Launch HN: Noloco (YC S21) – Build internal tools from data without code
Noloco lets you create internal apps from data sources like PostgreSQL, Airtable and Google Sheets without writing any code. This makes building internal tools and configuring views a lot faster than building them with code and SQL queries. It also enables non-technical team members like those in ops, customer support or sales to make changes without having to rely on engineers.
Building internal tools is time-consuming and resource intensive, not just for the original build but the ongoing maintenance as well. It’s also not the kind of work that developers typically want to do, nor usually the most valuable use of their time.
From our prior experience at tech companies like HubSpot, TripAdvisor, Revolut and Flipdish, we experienced some of the pains around internal tooling first hand. As a PM leading the Payments team in one company, Simon would have to prepare SQL scripts every week to update customer data, and hound developers to run them. Most of the time, businesses simply didn’t have the resources to invest in updating tooling.
Since launching in November 2021, we have a wide variety of customers using Noloco for internal tools. For example, one real estate company is using Noloco to manage payment approvals to contractors hired across their property portfolio. An accounting firm uses Noloco as an internal practice management tool to keep track of proposals made to clients and relevant pieces of work. And a lead generation business used Noloco to build a sophisticated CRM and customer portal to track leads provided to their customers.
Most platforms that enable building internal tools are either targeted at developers, or are ‘low-code’ and still require some coding expertise to build something useful. Other no-code platforms typically connect to more no-code backends like Google Sheets and often focus more on B2C use cases, enabling building of publicly accessible websites, for example. Often these solutions fall short when it comes to building sophisticated internal tools around data.
Noloco is a fully no-code solution focused solely on web apps. We connect to relational databases like PostgreSQL as well as no-code backends like Airtable and Google Sheets, enabling companies to build powerful apps on top of their existing business data from multiple sources. We believe that we’ve got the balance right between simplicity and enhanced configuration ability for power users who want to go deep with customisation: filtering, validation rules, database permission rules etc.
It took us a couple of pivots to arrive at this system. Initially we were building a feature-rich full-stack website and web app builder—but no one could build anything useful with it. We decided to revamp the product to make it much simpler. A few weeks later, we had our first version of our client portal builder. This was a step in the right direction, but our value proposition around centralising customer interactions in a custom-made client portal wasn’t resonating with prospects. Finally we realized that what our most successful customers wanted was to share their existing data with their team or customers. This led us to revamp the product once more to make the focus on connecting your existing data. Once you do so, we’re able to automatically build an app around your data meaning that you can launch a whole lot faster with much less of a learning curve.
The starting point for building an app with Noloco is adding data. If using an external data source like Airtable or Postgres, you provide your connection details, choose what tables you want to import and then Noloco syncs your data across. Once the initial import has finished, Noloco instantly builds an app for you around your data—including collections, forms and record pages for each database record. From there, you can customise th...
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Noloco in comparison is no-code first, meaning that you don't actually need to write any queries or know how to code at all to build different views. In fact, Noloco actually automatically creates the basic app for you once you connect your data (list views, record pages and forms). This reduces the learning curve and by being no-code first is accessible to non-developers as well.
Like other platforms, you can of course build and test out functionality and even see what it looks like to users with different user roles before publishing to your user base.
We have workflows functionality (where you can trigger emails and webhooks when data is updated in your app or when action buttons are clicked) and that would probably strike me as one of the first areas where tests could be focused as these things happen more in the background.
Defining the rules for the app could (and will) allow you to programmatically verify that it's still working as expected.
However, I think another large appeal for no-code/low-code solutions is not having to worry about testing. You can assume that because you're building your application within the rules of the platform, that everything will function as you tell it to.
If you want to verify that it works how you want vs how it's setup to work, then you would be better leaning on existing tools that can do that.
My point about not needing to test it was about the implicit trust you would put in a platform like this, just like you would trust that a library you import behaves how it describes. It's not expected that you should write unit tests and integration tests to verify the behaviour of an external library
In the case of something like Noloco, I imagine it would be more like "we need to change this DB schema, can we update the schema in a test environment and make sure that we didn't break our Noloco app?" There's nothing to unit test there but if you don't have a solid set of integration and e2e tests then you might have a form that's halfway through a flow that suddenly stops working and you don't notice until your conversions crater to zero.
Another benefit is that it's generally easy to spell as well, which loads of businesses have a problem with when it comes to search.
In general, we tend to see that existing enterprise-focused tools tend to be more low-code rather than no-code and often more aimed at developers rather than non-developers.
We're launching a product early next year that can do all the things you listed + more. It's built on top of users Workflows and the rest of the Cloud platform, but it's an exciting AppBuilding experience once you've done the Analytics part. https://www.alteryx.com/products/alteryx-appbuilder
I wouldn’t do it for free, either.
But standardized SSO like Google or (presumably) Office 365 - yeah there shouldn’t be a tax on that.
For us, we're trying to strike the balance of nocode and lowcode so a lot of the advanced features of version control and approval flows are not a priority for a lot of our users. I imagine this will change as we grow though
Last year I built multiple Retool apps, all simple ones, but they needed code for data transformation and joins. What got in the way were operational items:
- Punch a hole in our firewall to access internal APIs.
- An internal Retool deployment was out of question since their install isn't light (requires a Postgres). Btw, Superblocks solve this problem quite elegantly by separating the control and data plane.
- Code reviews and testing were a constant challenge.
Yup.
Yes and: You'll eventually have to drop down to code. For all dangly bits, that last 5% of fit and finish.
Then you're fighting the framework (tool). Completely negating the benefits of the "no code", visual design tools, patch cord programming, etc.
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I did A LOT of data munging for healthcare. Starting in the mid aughts, that generally meant "HL7 interface" and "orchestration" engines. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
SeeBeyond (JCAPS), BizTalk, InterfaceWare, Talend, etc. A handful of others. Each was worse than the last. Though none was worse than InterSystems Caché. (And all that "Web services" nonsense like SOAP and WSDL; so awful.)
It'd take us 3 months to onboard experienced devs. Totally impractical.
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My solution was to create simple, typesafe, bulletproof APIs and tooling.
For data munging, by analogy, it was like working with DOMs instead of wrestling with strings and innerHTML.
All the networking, queues, retry, errors, logging, tracing, etc. was done by the tool. For the developer, everything just looked like a loose file. So the same code that worked on a directory of local test files would work as-is as the service. Made coding and debugging super easy.
A bit like what AWS Lambda would look like, if it was both useful and usable.
End result was 1 or 2 weeks onboarding, depending on prior experience. New hires were writing and deploying real code to production by the end of our training. And left with all the tools and skills to be self-sufficient.
Actual "interface" code was easy enough to understand that we could do live review with BAs and customer liaisons. Make fixes together. Deploy code updates to prod in seconds.
Our improved tooling greatly improved the team "culture" of working together. Changes requests just became conference calls. Which, of course, beget a lot more additional contract work. (No good deed goes unpunished.)