[chowes]

I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps.

The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the features they provide. Chat, ticket queues, automation, etc. Business users also don't want to be architects - a turnkey solution that solves 80% of their use case is better than a blank slate that they have to start thinking about schemas, relationships, etc. The old saying "nobody ever got fired choosing IBM" can now just as easily be applied to VP of Sales picking Salesforce.

That being said, there ARE tools to do this: Quickbase (enterprise) and Airtable come to mind. I'm curious if the author has looked into using one as their base instead of Google Forms/Sheets.

[mmonihan]

OP. This is an idea I've been going back and forth on for a while.

I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc.

What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility.

However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data model. I've been using http://form.io for that recently. You use a form builder to generate a UI and an API simultaneously and submissions are stored in Mongo. And, I can build the app as I want using their API.

I think that paradigm is the future, it just needs more refinement.

[chowes]

Ah alright - so definitely more aimed at people who can code. Ours was more focused at end-users.

That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :)

Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapier, but allows you to add some code (Ruby in fact) to do custom hooks.

I guess it really depends on how complex you need to go, which then brings me to my point about being master-of-none - at that point you're losing your abstraction and essentially building a custom app.

[snuxoll]

Salesforce is a great solution for stupid CRUD apps that require some custom code here or there. A year ago I started with 8 users, now I'm at 40 and counting - I don't have to waste time developing a front-to-back web application to keep track of garbage that was stored in spreadsheets, and my users get rapid turnaround on most changes (hey, add this new object or field please!).

And if your users don't need to access a lot of different "types" of data (objects) the $25/mo "App Cloud" license is a cheap way to get going.

[bryanh]

Zapier has custom Code steps (Javascript & Python):

https://zapier.com/help/code/

https://zapier.com/help/code-python/

[michaeloblak]

For quick CRUD apps, where a spreadsheet is your admin panel I recommend Sheetsu.com (I'm founder). You get REST API, from your spreadsheet. What you do with it is up to you.

We see a huge peak with agencies and freelancers using our service, just to avoid building admin panels for a client. Easy, clean & simple.

[meredydd]

I posted upthread already, but I would really love to know what you think of Anvil (https://anvil.works).

We're aiming squarely at your use case: more than just a form builder; less fuss than fighting Heroku for four hours.

[meredydd]

The long tail, though, is huge here. Anything that actually expresses your business workflow is going to be more specialised, and people end up really chafing under one-size-fits-all solutions (as evidenced by the bottomless demand for custom line of business development).

Our big point with Anvil (https://anvil.works) is something already noted here: The key is being able to write real code.

Pure Crud - anything sufficiently simple to do with a spreadsheet - is going to be done by a slick single-purpose startup. But anything that requires custom logic, you won't get quite what you want and you'll be stuck in spreadsheet-land or spending thousands on a contractor. Offering people a choice between those extremes can relieve a lot of pain.

[n00b101]

> The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none

Interesting. I'm working on a product based on a similar premise, for end-users, but focused on financial services.

I'm curious, did you try pitching to customers, or just investors?

[chowes]

We were still having product-market-fit surveys with potential customers, and friends (some of whom are investors).

I think narrowing down to a specific industry like you're doing helps the problem immensely. A true schema builder is a hard sell to both non-technical users (when point solutions offer more with WAY less setup) and technical users (see how tech people view Salesforce, for example). However, Quickbase and Airtable are doing it currently. Very interested to see how Airtable matures.