Why I quit my job to start BoomAdmin (in a recession)?

Hi! I’m Noj. I’ve been working as a Software Engineer for more than a decade. From Kenya → Australia → Canada → USA, it’s been a great journey traveling different continents and working at different companies.

At PowerBI, I was one of the early engineers working on the UI. The big insight I got was that organizations are collecting more data than they know what to do. There is a ton of value in visualizing data and making sense of the trends. Using those trends to then make reasonable bets about the future.

At Mixpanel, I understood the value of iteration. Start something small, collect user feedback at micro level, and product usage data at a macro level. Make small incremental experiments that test a hypothesis at a time and see if they move key metrics in the right direction.

Over a decade, the value of good product design cannot be understated. Keeping things simple, easy-to-use, performant, focused on solving a few but important problems.

When I turned 30, I had a mini mid-life crisis. “Is this the life I want to live?”. As a software engineer in the US, it’s a pretty decent life (can’t complain). Like many others, I’ve always had a dream of building a product business that is profitable enough to sustain me. Something I could pour my heart in and show my craftsmanship, something that people would love and share with others, something that people would happily pay for.

I discovered IndieHackers, it’s where solopreneurs hangout and share their journey. That gave me a ton of confidence. If they can do it, perhaps I can too. I have about 2 years worth of money saved up (1.5 years now that the economy crashed due to COVID-19). I am pretty confident building apps, not so much about marketing and sales, but it’s a great opportunity to learn.

The risk is that I build something, no one buys it, lose my savings and the opportunity cost of working at AMGAF. Working at Microsoft, Facebook, Google e.t.c for a decade can net you a million dollars easily.

On the other side, whatever I build, even if it doesn’t work could be open sourced and be useful to someone else. I would learn a ton and be out of my comfort zone. If things do take off, then I’ll have a loyal user base who sustains our living and I can keep on building awesome software.

Not trying is the biggest failure, because when you try, you either win or you learn.

I’m timeboxing to give myself a year (until 2021). If BoomAdmin works, great 🎉, if not 😢, then I can always go back to a cozy software engineering job. Failure isn’t futile.

So why BoomAdmin?

Databases — They make us superhuman. Our human brains are phenomenal at pattern matching, but they not great at remembering 1000s of structured records. This is why inventing writing made us so powerful. Databases let us find, sort, group, index billions of records on a modern computer. They enhance our memory intelligence. There are many open source databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, CouchDB e.t.c

They tout how resilient they are, how fast they are, how they can handle terabytes of data and millions of queries. However interacting with them is somewhat painful.

There are solutions that make them less painful. Native clients like SequelPro, TablePlus, Navicat, Postico. There are open source web based ones like phpMyAdmin, pgAdmin, Adminer . There are paid ones like JetAdmin, ForestAdmin.

There are content management tools built on top of them e.g Strapi, Ghost, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla e.t.c

However finding an existing tool that lets you manage existing popular databases like MySQL with a spreadsheet like interface, has come up short. AirTable & SmartSheet are great but they don’t work with existing databases. They’re also slow with >10k records and cost a fortune with large amounts of data.

There are a billion spreadsheet users. A large chunk who use spreadsheets like a poor (wo)man’s database. BoomAdmin is working on giving them memory intelligence superpowers. We want to make make databases ‘spreadsheet’ easy to use.

The game plan

Hypothesis: It’s painful for teams to organize data in databases. Solving this would mean there would me more creators sharing their organized knowledge and building great apps & sites.

1. Self hostable or SaaS hostable — Your data is yours. If you want ultra security you can bring BoomAdmin to your data. If you want click-click ease of use, you can bring your data to BoomAdmin.com. You get best of both worlds.
2. Open source with Commercial licensing — Open source means anyone can look under the hood and see how it works. I contribute to open source and I use quite a bit of open source code. I believe it’s one of the most altruistic ways to contribute to society and create prosperity in the world. However I also want to create a sustainable business. If BoomAdmin is solving a painful problem, then it would be in the best interest of commercial entities to pay to use it.
3. Phenomenal exploration and editing experience — Excel, Medium, AirTable, Dynalist are all great examples of apps that offer a great editing experience. Adding content should be as simple as adding data to a spreadsheet. Uploading an image/attachment should be as simple as drag-drop or copy-paste. From built in markdown editor, tag selectors, json editors, we will build a great editing and viewing experience for different kinds of semi-structured data. SQL is somewhat painful to remember. BoomAdmin will have a sleek Visual SQL query builder that keeps simple things simple, but makes complex queries possible.
4. Sharing, permission slicing & data governance — Currently when sharing with others, users get access to the full sheet/database or nothing. There are many instances where you want to give users access to a slice of the database based on a filter e.g They can only see rows where user_id=<logged_in_user_id> and related rows in other tables. When you share, based on the role they can only see certain fields e.g the username but not the password. Sometimes you want people to suggest edits and have it be approved by someone else before they get applied. Large teams can only scale and build trustworthy data if there osgreat data governance tooling. We will build Github like Pull requests and sharing with filters in BoomAdmin.

Thanks for reading this far. Please feel free to get in touch with me at hello@boomadmin.com, I love talking about databases and UX.