Daniel: Wants to solve his own problems + NoCode niche is fun + With this product DOESN'T have to settle on VC route or bootstrapping yet (as the market allows both)

Starting Position

Own problem: When automating our company Ops, Airtable was restrictive due to limited user rights

API is shit --> bad for developer use cases e.g. Nils + Forums

Got stuck when trying to hack the gempex project

General flaws of NoCode tools that also apply here:

Most have no Logs (ex ept e.g. Zapier)

All have no real Version control mechanism (like Git), at best they have version history/rollbacks

Identified and resolved strategic issues

Product Perspective

Good and bad things about Airtable

Good on mobile

Quick to build stuff

Make a product that is customizable for other devs through a rich selection of hooks (similar to Strapi)

Distribution Perspective

Airtable is the incumbent (I already ignore Google Sheet and Excel as they target different people, but perhaps one can even steal some of their users)

Competition

⁠

Airtable⁠

⁠

From

The Experience podcast⁠

(

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2InV4mS6lPiGup5fy4936c⁠

)

Airtable is quite "fame" focused, e.g. raised money to have unicorn status --> quite likely that they neglect some "harder" product opportunities

Their best enterprise accounts might generate ARR of >1M Dollar

Dynamics between having a generally applicable product and niche-specific distribution

Cannot build rather specific features in the general framework

Still have persona-specific distribution (landing pages, templates etc.)

Good collaborative feature was very tough to implement

⁠

Baserow⁠

⁠

Quite new, done by a single Dutch developer

Focuses on Open Source

Not clear how much revenue it makes

We can leverage their code for quick MVPs

⁠

Supabase⁠

⁠

Recommended in

n8n⁠

community

Its founder says on hackernews:

I don't really feel this space is a player-takes-all market (see also nhost, graphile, subzero, amplify - all great products)

i.e. we want to build an Airtable-like interface for non-techies to use), and charge on that aspect.

⁠

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901⁠

⁠

There open-source put together stack is generally good

Postgres scalability seems to be common sense

Still quite new, but got funding and traction end of last year e.g. here:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/supabase-raises-6m-for-its-open-source-firebase-alternative/⁠

⁠

Competes with Firebase free tier, which is hard according to them

Technical Evaluation with Nils

First impression: Light approach, do i find self-hosting (checked out pricing, only free ads stuff, therefore I thought it is open source startup, but there whole code is useless, unless you buy)

Then checked out github search "self hosting" - found some info there how to do it --> didnt work immediatly

Biggest problem: It forces you in a new ecosystem (as it tries to do a lot of things) --> same problem as with AWS, Google etc.

Nils wants a pick and choose solution: Spin up a postgres db in seconds (ideally with docker compose), start a backend with a rest api and let's go

Then configure e.g. writing only from outside

Interesting quote from a discussion on Hackernews

As an engineering manager, my concern with Supabase is the complexity of the systems involved. There's PostgREST (Haskell) and then a bunch of Elixir on top? Not only is that two services (plus the database) but they're in languages that aren't easy to hire for if I have to do maintenance or development. My preference (as an eng manager) would be to operate (and develop hooks for) a single generated server in Go, Java, or Python rather than manage a real BaaS. --> Nils agrees on the annoying lock in effect, but the implementation of the different components shouldnt matter too much

But if you want to make it customaziable Haskell is a bad choice and just use Python or Javascript (not saying this is necessary needed here)

⁠

https://supabase.io/beta⁠

--> Advertise with Speed, this is not the dimension we could compete with easily as it depends on the protocol (they seem to use sockets)

Speed not relevant for normal Dev use cases (like managed DB)

Requests Speed advantages relevant for e.g. high performance crawlers

Further Info in this podcast (haven't listen to yet):

https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/jamstack-radio/ep-71-open-source-firebase-alternative-with-paul-copplestone-of-supabase/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=heavybit&utm_content=Ep.%20%2371,%20Open%20Source%20Firebase%20Alternative%20with%20Paul%20Copplestone%20of%20Supabase⁠

⁠

Potential existing alternatives are e.g. Hasura

ProductIdea diagram

⁠

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ld-YhhE=/⁠

⁠

Misc

Learn from examples of bootstrapped vs. funded SaaS cases

Is the market too large for an indie hacker product?

Maybe it makes sense to start with a specialized airtable use case early on, but keeping in mind the general layer for later

Is it hard to compete with Airtables Free Tier?

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