Making Your Ideas Worth Something
I have been working in Silicon Valley for more than a decade as a software engineer. In the early years, I would listen intently when someone would say, “I have this great idea for a startup. Don’t tell anyone k?” I would promise not to tell. I would thoughtfully consider how hard it would be to build and acquire customers.
Then I would say, “Sorry I already have a job and I’m not trying to pick up an unpaid second job. But good luck getting your idea built!”
One thing you become acutely aware of while working in the Valley is that ideas are a dime a dozen; execution (with an ample helping of luck) is what makes a successful company, well, successful.
Build It
How do you go about building your idea for a web product?
For the longest time, the only way to get something interactive on the web was to have a software engineer to code it and deploy it. (Even if you code it yourself, now you’re the software engineer.) In fact, not too long ago, if you wanted to “deploy” your code on the internet you had to rent space in a colo and buy a physical computer that you would then have to configure as a web server.
Thankfully “the cloud” (AWS and the like) has made it infinitely easier to get a server running on the internet. You can do it on-demand from your couch, for a tiny fraction of the cost and time it would have taken you to rent space in a colo and install a server.
But you still need the code to run on that server. And for that there was no way around having a software engineer write that code.
Well, not until recently anyway.
There is a growing #nocode movement that is empowering non-software-engineers to build interactive, data-driven web sites (or “apps”). There have been “web page builders” of various sorts available, with a long and sordid history. But those products are not capable of taking data from your page visitors (eg, in a form) and then showing it to other visitors (eg, showing the data from that form). This is the underlying powerful concept of what was once referred to as “Web 2.0” sites but has now become so ubiquitous and expected, that they are just “sites” again.
The idea is that your site is nothing without people interacting with it. Imagine Facebook but with no friends or posts or pictures. Twitter with no tweets and no followers. Pinterest with no boards. All of these sites had to start somewhere. They started as an empty shell, waiting to take data and show it back to you & others. Waiting to connect you with your friends, colleagues, and future lovers.
Which brings me to Boundless. We built Boundless to be the tool of choice for future builders and problem-solvers. Not only do you not need a software engineer to fully build and realize your idea, but you don’t need to deploy it. Your web app is fully hosted and managed by the Boundless platform. Where we’re going, you don’t need technical co-founders (or roads!).
All you need to do is figure out how you want people to interact with your site, and then drag and drop the pieces into place.
Your ideas are worthless without execution. But with Boundless, execution is within your grasp. Now you have one less excuse for not pursuing that idea.
