many, many bugfixes. Now I'm very happy to say that Turreto is in open beta and accepting users.
Looking ahead, I want to solidify my offering and work out my pricing tiers, and then integrate with a payment processor so that I can start offering a paid product. I also have a long roadmap of features I want to add. Very excited to work on all this!
I've been working towards a prototype of my "internal webapp platform" idea. I wanted to convince myself that this is a viable product that is within my reach, and here we are =)
On Turreto you now can
- Create a new Turret (i.e. a webapp), edit the server-side, client-side, and CSS code, preview your changes, and publish your changes to share them with other users.
- Persist JSON documents to a sqlite-backed datastore, and work with this datastore both in server-side and client-side code.
- Seamlessly branch the datastore when you are editing a live webapp so that you can experiment without fear.
- Import common javascript libraries in your client-side code.
- Use built-in support for either Bulma or Bootstrap CSS frameworks.
This is the MVP set of features for Turreto. Now I need to actually turn it into something I can put in front of other people. In other words, add a landing page, terms of service, docs, account management, SSL, etc.
This idea has been bouncing around in my head for a few months now, and I keep coming back to it as a possible SaaS business: a platform that makes developing internal webapps as simple as writing a wiki page.
I often wanted to have something like this in previous jobs. In the past I've worked closely with professional services teams, sales, customer service, training, and other developer teams, and a common scenario is that we would find a workflow that would be easy to streamline or automate if only I could build the right tool and put it in their hands. Building the tool itself was rarely the sticking point, it's the fact that you have to think about where the repo lives, where the data lives, how to deploy it, who will maintain it, how users will access it, and so on. Depending on the culture and size of your company you may have standard processes to address some of these questions (if not you have to solve them yourself) but either way you probably have to cajole stakeholders and managers to get their approvals. Developing internal tools is harder than it needs to be, especially for problems that cut across organizational boundaries, and the end result is that the entire company loses out on potential productivity gains.
What if, instead, you had an internal "webapp library" and modifying or writing a new tool was as simple as editing the code and clicking a button? Your users (other members of your organization) already have accounts. The hosting, versioning, deployment is all taken care of for you. That is what I want to build.
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