Prototyping a YC Startup Each Day

I see a trend forming where the stacks are getting too brittle, complex and overweight at all levels. I think it might be a result of trying to keep pace with constant change. There has been very little period of exnovation but huge amounts of innovation... perhaps at a cost.

A certain category of developer is suffering fatigue. People want to focus on their business more than the technology. They want to spend more resources on advanced technology like machine learning and analytics than the transactional CRUD/user interfaces. They want to apply technology holistically and stop worrying about the details (e.g. moving to cloud platforms).

For that matter, I see a lot of people trying to apply advanced tech thinking it will alleviate or continue to greatly reduce the need for human input and interaction. Most of the energy I see being expended out there is being spent on advancing tech at a blistering pace more than streamling/simplifying/solidifying ergonomics of development. There isn't a huge focus on ease of long term support.

If the trend continues and tech continues to advance at a mad pace, I think more and more people are going to want to outsource the problem of keeping up so they can just easily build what they need and hopefully this time it will scale further than previous attempts at things like 4GL.

Very interesting approach you're taking here, it will be interesting to see where it goes, and wish you great success!

We spent a lot of time working on the business requirements that we got from our first potential customer.

See this Steve Jobs demo [1] from the 90's creating a DB driven app in a fewminutes. It's 2018 and we're just getting back to that level of productivity now.

[1] 23 Minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk

I feel like most people who need a website to "take orders for your new widget, or keep track of your customers, or schedule your local football league" are best off just contracting it out. I'm not sure how this moves the value needle to make an average person want to learn web development.

Yet the post is still titled "How We're Building One Y Combinator Startup a Day" instead of "How We're Building One WebApp Prototype a Day"

Your service is really nice but the current title sounds really clickbait.

I don't want to be a downer, but I think what they show is the kind of product that people expect from IT departments. I.e., bring a bunch of services together with some plumbing with a database below it, and a nice UI on top. This is all pretty standard. And with today's tools you can do that all in one day (see hackatons). Of course, when you start using the product, and the real requirements become clear, that one initial day seems like nothing.

Yet, like all crutches, the provide a superior alternative to certain groups of people. People with broken legs use crutches, but only for the purpose of self sufficiency until their leg heals.

Perhaps this is where the flaw in the business model is revealed. Anvil is largely incentivized to get its users to depend on its crutch. But users are still able to utilize the crutch to ease the learning process, and perhaps explore something that might interest them enough to seek out more traditional development workflows.

Rental of goods exists as a viable service, because there is demand for its supply. When you fly somewhere distant, at least in the US, your first order of business is to pick up your rental car. This is not a bad business practice. You are making the correct judgement that given your limited resources, renting something in the short term is more prudent than purchasing it.

The learning curve of programming is steep. It's like a sheer wall and then a steady increasing line. It takes a beginner a ton of effort to produce anything in something like Rails. But once they get passed that initial hurdle over time they will be able to build more and more complex apps. Something like Appian, that initial sheer wall is far less steep, but still formidable. After you get passed that, however, you will fairly quickly find some thing Appian doesn't provide an easy way to do. At that point, you hit the sheer wall again and can even find yourself with something that isn't possible to do.

I think everyone identifies that replacing excel with web apps is a huge need with a lot of potential for monetization. The issue is that the biggest reason that non-technical users can do stuff in excel is that they have spent years to decades learning how. It's a tough sell for them to do the same in your app unless it is an industry standard.

> The number of tools that try to do something like this keeps growing (Bubble comes to mind, or Appian in a slightly more enterprise space)...

This is an interesting comparison. Those tools focus on building apps without code. That's great for simple things, but once you get more complicated, you end up writing something that's kinda-sorta a program, in a language not really built for the purpose.

I think there's room for both. But as far as we're concerned, when you're telling a computer what to do, there is nothing better than writing actual code. And so Anvil is unapologetically built around a real, industrial-strength programming language, with a solid ecosystem of libraries and tools. We've had startups scale into the millions of dollars of revenue with products built on Anvil, with serious technical heft on the back end. We work quite hard at the architecture so it can grow with even the most demanding applications.

Appian looks really nice and has $90 and $180 plans, which is great. It's so weird though, you can't just give them money. They make you wait 3+ days for a human to say "ok fine, we'll take your money", if you ever get a response. So far, I've tried twice and they still have never responded / activated an account. I get it with the mendix/outsystems/salesforce super enterprise stuff in terms of lead qualification but at the low appian price points, I do not get it. Have you had a chance to try appian? It looks very promising albeit perhaps a bit over complicated.

Drop me a line at meredydd@anvil.works - I'd be happy to give you a proper demo. The on-prem version takes just one "docker-compose" command to set up.

That being said, I see no reason why you couldn't combine the two, and get the best of both worlds.

Annoyingly, we can't really talk about the details of most of our internal-enterprise-app-type deployments. We do have an anonymised example here: https://anvil.works/case-studies/building-secure-download-po... - but even that is more detail than most want to share!

So if you have a suggestion for an enterprised-focused example you'd like to see - especially for your company - drop me a line and let's make it happen! (Email is in my profile.)

Two weeks ago I was waiting for someone who was late for a meeting, and in that 30 minutes I wrote and deployed a little system monitor for an invisible API/EDI broker service! In another hour the next day I added some more features so the app started to become a control panel for the app. It would take me longer than that to set up the hosting normally.

But there's a whole universe of companies who need to build internal tools. (If you're in a startup/tech-co bubble, you'll be astonished how many line-of-business Django or .NET developers are out there, and how much they are needed. They tend to quite enjoy meeting Anvil :). Unfortunately for the peanut gallery, their employers tend to be a little more leery of suppliers throwing their names around, so those customers will have to remain anonymous in HN comments...)

The tool allows you to graphically build Node.js applications, through some key abstractions. Node you drag into the canvas has inputs and or outputs which can be connected to other nodes, by simply clicking and dragging between them.

As an embedded developer, I was far more interested in determining the viability of an implementation than learning node.js. To me, Node Red is the superior evolution of node.js. But I can certainly appreciate that people who learned node.js to any degree, before finding out about Node Red, see far less utility in it than I do.

For a mirror image of this phenomenon, Arduino allows novices to circumvent the traditional learning curve required to develop embedded systems, through its key abstractions. Yet, every embedded developer I know immediately attacks the downsides of Arduino. Its not really teaching its users much. At least in its infancy, much of the underlying code was cowboy spaghetti. You would never use Arduino in a production environment.

Yet somehow, Arduino is flourishing. I'll admit that since it's open source, that is a key distinction. But Adafruit.com, and Sparkfun.com are literally printing money with Arduinos and the ecosystem they facilitated. Each is a private company, but each has revealed at least one year of revenue exceeding $30,000,000. Each also provides schematics, datasheets, and tutorials for every single product they sell, if it is within their rights to provide such information.

As Meredydd said above