Open Office Hours

Today we don't have necessarily a topic, but we just want to talk about the market and everything that we're seeing happening in this no-code AI-assisted development space. Now, one observation that I recently made is people don't want to use no-code anymore. Now, I had someone, he reached out to me and said, you know, I built this application, WeWeb, and I don't want to, I don't want to always like go and put the button on the page. And connect the button with the backend. I just want an AI to do the whole UI structure for me and just plug it in with Supabase and it just works. I don't want it like— and then I said, you know, you can use NordGraph as an alternative to WeWeb if you don't like how we would handle some things. And he said, like, you know, it's not about that I want something better, it's I want something that does it for me. And I think this is a shift that happens in the market where we used to think, and how How can I make it better? How can I find a tool that helps make it easier? Do it, accomplish it easier. Now we're thinking about how can I find something that does my work and I just have to put the idea into it and guide it like I'm walking a dog. I'm not kind of like carrying a dead dog behind me on a leash. The dog can walk by itself. I'm just going to guide it.

Automation always has a lure to it, right? People are excited about, you know, hey, maybe I don't have to do this thing anymore. And like, I think whenever you can offer that, it's pretty compelling. I talk about robots and bicycles, right? Robots are where you get the whole thing to do it for you, and bicycles are where it allows you to do it better and faster. When we talk about AI-assisted development, that's obviously a bicycle, right? And just like a lot of low-code is basically trying to make this stuff easier., but then kind of getting in their own— I, I think has a potential, right? All these things have potential to get in their own way. Uh, but the, uh, but where we can say, hey, this doesn't have to be a problem at all anymore, that's magic, right? It doesn't matter how low cost to make everything else zero, impossible to compete with. The, um, and then, and then once you've done that, what new opportunities does this create? Because the thing that used to be a blocker, I'd spend all my time doing X and therefore you never got to Y, that means a much bigger market for Y and we should be focusing our attention there instead.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a very interesting shift. I think it's a little bit sad that people are not building applications by hand anymore because I like building applications by hand. But I think it's like building applications by hand and thinking about how to build stuff, it's going to become an art. There are always people who want a custom tailored suit that is for some reason special are more special than a suit I could just get at Macy's, and they're going to pay $100,000 for it. And I just go to Macy's and get the same thing for $100. For me, it's the same. But for some people, they want to get a $100,000 custom tailored suit for some reason. I don't— I cannot explain why. For me, they look both the same. But there are people, and I think this is where web development will be. There are people who want it cheap, and it will be essentially the same, And then there are people who want to have the effort put into it to have an artwork, if that makes sense.

Maybe. But, you know, like, if you say— if we're going to say, like, building in Nordcraft counts as building by hand, right? But you're building on top of all the software and all the abstraction Nordcraft's providing. Okay, well, maybe we go underneath, you're going to build it in React. Well, that's all these abstractions that, like, the people at Facebook created.

I'm trying to justify my existence here.

You know, it's like there's, um, it's just turn, you know, like these things are all kind of the same. And like if you were to be asking people— I remember this like 25 years ago, you know, like for me coming into, you know, a little bit doing more software and being told, well, look, I don't know about this, you know, Java stuff. I'm talking about Java now. Java, that's not real programming because that's using intermediate language, and like real programmers are just going to use C, and maybe even the more real ones are going to be using assembler. So what are you doing over there? That's That's not going to be real engineering. The world evolves the way that it does.

I think right now what I'm not fully convinced— I did build an app in React like a tip-tap editor, shipped it as a React component into Nordcraft. Beautiful experience, works great. But it's very simple. It's beautiful. What is really missing for me is the ability to have like a Webflow-like editor attached to such an AI code assistant. Like, that's like if I just have like a visual interface for Tailwind CSS and HTML, and there is one, it's called ReWeb. But if that would be like integrated in, you know, those CLI tools, I think that's game over for no-code. And then if they kind of like let me click on a button and see all the code files that are attached to that button ID, because, you know, I can't find them. I'm like on a button. I was like, where the heck is all the code that runs on this button? I think that's the benefit with no-code. You can see the code, you can click on the button and you go to all the files that mention the button, right? I think that is a nice thing. If they can get this in and in a code editor. And I think the closest one right now is Lovable. They are more than likely going to add that at some time. And I think the moment that happens is that will be the point where I will be, okay, screw no-code, go to Lovable, and then I can edit it myself as well. But I like that no-code gives me this organization where I click on a button, I find the code that's attached to it, and it kind of like, it lets me organize and visualize a big project. Is where I found it's really nice. No-code is not a way of development, it's a way to organize what you've built the way I—

that's a really interesting point.

Yeah, the other thought that was right, that's why I would prefer Wist over Next.js or Lovable, right? Because in Wist I can click on a button and I can now go to all the actions that mention this button, right? I mean, it didn't used to be that way, but now it is, right? So I think it's just nice to have a big project built in no-code so I can see and, you know, I can understand it and I don't have to go through thousands of lines of code to figure this one thing, like to figure out what is going. I can kind of like see how those little functions like hug into each other, how they kind of like are holding hands, and it gives you that trace. But With that being said, if Lovable can add that tracing— I don't know how to call that— it's game over for all the no-code tools.

Well, yeah, it's never— to your point, to your previous point about the suit, it's never quite game over, right? But the— but I do think that the no-code tools, such as they are, are trapped in a declining market. They basically never really got that far into liftoff in the most recent round. And that's, that's one of the troubles that they're all dealing with right now.

Bubble is the biggest one. It's not that big if you compare Bubble to, to Lovable. Lovable, I think, is like, it's like 10 times bigger than Bubble or something. Like, we forget how, like, how small no-code of a market is. And, and it was only quite popular because there were people, the same grifters that are now selling you courses how to get rich with AI coding, and that used to sell you courses how to Do dropshipping in between dropshipping and vibe coding. They used to make courses about how to get rich with no crypto.

Bubble and Airtable, I think, are the ones who are sort of probably the, the biggest winners of that previous generation of like the late teens.

Yeah, Make, Make.

Oh, Make, Make, Make a Design. Memberstack. Make sold out early. They, they kind of got like a, a Reddit-like quality where they, uh, they did their early sellout and I don't know if they're gonna have a second act, like like Reddit has had, but they haven't so far. Um, the— and whereas Zapier, you're absolutely right, Zapier has also done really well. But I will also notice all three of those tools have their origins in like, you know, 10+ years ago. Um, and like, they're, they're not part of—

like, if you're a dinosaur, you're going to— if you're dinosaur and you've been always there forever, eventually when the next wave comes, you're the first one, right? And then you just take all of the momentum.

Well, right. I mean, I think they've done relatively well. And then like the other generations come after that, like, you know, the owners, I forget the name of the company that owns Make that sort of tried to make a second run with or turned from Integromat, right? They bought it when it was Integromat and now they turned into Make. The, you know, the Xanos of the world, frankly, even the WeWebs and Norcrafts, what have you, they were just a little bit late to that party. And now the market isn't quite going, isn't going up the same way. And now they're sort of recasting to figure out what they're going to do. I would say, As a broad category, they're all in developer tools business and the developer tools business is going gangbusters, right? You can tell that because Cursor, because Lovable, but these tools that exist, how do they turn so they can become successful in the new round? And I'm not sure they do it by doubling down on like what they had previously because the market has judged it and moved on. The question is going to be, how do they take the best of what they have and apply it to where the new demand is.

I mean, I think the whole idea of no-code is a little bit flawed because it was built— no-code and visual development was built on the idea that it is hard for people to write a foreach loop. But now everybody with AI can write a foreach loop.

Well, I think there's a bigger problem, which is that people write foreach loops in AI and then have no idea what's going on because foreach loops I mean, of course, for each loop, it's kind of like a problem, but I'm just saying, of course it creates more problems. I think you really put your finger on something that's really important, which is the idea of there's certain things about the way a computer thinks that introduce complexity that people have a little bit of a harder time working with, right? And so the, uh, the idea is being able to map or, you know, uh, iterate over arrays is definitely one of them. The way we think about Boolean logic, right, for handling control flows is is another. Um, and that's, it's a little tricky, right? And requires a little more advanced, advanced thinking. And like, people who do, who, who master those things or get a little bit of understanding, man, there's like nowhere they can't go. And so when you look at like Zapier, one of the keys to Zapier's early success, in my opinion, is that they did not have looping because that, that limited what you could do with Zapier. But it meant that everybody who went into Zapier wasn't getting lost, like, what is this looping thing? How do I make this work? And then you contrast that with our friends over at Integromat, which basically won all the looping business and then were bogged down by trying to explain it all to people. And so you could do much more complicated stuff in Make, but— or TigerMath, as it was— but it was— but one, they had a weird language for it that made it even harder to work with. And second, it was, um, you know, the, the, it, it meant they were, they were bogged down by a whole lot more support, and that made it, made it trickier. And so in the meantime, the simple guys were able to go do the, the land grab. Dev tools that are able to scale are very tricky business. Usually the reason dev tools able to scale is because it's taking advantage of the whole big new environment. That's why Microsoft was able to just go gangbusters with this build tools because Windows.

I think there is a very interesting area ahead. I don't— I'm not completely sure how the future of no-code will look, because if I'm looking at most of the no-code visual development tools out there, it's not really— nothing really innovative is coming out of them right now. The biggest innovation that comes out of them is them adding more AI to their existing product, while the AI companies are coming up with new concepts and new use cases for AI and they're reinventing the wheel. So what the no-code companies are doing, which I think is very sad, is they're looking, oh, what is Lovable doing? Let's copy that and put it in our thing, you know. And I don't think that you can become very successful in the market that they're in if you're just copying your competitors to not fall behind. You got to be a step ahead of your competitors, see a trend coming go on top of that, be there for a while, and then you do it like Zapier. When the next trend comes, you're the number one on top of it. I think what most people are really underestimating is having a voice assistant that will help you vibe code the application, because I don't want to type it. And I think if, for example, WeWeb— it's a small feature, I assume they can spare the credits. They're already upcharging you like 5 times for credits. It's it's ridiculous. So they can pay a little bit for Whisper so I can talk with WeWeb AI to get my idea out there because I can talk more about my idea for my application than I should just write. And many people are like that. And this is something that Lovable doesn't do. So there are those small things that they can add that have some virality to them that people will make videos about, that people will find more easier about their tool. That ultimately improve the user experience. Then it's not type to build your application, it's talk to app, like voice to app. You just tell me what you want and I'll do it for you. Then they can have a nice British voice telling, yes, sir, I'm building your application right now, like a butler. No, I mean, right now if you take a look at all the marketing, how Cluly is advertising, how App Mafia was advertising that, suspicious thing happening over the weekend on X. Um, it's all with viral marketing. It's all targeting the scrolling generation. And Lovable is wild on TikTok. Replit is wild on TikTok. I see them all the time. They say, hey, you can now build your application from your mobile phone. It's so easy, it's so simple, don't ask much questions. They're clearly targeting the new generation that is now tapping into the job market or trying to become self-employed, trying to become an entrepreneur, building their idea. Those are the ones that used to be sold to dropshipping courses or no-code courses back then, right? That generation, they're targeting them and they're reaching them where they are on social media. And I don't— I have not seen one no-code tool besides Zapier and besides the one that are currently winning the market being on TikTok. And advertising to people and making short videos about their tool, trying to convince the next generation that they should use it. They're advertising to an audience that is slowly getting out of the workforce and not into the workforce. And the no-code tools are doing the opposite. They're not advertising to people who are going out of the workforce. They're advertising to people who are going into the workforce. And that is why they're winning, and that is why no-code will be absolute in a few months or years if they don't change it. That is my—

that's a really cool marketing observation. I, you know, the sort of shows our difference in age, like I'm not as aware of what's going on TikTok, uh, and that they are just sort of out there and they're, they're making themselves known. And I think your point about getting into the workforce is also a really good point. I think there's a reasonable question of, you know, if you want to be getting into software, right, or building or being an entrepreneur or whatever, where do you think the future is? What's going to help you do that now?

Right.

And there's something called the innovator's dilemma that Clay Christensen sort of talked about like, you know, 30 years ago where people will— where companies, right, once they have customers, they have a class of customer, they keep on trying to ask the question, how can we serve that customer better and how can we win the bigger version of that customer? So like what you're seeing with, say, the, you know, Xanos and WeWeb, not so much. I actually thought WeWeb was going to go more enterprisey, but I've talked to their senior management and they are very clear they're just trying to go wide right now. So they— I don't know if they are, you know, thinking about going TikTok. Perhaps they should, given that marketing strategy. But the— but like, certainly when I look at like things like, say, Xano, you know, they are— they're looking to move up market. Right. So like, that's where the money is. And certainly what they've seen is that the other successful players in the space— I mean, Bubble, yeah, sure, has a downmarket play. They've got a lot of customers. Um, then you have, uh, Zapier is largely downmarket, right? And so it's really blocked because the IPaaS market in the enterprise side is, is well spoken for, right? So how do you, how do you, how do you crack into that? Um, and then you've got, you know, Xano, which is in a heck of a spot, you know, in terms of the way it looks at things, but certainly is trying to look at, you know, how it moves upmarket as well, right? And that would, I think, partially explain why you're not seeing as much today's Xano stuff on TikTok, because that's not the audience they're talking to. Although perhaps, perhaps it should be.

The—

but, but they're— of course, how do you go out?

They want to— they want to— they rather have 1,000 users paying them $10,000 a year than the other way around.

Yeah, I, and I think that for a lot of these companies that are essentially business-to-business plays, that's, that's what they need.

Remember Windsor. But I think there's an interesting point to be made with the lovables and the no-code and the live coding apps right now, because here's the thing: Norcraft, WeWeb, all those— what I'm seeing is they're targeting people who already have a business to use their platform to build their application. Of course, there are always people who are in a different category, but that's essentially their market. Where Laughable and Bold.new targets an audience who doesn't have a business yet, who starts their business with their tool, and they create this relationship that, that was the first thing that got people into the market of being an entrepreneur. And that's where they will stick with. And instead of going to an existing market that has a limited amount of people, they are taking people and bringing them into the market so they can serve them. And I think this is where the difference has changed, where the dynamics change. And of course, well, with Lovable bringing people into the market, Nordkraft, WeWear, Zano at some point will also eventually benefit from that. But I see it right now that you got to be on social media and you got to talk to the new market and say, hey, if you're out there and you're trying to build your application, you can do two things. You can use an AI and build it without understanding it. I know this is what your teacher in school told you. If you're not learning it and just copying it from someone else, you're not learning math. But it's the same thing with coding. Or you can, you know, you can put the effort into it, learn a valuable skill, and you'll be able to solve all the problems that come in the future, and no developer can screw you over. And I think if you go to that market that Lovable is targeting, I will say at least 30% of the, of the whole market that would go to Lovable, go to the other ones, would be actually willing to take, invest some time and learn about this with Nordcraft, with WeWeb, if they have proper educational courses for people trying to build their own SaaS, build their own business, how to start with that. If, of course, if you look at the tutorials for WeWeb, Nordkraft, it's how to build your own CRM, how to build your own weather app. Nobody who's trying to build their own business wants to build a CRM or a weather app. This is weather app for people who don't have anything better to do. CRM is for people with already having a business. Those are the two most common things. I went— when I did my YouTube videos, it was kind of revolutionary. I was telling people how to build a SaaS in those tools, how to build a business, how to wrap an AI and sell that to people. And I don't see those tool makers themselves doing that. And I think they're really missing out on an audience where they could go to people who have an idea, and they can be the next tool producing the next Cal AI. That is going to make millions of dollars a month and that will be a success. And from that success story, they're going to get the publicity from it as well. And I think it's really— they're targeting the wrong market and they're really looking into the wrong direction. They're looking into a market that used to exist and they're ignoring the market that exists right now and is available to them. We got a comment here. Uh, Charles said, fully agree, Nordcraft was so interesting because I could understand how it worked. Right. But, you know, most of the people don't know that Nordkraft exists. Most of the people don't know that WeWeb exists. And they just hear about Lovable and they like the idea, "I can build my own application," and they go to Lovable. And they never hear about Nordkraft and they never hear about anything else because they're just not targeting the people that are actually interested in doing it. This is why I thought when Nordcraft moved from being no-code to being made for developers, I thought that was the dumbest idea ever. Because why advertise to a market who already exists and is limited if you can go to the general audience that has an interest in technology and bring new people into the market that you define and control? And those are going to be customers for life, you know.

Well, they might be, or they might just be the customers then roll on to the next thing, because that's certainly what happened to the previous round of folks.

It could be, but there's, you know, I think there is an opportunity. I'm not going to, uh, and I'm not going to claim that I can see into the future and know that this is what's going to be true, but based on my reasoning, I understand that if you create a new market and you get people interested in this, excited about what they can do, you're going to have a better chance at winning those people than just copying what your competitors are doing that are doing this.

Why don't you do that as well? And, and if I might, I think there's a, there's a, there's a different spin on like what you're describing. You're talking about it in terms of demographics. I think that that's smart. Uh, like there's a whole audience of people who are not like existing developers, right? But, and like they're— and you might have described them as being almost developers, right? They had this idea they could do it, they don't quite know how to do it, and then you have to be reaching out to them and like make— and saying this can happen. Any reach them where they, where they are. That's what the newer social media stuff is. That's like the, you know, the— like you say, I love the scrolling generation that describes them. The— but, but there's— I think there's a second issue too that you, you sort of touched on. You started talking about like building a SaaS and what have you, and that is the, uh— I, I think there's a significant failure of the, of the no-code tools. The no-code tools focus on the fact they're no-code or focus on the fact that they're visual development. Which is all about how you build, right? And the, uh, and, and I don't think that matters. I don't think anybody cares. Um, you know, you like it because of its effects, but not, not, I mean, the, the, the, the mechanics of it.

Yeah, whatever. Unlike NordGraph, for the results, I could care less what color the editor has or how they name their workflows or whatever. I care about the result, and it's the tool that gets me the closest to the result I want, right? It's not, I'm not using Norecraft for the interface. I'm using it because the interface allows me to go to a specific result. I care about the end product, not about the— Right.

But built into that sentence is the other key factor, which is you, right? You can get to the result that you want. That's good marketing. And like, if that, and that's marketing I don't hear out of Xano. I don't hear out of WeWeb. I don't hear out of those players. But you know, but you know, when I look at like the way WeWeb, the way Lovable markets, the way Replit markets— Replit's actually very good at this. Um, they are saying you can make this, and this is why you building this would be a wonderful thing. And, and then, and we're going to be the thing that connects you between this and your dream of building this. And that's the, the, the— that is a strong pitch because it allows you to basically define it as a category. I, I suspect that some of these players don't like to do it because they don't want to just be growing the market for fear it's going to just grow it for their competitors. And like, it's not selling themselves directly.

But I mean, if you're not willing to do that, you're not, you know, willing to be in the business. Because Lovable extending the market is also extending the market for you, and you extending the market is also extending the market for Lovable. If we take a look at competitors, most people have the idea that competitors are bad. No, because if you're in a strip mall and there is a McDonald's, right? It would be the smartest idea to put a Wendy's next to it because you don't want to eat McDonald's every day and you want to have a Wendy's sometimes because, you know, you want some variety. And then the smartest idea would— actually, there is a McDonald's already and there's a sweet— and there is a Wendy's, and now someone say, you know, it's already oversaturated, there's so many competitors in that strip mall. And then Sweetgreen is hesitant in putting a salad bar in there. But then that would be the smartest idea because people don't want to eat shit every time. They want to eat a salad sometime too. So actually, competition is not taking your business away, it's completing your business because you're giving them something if they are sick and tired of you and they still stay in the market so they eventually can come back to you, right? Better than them leaving the market and giving up. And then it's vice versa.

I think, yeah, I think there's a lot. First of all, I think a lot of what you said is not a lot. I actually think everything you said was really smart and good advice for people who are listening right now and who are thinking about their marketing. The Wendy's, I learned it's Burger King rule, but the Wendy's McDonald's rule, that's the story as you just laid out is actually really strong. And the Sweetgreen one is even stronger. The, but if I might, I think that part of this has to do with firm psychology. Uh, and when we look at these, uh, a lot of dev tool companies, um, particularly ones that are more bootstrapped, and when we, and when we think about like the post-2020 era, there's a lot of bootstrapping or relatively thin funding going on, right? Like WeWeb was Y Combinator but didn't raise a lot of money. Um, Xano went through a seed and an A round but still relatively thin, and they sort of see themselves part of that, you know, microconfy, you know, uh, ethic. And went relatively thin. And even now they're a relatively small company. Just for perspective, Windsurf, when it fell apart, had like 55 engineers and something like 200 people who weren't engineers in the company, right? So, and still it was too small to compete with Cursor compared with like the largest of these companies, which is no more than 50 people on the, on the no-code side. The, but as a result of them being small and then being lean,, and them being, you know, sort of early, they also believe the product should largely sell itself. And, and regardless of what they believe, I don't mean to be a mind reader about it, but like from an organizational psychology point of view, what they're, what they, what you see them doing is not spending much on marketing, nor do they have senior talent on the marketing side. So instead they have senior talent on the engineering side. We're going to have what they call product-led growth. You hear that term all the time and used poorly. It means we're going to build instead of sell. And, and so then they, they go out there and then, and then they start not making sales. Or maybe they make sales, like, unless you sort of— I think there's a, there's a story that like, hey, the market's growing and they're making sales, or their whole strategy is validated, uh, they don't need to be spending money marketing. But then, but then market slows, they're not making as much money, they're not hitting their numbers, and now Oh wait, we need to get marketing. And by the way, that marketing needs to produce sales for us. And now instead of them having this expansive view of marketing that, like what you're describing, that we're seeing in the more well-funded startups, you see a very narrow and extractive focus. And that, I think, is a very dangerous place for them to be because that's not going to produce nearly the results they need.

Uh, completely 100% correct. I think here's the missing piece to the puzzle. Lovable is building features that paying users want and is going into requests from people who will be future users. So they are selling first and building second. And the no-code companies are building first and then selling second and then trying to find people who like what they have built. It should be the other way around. Sell a product that doesn't exist first and then figure out what people want and build it. That's actually how I did it with Despia. When I was going out there and advertising it, the thing was not done at all. I just sent out emails and had people sign up on an empty signup form and it did that to nothing. Then I sent them an email, hey, we're getting ready to start. Let us know if you have some ideas, what features would you like to see? Because I had no idea what features we should add, what should be our priority. I just wanted to hear what's important to people and then we add that. Then this is why Desmio is now already at version 4 soon, like in half a year, a little bit more than half a year, because we started out with minimum features that are important and then we see what do the users want, then we add it, and then we see what do the users want again and we add it. Then very important, those are the best ones. What do people tell you that they want that doesn't support yet, that drives away the sale. So we have people saying, hey, do you have HealthKit? I said, no, we don't have it yet. Okay, then I'll purchase once you have it. And then I was like, perfect, we got to add HealthKit, which will be out there in a week or so.

And that the— I think, you know, in politics, there's an expression about how democracies turn into tyrannies, which is called one man, one vote, one time. And I think there's a similar thing in technology companies, which is how a perfectly good marketing or customer acquisition oriented enterprise turns into an engineering enterprise where like you, you ask the questions like you're asking right now. In fact, just to, I mean, not say Despia is gonna fall into this trap, but like here's how it could fall into the trap. You're right now in a mode where you're still discovering what you are, keep making change, making change, making change, making changes.

Yeah.

And then you make a turn and you start focusing on growth instead of just, uh, you know, evolution. And now you're growing, you're trying to sort of get, get these things more solid in order to be able to sell more and scale up. But then what happens is the market turns— is an S-curve, right? It, it's slow, you're getting some stuff, then you have a big growth, and then it starts to taper off. And that, that taper off, that's the danger point, of course, because at that point, if you are not still selling or returning to selling You then, that's where the wheels come off because you've been operating on a money-losing basis, usually in that high-growth phase because you're trying to grab more land and the cash flow is well behind you. So every dollar you make is like a dollar you're losing in your bank account. And now you're up here again. How do you then make that kind of progress? And I find for a lot of companies, what they've done is early on they see themselves as builders. And they made themselves be marketers, and they did the marketing, and they did it kind of successfully, and they got into this. And then they revert to form as they become builders. They become very good builders. That's the reason why they can climb this curve. But that means that it is unnatural for them to go back into sales mode. The companies I've seen do really well in this have those kinds of chicanes, those S-curves, but they keep on going up and up because it's usually made of someone who— and sometimes could be the same person, but I think like, you know, Wozniak and Jobs are sort of still the, the the big power couple example, right? Wozniak could build, Jobs kept on going back to sell.

Yeah, I mean, I'm doing the marketing, John is doing most of the building. I'm just doing the pretty interfaces.

So, well, here you are, you know, right here on Office Hours. You know, we are, you know, we're out, out there in the world. I, I, we were just at marketing mastermind earlier today, uh, and say, change it. And the topic, as it sometimes turns to, was, you know, personal brand-oriented marketing. And I think that's a very smart place for you to be, you know, like you are out there showing that you are a thoughtful, smart, nice individual. And like, man, there's a lot of market in that if you can just, you know, convey that to, you know, more people at scale.

Yeah, I think really what is important is you have to be convinced of your own product and you need to be able to want to use your own product. That is a very important part. And what I really like about Nordcraft is that they really pulled it off and built Nordcraft in Nordcraft. That really shows me they're invested in it. That is kind of like the testimony that I want to see. WeWeb is using Vue 3, I think, for their dashboard. It's not necessarily built in WeWeb, but I think they use WeWeb for their marketplace, which is also showing me they trust WeWeb. So I want to hear more about those things, how those tools are using their own tools. I mean, I think it would be like hilarious to have like Andreas on TikTok do like a day in a life working as the CEO of Nordkraft. I think this would be great because you get a personal connection to the person. It will be funny, a little bit odd maybe, but I think this is what the future of branding and marketing will be. I mean, there are companies— I think it was the CEO of Chipotle or something, he's now paying someone a quarter million a year just to film him so people like him. So because they know if people like the CEO, they will buy more of this product, right? So I think this is where really those tool companies are missing out. And the Lovable CEO is a master at it. He's like all the time on social media doing all kinds of stuff, and people really like him. And they— most of them sign up just because they like him, what he's posting, uh, what he's sharing on there. And I think this is a very, very interesting thing. Most people are just like, hey, I'm hiding behind the X logo at Xano, and nobody really knows who the heck is Sean Montgomery and how does he even look.

Well, that's probably for the best. Sean is a brilliant individual, and I'm pretty sure that if you want to know what he looks like, if you just bust out your Webster's Dictionary and look up curmudgeon, I'm pretty sure his picture is right next to it. Um, but, but, you know, he's certainly an asset, but they've got other people who basically are more the faces of the company. I, I give them a lot of credit. I give Daniel Petro, um, who's, I think, um, you know, on vacation right now, but he is— if he's watching, you know, hi, hi Daniel. Uh, and the, um, he, he does— and he was on the pod like, uh, several weeks ago, and he— I think he does a wonderful job, you know, representing Zeno. And like, when we were giving him a little bit of a hard time, uh, I thought he did a great job like showing just how attractive and nice a company it was to work with by just personifying that. That they don't have more of that is, you know, probably, you know, a missed opportunity on their part. I think of companies kind of like circles. Okay. So like this is my theory of staffing a small— of staffing a startup company. I think when you are a solo, right, you know, there's a question of like you are, you are the one person and you are touching all the perimeter. Right? Therefore you're outward facing. Great. If you have 2 people, both of them are outward facing because you're both touching the perimeter. You have 3 people, everyone's touching the perimeter. You have 4 people, maybe you have somebody in the middle, right? Now you have 3 people who are on the— who are talking to the outside, they're outside facing, and maybe 1 person in the middle. And then as you scale, you know, kind of like because there's a surface area to— sorry, there's a perimeter to area of a circle thing going on. But then we think about how many mini circles can you fit into the bigger circle. And so like, I think the more staff you have, the more people you wind up who are on the inside versus the outside. But the— when particularly when you're small, uh, I think it— I find to be a useful mental model because I can't tell you how often I find that a company of like, you know, 7 or 10 people and there's only one who's spending half their time talking to the market. Like, wow, that is the wrong ratio. Uh, because if you're a company— this is different than a company being a research lab. If you're a company and you're trying to sell stuff, well, then you need to have a lot more in sales. And it's not until you get larger that you can afford to have that bigger support structure. So the, and then the reason I bring that up is that, you know, you're talking about, you know, these companies like Lovable and what have you, where they have internalized this idea of their senior people should be out there selling. And that's a big piece of what they need to be doing and they are doing it.. And that I think a lot of these low-code companies, um, or at least the ones that are having more trouble, I would posit that, that the absence of that is, is part of it. And that's a fixable problem. Uh, I don't know if it's magically fixable, but it's fixable. And, uh, and I certainly hope they do because I'd be rooting for their success.

Yeah, me too. I'm kind of like, you know, I'm kind of like screwed if they all go out of business now because all my stuff is built on top of Norcraft and Xano. So we hope the best for them. Fingers crossed. And we'll pray for them. They do need it. So. Right.

We can talk about them needing a bit of luck. I think they also need some decisions. You know, I've been thinking about this in terms of a bunch of companies lately. I have what I call the 18 month rule, which is after a company's been around for 18 months, there's a significant drag on its growth because you're carrying around all the stuff that was now 18 months old and starting to get, you know, behind and what have you. It's one of the reasons why an early stage startup has a very easy time growing. Like, I don't understand why these incumbents can't move past. Well, it's because they've got the 18-month stuff. But in order for you to be able to continue growing, there's an aspect of what of that 18-month stuff needs to go and be willingness to kill your— in writing we call it killing your darlings, right? Like these turns of phrase or these, you know, flights, these passages that like you really love, but your audience is going to have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. And that's, uh, that, that's stuff that like you have the evidence of whether the market has made use of it.

And I need to go. I mean, we're doing that at Despia because we were all in on Nordcraft at the beginning and we had the Nordcraft integration, the Nordcraft plugin. The truth is nobody who used Nordcraft— I mean, a few, but essentially nobody who used Nordcraft was paying for Despia. So, but then all of a sudden, which I didn't expect, of course we had vanilla JavaScript documentation and then all the sales came in and I looked at their projects and it was all WeWeb.io domains. And I was like, oh my God. And then I started kind of like starting to make WeWeb videos through Despia. And I started learning WeWeb because I was like, I don't want to touch that thing. And then I kind of like touched it and I tried playing around with it. I was like, I don't know how to do that. It's way too complicated.. Then I found out how to do it with the help of WeWeb AI, great people from the community. And now I have to say I can get my way around WeWeb as good as I can around Nordkraft. I know everything in and out. And I was at the point where I just built the native WeWeb integration for Despia because here's the thing, when you start a business, you don't know what's going to happen. You assume Nordkraft is going to be number one market, then it turns out to be like the worst market of all that people actually use. Like, no, essentially you have no users using Nordcraft, like 5, which, you know, you can count on your hand. And then you have like dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people using WeWeb that all require customer support, and you know nothing about WeWeb. That's usually always how it happens. And then you gotta shift. You gotta say, okay, we need to— we can only prioritize so and so many things, so we gotta drop Nordcraft. I mean, we're not saying people don't use it because you're using NodeGraph. But you know, when it comes about making videos, when it comes about writing documentation, when it comes about me like adding new features to the native plugin, we have to drop NodeGraph. We got to go into WeWeb because we need to serve customers and not who we want our customer to be. The tough decision, but you got customers happy and bring more customers like who like WeWeb and like Despia, but they're like 5 people who like, who don't like Despia or don't[No speech] Am I back? You're back. Oh my God, I like— my reset on my front end said like error fetching, and there was like a red dialog, and it was like, it's not my internet, but I didn't know what happened. Maybe we're shadow banned or censored, I don't know. No, but what I was saying is you have to adjust your market, right? If you expect Nordcraft users at the launch, it turns out to only be WeWeb users, you gotta adjust. And I think where I see most people fail is the market changes, it doesn't turn out to be how they expect, and they stick with Nordcraft for their user acquisition strategy, and then they gotta close down in a few months because nobody's coming to them, right? The business needs capital, needs money, needs cash flow to operate. So if you see a trend in the market change, you have to adjust on that because you want this thing to continue, right?

And you know, you're as happy serving Norcraft users as you are serving re:web users, you know. That sounds right. But I think also there's longevity thing to it. Like, I think you are early enough with Despia, they're like, hey, it's all new growing pains, still finding your feet. You view it as being early stage, but then you get to, wait, I've been doing this for a couple of years and people will clap when I come in the room and, and then they stop clapping. And what you're looking for is like, wait, how can I go back to that high growth, whatever? But there is no going back. There's only going forward to the new market.

You have to adjust to what's happening in the future, right? And I think there will be some point, if you take a look at Expo and how popular AI-assisted development is happening and how, how popular it's going, uh, right now the main value proposition for Despia is The fact that you can take your web application, your Node application primarily built in a no-code tool and you can turn it into a mobile app that works fantastically. Now at some point when no-code is going to die and my prediction happens to be true, that there is going to be a significant down with that. But life is ups and downs and I expect that to happen. But we're preparing for that. We're going to prepare to make it lovable competitive, to provide better documentation, videos, how to set up with lovable. It's not something I want to do right now because I like WeWeb, I like Norcraft, I like those visual development tools. But essentially, when it comes about bringing the business back to its old glory and continuing the business to run, of course, you got to go with the trends and you got to be adaptable. And I assume at some point, Despia will have a web builder interface that will be AI-powered. We have been already working on something like this. Um, so, you know, like maybe in a few years we'll have a Webflow-like editor that allows you to build your applications. So you can build your web application and your mobile application in Despia with the help of AI-assisted coding. If it happens that WeWeb, Nordcraft all go out of business We need to stay relevant and then we're going to take their market because I don't want to sound arrogant, but as someone who's one of their heavy users, I know how to do it better than them. Sounds so arrogant, I know. We got to cut that out. I couldn't write the code necessarily to do it, but I know I could tell people how it has to be.

Yes. Well, I think there are many people who enjoy fine restaurants who think they could do it better than the chef. But I think there's also a, there's a second kind of aspect to that, which is there's a difference between being the chef and running the dining room. I've read a couple of books in those regards and like it is remarkable how, I mean, and I think there's even like a TV show called The Bear, which is kind of about that kind of distinction and the, that, that idea of, I, and I kind of suspect that a lot of the companies that we're talking about so far are very heavy in the kitchen.

Right?

And they're not so much running the front. Um, and this is where, like, that's where sales is. That's where, like, real customer— high-touch customer success is. This is where, uh, account management is. This is where, uh, professional services lies. And these are things that, like, a lot of these companies have tried to avoid on the belief that, like, doing those things drags down your margins. And if they can just sell pure software, they don't ever have to touch the ground, and they can, like, be very, very profitable and, like, have lots and lots of growth. The trick is if you're selling development tools, they tend to be more complicated. They require more help, they require more support, and probably a lot more engineering, but also more in the way of, you know, making sure people are going to consume them in such a way they create value because if they don't, they're going to churn off. It really seems like a wonderful opportunity for customer success that I've not really seen put to work just yet.

Yeah. Also, I think that most of the no-code companies, they are not necessarily talking to their customers as well as they should be. And they're not necessarily like imagining they would be their customer audience, like they would be their target audience. Because some of the features I see being developed are like, I know I've been talking to people, I've been building applications myself, I know what people— like you with StateChange, right? We know what is holding people back and we know how to make it better because we have that experience in working with the market directly. And then it just takes them 3 years to do this important thing like NPMs and Xano.

There's a bit of that. And then, and certainly what you're doing is you're saying you're taking lessons from what you've been seeing in the market and you then applied it to— first you applied professional services, uh, and then you're applying it to building a product, which I, I give you great Great credit for that.

I mean, with this, we're not, we're not doing what we could. We got to be on TikTok, we got to be on Instagram. I will start then. I got to get into that, uh, right now. Before I go into that, I need to have a version of the product that meets my quality standards, and they're pretty high. But the version that's going to come out in a few days will actually meet my quality standards, because my standard is if most of our user audience uses WeWeb there needs to be a native integration with WeWeb. I do not want people to have to write code if they don't want to write code just to get it to work. If they want to do some fancy stuff, we'll send them to StateChange, you know, but you should be able to do everything that you expected to do in less than 5 minutes. That's why all the new WeWeb and Despair tutorials are like never longer than like 7 minutes. It's like the most complicated one was like, uh, what was it? Uh, native contact access. But that was because I didn't know how WeWeb lists work and I was confused by that. Um, if I cut it out, it was like 6 or so. So the tutorials are intentionally short and the integration is set up that it's so simple to set up that you can do it in a matter of minutes because you need to have fast success for people that build, that use your tools. If someone doesn't have a success feeling and like this, like this, like the success event happening with their project in like less than 10 minutes, they're going to churn your product. So it needs to be, before we go out there and start advertising the product, it needs to be that you can have a success in a matter of amount of minutes and do this in WeWeb and publish and see the native Face ID pop up in something you put 5 minutes of effort in. It's very important. This is why Lovable is so successful, because you can type something in and within 5 minutes you see a result. Why people churn is when they start something and they don't see a result.

Yeah, I remember I used Lovable back when it was called GPT Engineer. I was involved in the hackathon, like, '23, I think, uh, and the, the, the, the people sort of look at it like, hey, look at this overnight success, it's only been this long. Well, you know, Well, it's actually, you know, the, the, the, the efforts have been, you know, around for, uh, for longer. All of which is my way of saying that I certainly take your point of like Game One, I was looking at pride in your— it takes time to be evolving into the product you want to be. I do, however, think that like, um, you know, leaving us— not meaning to litigate, you know, your decision like when you're in the market. I, I do think that most these companies, um, in fact, probably most people who are watching this right now are putting off marketing for far too long because they're concerned about issues of quality or whatever or whatever. I'm not saying you should sell things that are low quality. I'm trying to say that like your standard for quality is usually not quite right. One, it's usually too high for the things that are like on your list and it's too low for the things that aren't on your list that the customers actually care about. And the way that you find out about that second list is by actually being in the market, interacting with I think that's a beautiful way to end this podcast.

I think it was very informative. It was a topic that really excited me today, like marketing, you know, how you can do better in marketing. That's certainly something that I'm very interested in because at the end of the day, we're in the business of communicating to people. So, you know, we got to make sure that the message comes across.

That's right. And if you take one thing away from this hour, it's get on TikTok.

Get on. Yes, get on TikTok.

Go viral. All right. I'll see you Friday.