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Show HN: I Built a Visual Workflow Automation Platform – FlowRipple (flowripple.com)

92 points by shivsarthak34 ↗ HN
FlowRipple is designed to streamline and automate business processes with ease. Whether you're a developer, business owner, or marketer, our platform lets you build custom workflows that can be triggered by events from your applications, webhooks, or on a schedule. We’ve just gone live and are offering an exclusive Early Access Program with some incredible perks to get you started.

69 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread
rcarmo
This looks visually nice, but the feature set needs a bit of clarification - you seem to be in the same space as n8n.io or Azure Logic Apps, so a few use cases and differentiators would be nice.
nextworddev
What are the biggest painpoints among users when using n8n?
shivsarthak34
I feel it's too much dials and knobs thing which can scare away the non technical team members. I personally feel n8n is a great product , but for my non technical coworkers it's hard to navigate or keep track of.
shivsarthak34
Noted i'll update the website mentioning more about the features, and yes n8n.io is a similar product , i personally feel it's too technical and hands on, and havent tried Azure. About differentiators i'm still kinda on the lookout to find some, to double down on, that's why went ahead with the early access, to listen to feedback and implement what people actually want, rather than building something broad which people don't want. Thanks for the comment tho , really appreciated
culopatin
How is this different from all the other low codes that claim the same and then make you wish you just wrote the code instead? Who is this aimed for?
shivsarthak34
As of now we're still very early to say this is our Moat or differentiator, but i just wanted to develop a tool which takes minimal effort to integrate on the backend and is easy to be used among teams members without much technical knowledge.
Multiplayer
I guess I don't know how HN works. How does this get to the top of HN with 8 points?
zekenie
i think it's a function of recency and points
iamwil
It doesn't take too many for new stuff. HN has voting ring protection, so I think if enough unrelated people vote on new stuff, it can make the front page. I've made it on the front page with 6 points before. But if it can't get more points at an acceptable rate while on the front page, it drops pretty quickly.

Sometimes, interested things are boosted by dang. This doesn't seem interesting enough, so I doubt it was.

mkagenius
It is a bit weird and its almost impossible to get so many upvotes in 10 minutes in new/show newest section.
d_tr
I think the front page is curated, while "new" is where you go to see the "autopilot" ranking.
shivsarthak34
Isn't "new" page actually sorted by time ? Because that's the point of it ..
sxg
This is a guess based on personal experience and old HN comments, but I think HN boosts potentially promising links based on how quickly they're getting upvoted (i.e., momentum). If the link doesn't keep gaining momentum after the boost, it'll quickly fall off the front page.
ronbenton
That is a great demo video on your landing page. Makes it look very easy to integrate. Would also like to see what setting up a trigger looks like.
shivsarthak34
Ahah thank you i skipped that part trying not to make the video too long, Also it is easy to setup a trigger too , I've added option to either manually paste the payload that your backend will send , or actually make a live request and it will automatically detect and create a trigger for you . Mapping variables too are just one click setup, just click on the property you want to map as a variable and done , you can use them in workflows.

Also yes i'll try to accommodate all these things in future iterations of the website. thank you for the comment tho , really appreciate it

peterlada
How is it different from relay.app?
shivsarthak34
The vision is to be a workflow automation SaaS for other Product Backends, the trigger management and the reusability can be a differentiator for now but, this was more of a side project i did to offload some tasks i had to do on my day job. I replaced the firing of webhooks or sending of slack notifications on certain events. That being said , the app is still under development and I wanted to understand more about what people actually want, thats why i rolled out an early access program to bring out features and integrations that more people want
dgllghr
Looks very nice with a well thought out landing page and explainer video. I wish there was an offering like this that also included a low-code interface builder like Retool/Budibase/etc. so that it was easy to put a human in the loop with a web app. Appsmith has built in workflows but I have never used them because they are behind a paywall and I don't want to start paying before I know how good the workflows are.
shivsarthak34
I agree , a brief explainer/demo video does a lot of convincing. Would you mind explaining your usecase ? I'd love to know if something can be accommodated in flowripple.
dgllghr
Sure! Here is a use case that I have now encountered multiple times. We want to do data ingestion of some kind, but one of the steps involves human intervention (editing, confirmation, annotation, etc.). For these human intervention steps, we have wanted to build a custom web UI very quickly and only for internal use. So we have turned to a low-code tool. However, we then have to do custom integration between the low-code tool and the workflow automation system. We have ultimately never actually used a workflow automation system because we end up just handling the "workflow" from the low code web UI through a DB.

But what I really want is a workflow tool that integrates with low-code in the following way: as records come in, they are stored somewhere. There is an interface where a user can "claim" a record and then do their work on it. The workflow tool handles concurrency so that a record can only be claimed by one user at a time. The user either finishes processing the record and it moves on in the workflow, they discard their work and it returns to the original state so that it can be claimed again in the future, or they save their work so that they can come back and finish processing it later. There would need to be some kind of time out mechanism or a way to return a record to the original state.

The actual processing of the record happens using a custom interface that is built with low-code. So for text annotation, they land on a custom text-annotation interface when they claim a record.

Does that make sense?

cjonas
How is the "code" represented in the backend? Can it be exported, checked into source control and deployed via CI/CD?

With the advances we are seeing in AI coding workspaces, "visual programming" seems like a dead end if the code isn't optimized for machine comprehension. I do think visual representation of code will become important to be able to more easily understand the AI generated systems, but it's just not an inefficient way to encode logic for AI (turns of code is a very effective at this).

IMO, for these low code runtimes to survive, they need to be "transpilable" to a simple DSL (or subset of a popular language) and have an LSP for agents to interact with.

shivsarthak34
This is a very interesting take. It currently cannot be exported but It sure can be achieved. Wow i think this is something i'll prioritise to implement. Thank you so much for the insight, it can be a good differentiator too.
nprateem
I really wouldn't bother if you're targetting non-tech users.
cjonas
I disagree...

What's the SDLC story? How do I move between environments, roll back, manage hotfixes alongside feature development, etc?

It's these "non-functional" feature that end up being the downfall of many of the integration projects I've been brought in to save.

John in accounting sets up a Salesforce to Netsuite integration that becomes mission critical and it works... Until it doesn't.

apsurd
+1

i learned recently that we pay $20/month for a hubspot app to intake our sendgrid webbook data and display it on a hubspot profile.

email engagement metrics are very useful so it makes sense.

one day we stopped seeing events in hubspot. sales had to give me their account password, i looked into it, no logs, no visibility, not even a status page. i sent a support ticket.

in the next few days i learned how to make a hubspot marketplace app and brought it all in house. it was non trivial and not ideal use of time, but now we have 100% visibility. everyone thought it was the right choice.

jamamp
I'll also agree with you.

I want to start with the fact that building FlowRipples is a monumental feat of its own. Generic tools that are adaptable to lots of situations is a difficult task, and it's impressive what was built.

But the supporting functionality in any service like this is also so important. It's one thing to have a low friction setup and way to get started, with simple steps and a quick showcase video, so that someone can get to tinkering. It's another thing to fully adopt this as a tool within your team that would be integrated into a published product.

Suddenly, like you say, you have multiple environments (Dev, QA, Staging/Pre-prod, Prod) that you have to move changes into and out of. Replicating the same changes manually will inevitably lead to human error and what worked in QA will no longer work in Staging or Production. Even a simple export + import helps with this.

I think one thing that also needs attention is parallel changes. Two people are wokring on different changes in the dev environment. Promoting the current state of the Dev environment to QA requires that both tasks have to be dev-complete, or else unfinished changes could make its way to QA and cause confusion. This is difficult when the different tasks aren't synchronized in their testing (i.e. start testing one ticket but not necessarily the other). It's almost like you need branching and merging and diffing, a la git, to help resolve this. That's difficult to do in low-code visual programming apps.

wavemode
I take the opposite view. The semantics of visual programming are very simple compared to text-based programming. This makes it more amenable to AI autocomplete, not less. A visual IDE could just convert the blocks to text, then prompt the LLM API with "here are the current blocks, and here are the blocks available to you. Suggest some more blocks." and then insert the response.
cjonas
I agree the abstraction level is perfect for AI, but not having it accessible (or even just in a format that is well represented in the training data) is a problem. From a CTO's perspective, encoding our processes in something like this removes my ability to leverage the general AI programming capabilities of the future that billions of dollars are currently being invested in.

It's a technical debt dead end.

maximamas
Checks out, that’s definitely a CTO’s perspective.
betimsl
From the demo on the homepage, I feel like, it would be much easier to call the trusty old mail(admin, new, registration) func on that trigger... than to go through all that hustle and bustle.
allthebestforus
FlowRipple looks very interesting!

Have you been inspired by Node-RED?

shivsarthak34
Hahah no but I remember trying to figure how Node-RED works at least 10 years back on my RaspberryPi. I work at a company called Spur, which is a Whatsapp Marketing Software, we have a workflow automation interface there, which is used to create chatbots. On weekends I was just experimenting on some different framework libraries on which we can rebuild our workflow builder. Stumbled across SvelteFlow and tried it out, one month later here we are :)
tspann
Just use Apache NiFi
Kalanos
does that have the same degree of cloud integrations as airflow?
halyax7
I thought this looked familiar - its a reskin of a fantastic full stack tutorial from a few months back:

https://youtu.be/RkwbGuL-dzo?si=mWnIfWnmFLKIwIaD

MattDaEskimo
Yikes. I was wondering where all of these exact replicas were coming from. Thanks for sharing.
graypegg
IMHO, if someone made something while following along with a tutorial, I do think they should be free to turn THAT software they made (with a guide) into a product. The presumption being that the tutorial isn't just handing you a product that you sell with no changes. (I do see there's access to the source code in the description.)

Skimming the video, and this site, I'm not noticing a ton of differences other than some minor styling changes. Maybe the author could mention any of the changes they've made? If they're significant, IMO, it's fine.

shivsarthak34
It's not a reskin , I developed it on my own. It's just that these workflow builders are built using libraries such as React Flows. As you can see in the bottom right of the sheet of the flow builder. Also my application is built on Svelte, and I'm using Svelte Flow which is a fork of React Flow itself.
ghxst
Fwiw I'm getting a 404 error on your documentation at the time of writing this. Quick question, does your platform support logic like iterating over lists or handling loops? For example, if Snyk sends a payload with multiple reports to a webhook, could I iterate through them and create Linear tickets for the correct teams based on the contents of the reports? One of our non-dev teams ran into issues with a similar visual builder that didn’t support this kind of logic, which often results in them wasting time on something simple that could be solved with just a few lines of Python. If you support use cases like this, I think they'd be excited to give it a try.
shivsarthak34
Yeah , documentation is still a WIP. i'll remove the link for now because the project will go undergo a lot of changes. And iterating over a list is currently not implemented , but I can add support for it soon. Thanks for mentioning , really appreciate it
_pdp_
5 years ago I built my own workflow programming environment to automate various security processes. What I've learned form this experience is that workflow tools kind of suck. They are effectively really bad scripting languages - fine for doing high-level composition but not remotely useful when it comes to putting simple algorithms. But I think this is just my own perspective coming from experience with various programming environments. There are plenty of users who find this style of programming essential to get something done. For me though, I rather write the code.

I think these types of workflow tools will be ultimately replaced by AI agents.

dexwiz
I think the last point is key. These tools are used by those who can’t program, too scared by the learning barrier, or trapped in a SaaS/Security ecosystem that bans user scripts. All three of these can be solved by an LLM putting together scripts in a sandbox environment.
shivsarthak34
Maybe a vision for this product could be to be that "Sandbox Environment" with the LLM. So you just connect your backend and triggers and just create flows telling what needs to be done in natural language (one time setup) and it creates the flow.
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fock
For reasons I recently got acquainted with enterprise scheduling solutions. IBM/HCL workload automation specifically - the company is actively looking for a replacement but nothing except for the chinese sponsored open source comes close it seems to me (and that is a step too far for management...).

The thing you miss with scripting is that a good workflow engine essentially provides a simple and well-defined layer allowing you to couple many concurrent processes and providing ressource management. Curiously out of the box all the opensource workflow tools do so too - like you said people (Airflow has pools, but thrn ...) essentially built very weird DSLs to do high-level composition and there you can indeed rather easily code it yourself. I assume the companies originating these have integrations for the other bits too while everyone else does fake elastic scaling with some halfbaked workarounds. And from time to time someone comes up with a new DSL and some GUI - ignoring all the hard parts.

mrdoops
Main limitation of these kinds of products is that the graph/workflow itself is not very expressive of dataflow options. Eventually you need map, reduce, and state machines and likewise concurrency and durable execution. It's not easy to have a high level declarative tool but also expose powerful programming primitives; at some point technical need-to-knows cross the point where you might as well have the user write code.
androng
Am I right in calling this a direct competitor to https://www.gumloop.com/ ? I would probably use that since there are more options right now unless you have an option exclusive to you
shivsarthak34
Yep , it seems to be a much mature product, they are have much more integrations going on. FlowRipple is at a very nascent stage and very much figuring out it's path. I've put together this project in a month along with my full time day job, so the motive to showcase it here was to just get some eyes and opinions on it.
yoouareperfect
To all the commenters asking how is this product different from another product:stop asking that question! Its a month old! instead why don't you chime in with your idea to help this founder out on how he can differentiate?
CharlesW
The peers asking them how this differentiates from the many, many other solutions for this are doing him an enormous favor. If he knows, it may prompt him to improve the messaging on his site. If he doesn't, creating a crisp answer to that question will improve his chances of success.
farceSpherule
help this founder out on how he can differentiate? That's his job as the founder.
digitaltrees
The founder is doing his job in asking customers for feedback. Useful customers will say things like “it would be useful if this integrated with intuit payroll because none of your competitors do that and I really need it”. Useless noncustomer haters will say “how is this different than 90 other tools” and then walk away feeling smug that they “showed” some naive founder the error of their ways. (And most often go back to not building or launching their own business just cutting down and discouraging others).

Be useful.

farceSpherule
help this founder out on how he can differentiate? That is his job as the founder. Competitive analysis on existing products, etc.
HalcyonicStorm
What's this built with on the frontend and backend?
shivsarthak34
Sveltekit frontend with svelteflow Backend is built on a NestJs Stack
ajcp
Very nice. I have a lot of experience in this space (RPA/DPA/* Process Automation)!

Tne thing people fail to see -and makers sell on- is that the value proposition of these platforms is NOT the "low code, no code" capabilities that "any business employee can use, no experience required" (a disingenuous sales tactic at best).

The value prop is their orchestration, observability, and administration offering that is their "control room". If you nail that capability, make it user friendly, and fully featured (queues, credential vaults, pools, etc) you'll kill it! Good luck :)