Delivering Peak Productivity: Budibase, flows2forms and Lowdown
Note from Ignite NI — Productivity loss can cause businesses to struggle in meeting their customers’ expectations. Niamh Crawford-Walker spoke to 3 of the current Propel 2020 cohort that have tools to help. Budibase, flows2forms and Lowdown.
Productivity loss is one of the primary reasons why businesses can struggle to meet their customer expectations. Increasing demands on staff lead to bottlenecks in production, poor product design and a lack of engagement within their existing customer base. At a macro level, it can be the difference between economic success or continuing underperformance. These three Propel companies believe that they have the tools to help.
Budibase is an open-source web app builder designed for speed and customisation, founded by Joe Johnston, Michael Shanks and Martin McKeaveney.
At flows2forms, co-founder Jeremy Lindsay is focused on allowing businesses to draw a flow chart of their information-gathering process, converting this to a working web application in one click.
Lowdown, founded by Steven Hylands and Phil McClure, creates auto-generated newsletters for teams and communities.
Eliminating pain points
The main focus of each of these startups is making the lives of their customers as easy as possible, removing complications and allowing their customers to focus on the bigger picture afforded by productivity.
At Lowdown, founders Steven Hylands and Phil McClure help communities to unleash the value locked within Slack channels and put it to work as a newsletter resource, guiding members back and increasing engagement. CEO Steven Hylands explains, “Our initial target audience is communities. At the moment we’re looking at those that have some sort of paid component to them. For example, some communities will be invite-only which means members have more reason to pay for our service because they have more of a vested interest than somebody who has just set one up for free and is running it in their spare time.”
“Coming at productivity from a software side, it’s becoming way easier to do things without having much experience. More and more of the complex stuff is being automated or made easier with software that essentially takes over the hard work we used to do. It’s interesting because it frees up time to work on other things, focusing on the more important stuff.”
With flows2forms, founder Jeremy Lindsay removes the complication for companies by simplifying their quality process.
“There are lots of companies that have their processes mapped out as flowcharts but one of the challenges they have is that these can end up being flat documents in a file share somewhere. People may not know about them or how to use them. I’m trying to help companies solve that.”
“People like compliant offices who work with auditors to prove that a company has reached a certain standard of quality, they have a really tough job. When the auditor comes in, it’s quite a stressful procedure. I’m taking the stress out of that.”
Budibase encourages productivity through championing ideas and removing the barrier to entry in building web applications.
“At Budibase we help developers and entrepreneurs build web applications twenty times faster, cheaper and easier. We’re a low-code platform. With low code, a little bit of coding can take you a long way in regards to customisation and flexibility.”
“In most development organisations, web applications are generally built by teams who have front end and back end developers. There are some full-stack developers in the industry but they are few and far between. Budibase makes it easier to build a full-stack web application regardless of skill set by providing sensible defaults and adding a little bit of code if you need to for extra interactivity and functionality.”
Understanding their user’s struggle
Lowdown first took shape when co-founder, Steven opened his own Slack community, connecting tech people who wanted to help with the climate emergency. Within a few weeks, hundreds of people had joined.
“I noticed that people would join, introduce themselves and then after a while, they would disappear. I started thinking about how I could get them to come back. My thinking was, can I take the content within Slack and somehow present it to the people who aren’t here as a mechanism to let them know what they’ve missed?”
When Steven spoke to his co-founder Phil, he loved the idea. “Straight away we talked about how, having worked in a company of 50–60 people previously, you just miss everything (in Slack communities) and he spotted the problem from a different angle. It was one of those things that we both resonated with and could see how to create a simple version of it.”
Telling the story of Budibase’s origin, Joe explains, “Originally there were two of us — Mike and me. Mike is technical. He’s developed many web applications but every time he developed one he was repeating the same process with the setup, the coding and facing the same hurdles and barriers every time. I was a web designer, marketer and freelancer. I could build static websites but didn’t have the technical abilities or expertise to build a web app. I had the ideas but I was just a guy who could use HTML, CSS at a push and that was basically it.”
Realising that there was one solution to both of their problems — a low-code platform — Budibase was born.
As for flows2forms, using his background as a developer allowed Jeremy to identify and connect with the stress points in his industry.
“I’ve been through a few of these processes myself, different audits and the like. I know how stressful it can be for businesses. I don’t think business should be like that. If people have done the right thing and they’ve followed their processes there’s got to be a better way to demonstrate that and make it more ‘business as usual’ type thing rather than something quite dramatic. I really don’t like drama in business and I’d like to try and reduce that. I want to make everyone happier in the workplace.”
The Big Picture Vision
These founders strive to empower others to live a life they want and liberate them from arduous, time-consuming tasks. So what does peak productivity look like for these teams in the long run?
Lowdown has embraced public accountability as a big part of reaching their version of success. They’ve set themselves a goal of $10K MRR by 1st July 2020, posting updates of their progress on their blog and adopting a level of transparency we can all learn from.
“What really excites me is that I genuinely believe that right now, we have the easiest way to create a newsletter on the internet. It’s a very specific newsletter but it’s automated if you want it to be. I like using that idea as the guiding factor throughout the development, that we always want to be the easiest way. Say in the future we want to add a Twitter feature, I still want to be the easiest way to do that.”
Big picture vision for flows2forms involves increasing their impact on the immediate community and the industry.
“As a solo founder, it can be tough. It’s quite a lonely journey so for me, I’d like to grow flows2forms so that it’s not something I’m running on my own. I want to make it something bigger in terms of its impact on the industry and also on the community by offering jobs. I’m motivated by seeing what the abstract problem that we’re trying to solve is and how can this be used for other people.”
Having already secured funding, the Budibase team have set their sights on a long term mission of global empowerment.
“The idea is that we want to empower people around the world, from all walks of life to be able to build web apps and change their lives. We’re trying to say to people that you don’t have to join the rat race, do the 9–5 and you don’t have to go into work unhappy. You can do what you want if you have a good idea. We’ll provide you with a tool to get to that stage.”
Watch this space to see what’s next for the Propel 2020 founders taking productivity to the next level.
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