Would a member of the Pagedraw team share a postmortem? Seems like this is a huge need and will be the future state of web / mobile design - what stopped you guys?
I think the reality is, no matter how awesome and impressive these tools are, they just don't seem to have a fit in the market.
Prefacing this with the fact I don't know all that much about the product, only a quick glance
For a big team of developers, building a big website with complicated interactions or requirements, a tool like this isn't going to meet all the requirements the developers have
If you're building something simpler, then you're probably better served by something like Webflow or Squarespace.
At a high level, that makes some sense - these tools might not be the most practical way to get from point A -> point B today for a typical web or mobile app.
In my head, I'm wondering if they are just way too early? Going from design -> code -> UI is, in theory, less efficient than just going from design -> UI, in a programmable, customizable, scalable way.
Skuid, which is a page builder for Salesforce (now branching out to more platforms) is doing very well.
At the company I work at we are going to switch away from it due to the limitations you insinuated, but there's definitely a fit for it in the Salesforce world.
Thanks for this - interesting that you focused the postmortem on technical lessons (other than #1).
I'm super curious around what the sales strategy was.
I'd imagine for devs, it would have to be around productivity (time saved by exporting vs. manually coding, adherence to consistent CSS standards, etc.).
For designers, I would imagine it would be around taking more of the software dev lifecycle - e.g. designers can now eat up part of the value that front-end dev provides. Based on that, designers should be more in demand, paid more, and so on.
Those seem like huge levers to pull from a PMF perspective, but to your point, maybe it all sounds great until you get into that conversation, and it's really not something that teams are looking for (at least right now).
Probably the same as every other attempt at this since the mid 90s. People who can code front-ends don't need such a tool. People who cannot code front-ends hire people who can, and still don't need such a tool.
Not all UI-builders are a fail. Visual Basic, Qt, Delphi, MS Access all had/have some very popular and useful UI-Builder. There is always a middle between no skill and high skill.
Prefacing this with the fact I don't know all that much about the product, only a quick glance
For a big team of developers, building a big website with complicated interactions or requirements, a tool like this isn't going to meet all the requirements the developers have
If you're building something simpler, then you're probably better served by something like Webflow or Squarespace.