Ask HN: Success stories of apps have built with Airtable / LCNC?

3 points by diceduckmonk ↗ HN
We're two programmers fleshing out an MVP app geared towards backpackers. The gist of the experience is recommend things to see, do and eat around public transit hubs. We want to materialize our product idea before committing to any code. Some LCNC app products promise that they keep the source code transparent, but this isn't too much of a concern for us. We will handwrite code if we can validate a product niche with ~1000 true fans. For this set of users the content will be static and dynamic user input (at "social media scale") is out of scope. In other words, we don't mind the two of us being the manual bottleneck to content publishing.

How much runway have you gotten from AirTable or similar LCNC platforms for building apps? Any examples of YC alum that have gotten in or even graduated with LCNC MVPs?

In case there is a product gap that someone else would like to capitalize on, let us expand on our vendoring thought process and product needs as a user. Static site generators are compelling for the low serving cost, lack of vendor lock-in and has a migration path to a bespoke app, but, in our opinion, this too is too labor intensive at this stage. We've learned from our previous MVP and expect to have significant product churn/adaption/resetting. Model-View-Controller separation is great in theory, but (1) our data model will in all likelihood evolve as we spend more time with the problem domain and (2) in practice there will be some boilerplate and tight coupling between M-V-C. CSS Zen Garden style modifications to the view-only are rare or requires significant effort to structure your app accordingly. Thus, even a UI based tool to drag and drop React-based component seems like overkill. We're not doing any groundbreaking app work. It's mostly a content driven app, half a dozen pretty standard views (we don't want to challenge users with novel UI/UX patterns), maybe a UI slot where we embed a canvas, custom HTML elements, or OpenStreetMap integration. We do need a content management layer (expect to have 20 locations, each with 20 points-of-interest, so let's say O(10^3) datapoints) and something like AirTable/Notion with an accessible and hosted data input mechanism seems compelling (modifying JSON files with React and having to use Git as version control is overhead for us at this stage). It would also be superb if this LCNC tool lets us publish directly to the Mobile App Store with a native compile target (as opposed to an Iframe to a webapp).

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