Vlad Leytus first started working with no-code as an MBA student at Harvard in 2013. He had an idea for an application that he wanted to launch, but he didn’t have any programming skills or finances to spend on hiring. He was introduced to Bubble by a classmate and spent days and nights becoming an expert on the platform. In 2015, he and his co-founder, Andrew, quit their jobs in management consulting and analytics to build what would eventually become AirDev.
Vlad starts by discussing how integrating two big tools, such as Bubble and Salesforce, can lead to both powerful results and potential problems when the ‘source of truth’ data is not clearly defined. He shares his experience of having data live on both tools and how an outage on one tool can cause activity on the other tool to not be updated.
Vlad also dives into the different methods in which you can structure your company, depending on the stage your company is currently in. He talks about how earlier in a company’s lifecycle, it’s more important to get things out quickly and to have a shorter line and continuous feedback loop between the developer and someone on the business side, and how later, it is more important to optimize for stability and scalability. He mentions that while this principle applies when using code, too, no-code makes application of this principle even more crucial.
Vlad ends by discussing the importance of scoping in client projects. He mentions the ‘rule of pi’, which means that traditionally, you have to take a developer’s estimate for timing and pricing and multiply it by 3.14, and how AirDev places a much greater emphasis on scoping to better manage client expectations on time and pricing.
You can find Vlad on LinkedIn and Twitter and check out his company AirDev.
Tools & services mentioned:
- AirDev: https://airdev.co/
- Bubble: http://bubble.io/
- Zapier: https://zapier.com/
- Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/
- Redshift: https://www.redshift3d.com/
- Postgres: https://www.postgresql.org/
- Codementor: https://www.codementor.io/
- Salesforce: www.salesforce.com
- JIRA: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
- Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org/