Good morning fam 👋, any active users 🧑‍💻 of CRUD admin tools here (Django/Rails/Laravel admins or even ReTool)? I started working on a passion project last year but got lost in things end of year. I am slowly getting back to it and am looking for folks who need a CRUD + data exploration tool that works without knowing SQL. The product revolves around a core value: Business users (technical or not) should not have to learn SQL, APIs or other such constructs. The product reflects (extracts) your DB (MySQL, PostgreSQL, others) schema and builds the UI on top, generates SQL by itself, including for JOIN statements. Filters, ordering, group by - everything without a single line of SQL. It is an open source and self-hosted product. Would love to hear thoughts from those using similar tools.

The closest thing that comes to mind based on your description is MS Excel

@wide-twilight-82330 exactly, that is what my mental model is: Airtable for relational databases.

Have you looked at https://www.metabase.com/? I'm not sure about building CRUD admin tools but it is definitely a good fit for data exploration

@modern-spoon-64853 yes I know Metabase, there are many players in this space though. Each has certain unique points. The one I am chasing is 0 SQL, there is no SQL anywhere in the UI. Nothing to learn.

Have you had a chance to look at Appsmith? They're working towards something similar, but not 0 code at all. IMO, the window to make just another low/nocode platform is closing, if it's not already closed for this hype cycle. There's efficiency gains to be made from usig the right tools etc but that's more a differentiator for when you're already in the top 3-5, not when you're starting out. To beat the market now, you'll need to dig pretty deep into language design and/or ML to make a real-ish 5th gen language. If you don't have a history in language design, start there I guess.

@dry-monkey-93718 yes I know them, had a talk with their founder last year too. Although I wholeheartedly disagree that the window is closing any time soon. This is B2B/Enterprise market. So there will always be a lot of players, each having a niche and making money. Before I stopped working on this last year I had clear intent from the CTO of 2 German mid-sized companies willing to pay $1000 a month for dwata simply because it does not ask users to know SQL. At a 40 people company when you are spending 50K EUR / year** per person, a 1% productivity gain at $1000/month is very practical.

The good/bad thing in this market is that once people convert to one platform, they're very hesitant to switch. If you start today, you'll reach the shape of something stable and sellable in 3-ish months. Sales cycle itself would take some 2 months-ish. By the time you'll have your 10th customer, all major companies are already being targetted by bigger platforms that already have momentum in the market. Sure if you're working for 1-5 mil ARR, there's still a year or two left because there will still be teams within bigger companies which will use an alternate product just to try it out etc. But in that case, you might probably have a better time and odds of success joining an early-ish stage strong player (someone already in the 100-500k ARR range) that is similar enough and work for a percentage of 100 mil.

@dry-monkey-93718 valid points, but I am not in this to make short term money. The domains of data, schema, data exploration, no-code have been my curiosity and research for almost a decade now. So I am happy if I can build a sustainable product in a couple years and stick with it for 10+ years.

I like that a lot! I'd urge you to go for an attempt a 5th gen language. If you start studying language design on the side, it will take 8 months - 1 year-ish. Another 6-8 months to make a visual editor. Probably keep 4 months or more for iteration to get it working where you're satisfied. Do rope me in your progress as well. I'd love to know. 🙂

@dry-monkey-93718 I think this space is just getting enough attention from folks in academia to get interested. Till now, most products, and not disregarding them, are only touching the surface of language and interface design. I am not as nerdy as this might need me to be but I have invested a lot of time learning some of the fundamentals and I am in shock at how superficial some of the existing products are and are still making headlines. Would love to stay in touch.