Dennis H. Lewis explains why SaaS apps need Model Context Protocol servers to stay visible to AI agents and autonomous tools. Without an MCP, applications become invisible to the AI-driven ecosystem. MCPs let users control apps conversationally, telling an LLM to sign in, execute workflows, or learn new skills.
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Welcome to a new episode of the No-Code Wizardry show. Today we're gonna be talking about MCPs. MCPs seem to be, you know, trending pretty much everywhere these days online. Everyone and their dogs seem to be building an MCP for their app. And I actually think it's important that if you're thinking about building an app, if you've already built an app, we're actually pretty much implementing MCPs across all of our apps and all of our clients' applications.. And the reason is, of course, it's very, very, very convenient, uh, for your app to be able to be connected to Claude, ChatGPT, Groq, whatever you wanna call it. It, it really does, um, enrich the experience of your application if you can just have somebody connect to your app through one of these interfaces. Um, but anyways, why don't you just give a, a quick breakdown of what an MCP even is? Dennis H. Lewis.
Good morning, Tony.
Good morning, mister.
So I think that this episode should be the Mr. Rogers episode.
Okay.
Because everybody knows that Mr. Rogers was all about being a good neighbor.
That's right.
And the crux of this whole topic is enabling your software to be a good neighbor. In the wider ecosphere of what's going on out there. So that could be, like you mentioned, AI agents and all of that. It could be talking to other applications directly. MCP is a technology that Anthropic developed quite a while back, Model Context Protocol. Using the idea that traditional APIs weren't quite enough to make it easy for AI models to connect. Okay, they, you know, you have to accompany the API with the documentation, and then it was almost a little bit too low level. Most APIs were very transactional but not very strategic. And, uh, we can think of an MCP server as one layer on top of what would be an old-fashioned just API that provides the contextual information that these AI LLMs need to be able to understand the, uh, what your app is about and how to interact with it. So basically, that way you can just Give them the URL or the definition of your MCP server, and an LLM can understand it, query it, say, okay, what do I need to be able to authenticate myself and communicate with this server? And then what can I do with it? And that almost instantly converts you into being a good neighbor because now you are, uh, you are a part of this brave new world of AI-powered hybrid applications that connect people and agents and models to what's going on inside your business.
Okay, I think that was a good intro explanation about what MCPs are and, and what they do. Why would a client of ours be interested in, in implementing an MCP? Let's just go straight to the meat.
Let's go straight to the chase. Maybe 3 or 4 years ago, the strategic way to get your application into people's hands was through SEO. You hoped that the search engines would find you.
Clearly not the case anymore.
Well, it's still not irrelevant, but it isn't as important because now you, uh, unless you are implementing a strategy like an MCP server and the underlying APIs and tools that you need, you're going to be invisible to this entire new world of agents and applications that are automatically wanting to communicate with your application without a human in, in, in the, in the middle., and the only way to do that, to get that exposure, to be that, um, you know, good neighbor in the wider application ecosystem, is by complying with these sorts of standards. MCP, create skills, create tools, and, uh, allow your application to become a part of what's going on out there.
I feel like everything— I completely agree with everything that you just said, but it's also important to know that MCPs are not just useful for you as somebody building an app, but your clients, the people that are gonna be engaging with the app are gonna be— I mean, they're gonna love you because I absolutely adore just being able to talk to Claude these days and telling it, hey, I want you to sign in into this app and I want you to do this one thing. I want you to learn this new skill about a process that I've been doing manually for years. Instead of me having to do that every day, I can just tell Claude, hey, execute this skill and it just goes out there and it does it for me. MCPs allow for that type of behavior.
That immediately elevates your solution above all of the other competing solutions that haven't done so yet. So right now is the time to be doing this.
Um, is it— would you say it's expensive to build an MCP?
I, I don't think it's neither cheap nor expensive. It— doing things right requires some, some work, and work means that you've got to put in either the resources or the effort. But I just don't think it's optional, and I don't think you just generically create an MCP and think that you've ticked the box and you're good to go. You have to really think about how you want these other agents and applications to be able to work with what you've already built, and you've got to really think through which tools do I want to expose, which processes are critical, which How can I not only make it possible but make it useful? And yeah, that takes some effort.
Can you build an MCP on a Bubble application?
There probably are ways to directly do that using the API from Bubble, but that's not how we usually do so., we use a middleware called Relevance AI. Uh, it allows us to build tools that communicate with the Bubble application, but they can also communicate with other applications, with other tools, with other MCP servers, and provide a coherent interface to the external world. So that means that you can do a lot more. Because maybe your Bubble application does one thing really, really well, or, or five things really, really well, but maybe by just adding in a little bit of functionality from somebody else's application, you're suddenly creating something totally new and brilliant that wasn't possible, you know, uh, two months ago.
Um, I don't know that I have any other questions myself around MCPs. Anything else that you think is worth mentioning?
Well, I just think that it's worth mentioning that nobody who's building software today should be ignoring this. This is not a cool feature to have. This is perhaps the feature to have, uh, because that's the way the, the world is going right now. And, and I'm not— I don't buy into all of the hype and the hyperbole around, you know, all of this. I— you, you know me by now, I'm, I'm pretty grounded and, and and, you know, feet on the ground kind of person. But the possibilities that this opens for anybody who's building a SaaS platform, anybody who's building a software that people are paying to use, this is really true value add.
All right, well, that was today's small, short little conversation around MCPs. I love the emergence of them. I have to say, as a, just overall as a user, I mean, we're building them for clients, but as a user, if I'm thinking about buying or subscribing to an app these days that doesn't have MCP functionality, it makes me wary of, okay, how much time am I going to have to put into managing the app as opposed to just having Claude do it for me.
Yeah, well, you know, those tokens get expensive.
They do, they do. But still, anyways, uh, appreciate your time, everyone, and I will catch you— catch you guys next week.
