AutomationTown

 Previously on automation tail. So you know Amelia. Hi guys. So excited to work with you. You mean badass kicking down doors, suspiciously knowledgeable about cellular equipment for a sound engineer. Amelia

Doors open. That was awesome. That's the one she's kind of amazing. Oh. Guys, it's the mayor. She's out as mayor. The last three years have been amazing, and it's been such an honor to serve the great people of automation town As your mayor, automation town finds itself at an inflection point, Ted, you know, make a great.

Well, not Jake, you, me? Yeah. It would be a great way to learn about the Capitol underground. Ooh. If you were the mayor, you get briefed on all that stuff.

Five, four. Three more. You've got this. Two last one. Woo. How was that? Great job everybody. That's it for today. I'll see you Thursday at 10, two weeks ago in the fall kicking and screaming series. Let's finish out strong. Hey, yeah, see ya. Hey, nice job. I saw you. Nice work. Yeah. Okay, see you next time. Bye.

Great form. Great form, dude. Hey Paul. Paul, that was awesome. That was great. This is pretty cool. What are you doing? Well, you mentioned you taught kickboxing classes and I thought I'd drop by and say hello. I got you this. You drink coffee, I help. Wow. Thank you. Yes, I do. So, so do you want to go get coffee?

Get coffee, get another coffee? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess you already have a coffee. Let's do it. There's a place just around the corner really? Let's do it. Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

So kickboxing. Yeah, that explains the kicking on the doors thing. I am something of an expert at that. Yes. Is that a practical skill that you use all the time, , or are you like kicking open?

Ah, that's nice. This week, Amelia and Paul, this podcast has really taken a turn. Now our couple name Amelia Paul, Amelia Polio. The most talked about love story of the year takes a new twist and app builders. That's a pivot. It'll get woven in. Don't worry. It's one thing to connect the apps you already use with automation, but to build your own app from scratch.

No, you can't do that. You can, and it's easier than you might think. We'll talk through when it's a good idea and when you should probably just leave it for the experts, all of that on this week's automation town.

So a question for you and your automation nerd friends. Yeah. I'm running classes across several gyms in town. So the gyms are just renting you the spaces, right? Something like that. Kind of in exchange for running the sessions. Only the gym members are able to join, but I don't have a system to manage who's coming to these classes because they're members of.

Yeah. What I really need is a way for people to sign up for specific classes, but then I can gather some basic info about them to let them know about future classes. And the gym is good with that. They don't use any kind of scheduling system. People just show up. Okay. So you need an app where people can see upcoming sessions, they have some sort of login or profile, and that way you've got a way to notify them for future events.

Yeah, and it could go even further. For example, I have various plans for stretching and some basic meal plans, so it could potentially even go beyond scheduling. Yeah, that's a little more than just making a simple automation. Sounds like a mobile app. Probably, I don't know anything about mobile apps. Paul Omar, brave audio engineer and protector of all that automation town stands for, doesn't know anything about mobile apps.

Yeah, that's kind of a Chad and Jason thing, but I can ask him for you. There's gotta be a way. Yeah. I don't know. So, How'd you end up running sound for Buzz's Radio station if you're a kick, uh, personal trainer is how I got into kickboxing classes, but I did some audio work when I first got out of college.

And you heard automation show and thought I can do better. . No, it wasn't like that. I mean, you literally stole my job. It wasn't like that. I actually hadn't heard the show. Uncle Buzz. He asked me to come in to run audio on the show. And Buzz is the kind of person who, when they ask you to do something, you just do it.

What does that mean? You've met Buzz. He just, he needed help at a time when I needed health insurance, put me outta work just for the health insurance, . It wasn't that. I had no idea he'd be replacing someone. Oh, so you thought the job was just doing itself okay. I really didn't think about it that much.

Yeah. Okay.

Did you do it? Yeah, it's ready. This is big, big. If it works. You ready? Okay, pat. Hi Chad. What can I help you with? Uh, what is the capital of uh, Nova Scotia? Hi Jason. The capital of Nova Scotia is Halifax. I can share some information about Halifax if you like. That'll be all for now, pat. Sure. And Chad. Don't forget to follow up with the pharmacist.

Hmm. Because last time when a reminder, it'll be all. Thanks Pat. Still no potato zone then. They're supposed to get some this week. Well how about Pat though, right? Love what you've done with the, I mean, calling him a robot feels almost rude. Oh, someone's here. It's Paul. He's got a sweet rental. That is, yeah, I can tell that's a rental.

Uh, let's get the show on the road. Put Pat to the test. Hang. Wait, someone's with him? No. What? Paul? Chad. Amelia. Chad, Amelia. Hey, Jason. Hey, Paul. Jason, uh, Amelia. So Amelia and I just had coffee. Ooh. And we were talking about an app that she wants to make for her business. Well, uh, first of all, uh, welcome to Automation Pod World headquarters.

Yeah. Wow. This is. Cozy. It's not exactly an upgrade. Make yourself comfortable. There's a pullout couch and a foldaway table with some classy bench seating. This is where I set up my gear and we record here. Really impressive stuff. So an app? An app. It was above my pay grade. I run some kickboxing classes at gyms around town.

That explains the door kicking. The door kicking, yeah. Yep. And it'd be nice to have a way for people to schedule with me so they can see all my upcoming sessions and maybe to even give them some more resources between classes. Yeah, that makes sense. So mobile probably. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. We don't talk about app building much Davis.

Yeah, we focus more on what connecting apps. processing data. I think that's where people usually start with automations, but I do feel like there's a whole subset of people who are just focused on app building. They want to build a business around a product that they create rather than a service. Is that a thing that's hard to do?

Yeah, it can be, but there's a version of it that's gotten easier. There's app builders now that are easy enough for anyone to use, but the right place to start is probably still. Is there something off the shelf that'll do the job? I've done some Googling and to be honest, nothing really fits what I'm looking for.

Elaborate on that. Davis, do you have kind of a framework for how you decide When do I go try to find something off the shelf versus rolling? Something like my myself Custom the framework? Um, yeah, more of a trial and error, so I guess you always don't know what you don't know, so everybody goes to Google first and you try to look.

Something that can do what you're looking for. And then those sort of split seconds of your Google search results, you open up an app, you go to features, you see if it will do what you want it to do. You look at pricing and you kind of mentally decide, okay, is this something I want to try? For me, I always try the app.

Um, building something from scratch is really hard and. I think once you know what's missing from these other systems and tools, that's when you start thinking about like augmenting a feature or two with an app like that, or just building from scratch. But for me personally, building from scratch is the last option.

Yeah. Do you have a framework at all that you follow? No. I'm kinda like you, where I, I haven't done a ton of product building myself. I do think there are people, It comes easier to, and who maybe have done a bunch of it in the past. So the barrier for them to build something from scratch is very different than the barrier for you or I to build it.

You touched on pricing. It's actually another great consideration is certain oftentimes industry specific apps that are gonna be really costly, that may not. That feature rich or hard to build, but because they're for a very specific person or use case, they cost more. It's another consideration. Arguably, the most powerful thing that these app builders are enabling though, is a different sort of developer ecosystem.

Mm-hmm. at the price of entry for a mobile app is 60 grand, but now you've got no code builders. Five times as many people can build mobile apps now as could before, then it means it got a lot easier to go out and find somebody who will build that for you at a much cheaper price than was ever possible before.

And you can scratch those itches of the thing that the expensive app doesn't have. Maybe you could add or modify on top of that as some sort of, you know, ancillary app as. I think that's the key is when you're trying to source what these tools can do, you almost wanna see what you're limited to. And for me, if someone says, Hey, we've got an API and you can touch it, and here's the things that you can modify in our systems and our data, I'm more excited to try that app than I would be if they said, sorry, you know, you're handcuffed to our roadmap and you're handcuffed to only what we want to build and the data that we want to be able to provide.

When you're looking specifically at app builders, seeing what's out there. Are you doing a bunch of Googling or do you have like some trusted sources where you go and look like, what does this group or this person recommend? It'd be very specific. I feel like if I know of an app, an app's name, maybe five years ago I'd go to Google and type in, you know, app name, alternatives.

Alternatives, . And you'd get the G2 list and you'd get the Trustpilot stuff. Yeah. And then you'd like go to the second or third page to see if anybody's actually talking about a cool. But nowadays it's, it's Twitter, right? You put that name in the Twitter search. Mm-hmm. . And you might put the word alternatives or other options or anything like, and you'd be surprised at how many other people are asking questions around the same thing you're asking about.

And I feel like that interaction on Twitter will give you results that you may not have gotten in Google. I think the more saturation there is in tools that do the similar things, the more you. will trust the input of an expert or somebody in your network. So I try to follow people who are exploring these things.

Like I think just the function of curation and software is getting more and more important cuz there's just more and more software every day. So I've tried to kind of build a network of people I follow that can try to make that easier for me. So even after all of that, you still could be stuck. There still could be no solution for what you're looking for.

So if nothing off the shelf will work, what's the best place to start for a mobile app? That's a good question. What's your experience been, Jason building mobile apps? Something you ever got into? I've done some very basic stuff with, it's called Glide, I think it's Glide apps.com. Mm-hmm. Glide essentially just sits on top of Google Sheets or air table data, and it's super quick and easy.

Figure it out in five or 10 minutes. Really not hard. I haven't gone deep enough to like really push it to its limits. It's one of those things where I kinda like we talked about, I feel like I've almost chosen not to go totally down the product building rabbit hole, knowing that like, boy, that's a full-time job and there's so much nuance in how you do that and I haven't done a ton of it.

So I do know Glide is a really good, really accessible place to start. I've done a little. Plan around with that. I think Glide is where, where most people could start. It's one of these things where even if you don't have a Google sheets or a, or an air table backend, I think they still have their own tables that you can use within their stuff.

So put a template together, start playing around and, and just to be very specific, it's the type of tool where you could take one of their templates, push it in, and then have your own sort of working app if you needed it. I had a friend. Wanted to keep track of his workouts, but wanted like a very specific type of, uh, workflow and he couldn't find it in any of the workout apps.

So he made it in Glide and it was a really great use case of, you know, his free app used just by him to track the things that he wants to track. And it worked perfectly for him. There's also some other ones that, you know, if you wanted to step up, cuz Glide is, you know, it's, it's essentially a, a webpage on a mobile app or on, on your mobile device.

Right? Like not a very native specific app that you would essentially get from Google Play or, or the iOS app store. But there are other tools that do allow you to submit an app. People typically would do this when they want to take advantage of things like the gyroscope or the Bluetooth connections in your phone and just those, or the hardware stuff.

Yeah, like the stuff that's off limits to some of the, uh, the app builders like Glide and. I'm not a big user of this one, but I see this name thrown out a lot and it's called Flutter Flow, so Flutter flow.io. And it will allow you to do the apps and the gyroscope stuff and the full on app building and you know there's gonna be a lot of these tools that pop up.

Like you mentioned to, you know, increase accessibility and make it easier for people. And that's what's kind of excited about this is that no longer is it gonna cost, you know, 60 grand to a hundred grand to get an MVP out the door just to see if it'll work. You probably do it for, you know, half that or, you know, one quarter of that just to get something quickly out.

Yeah. Flutter flow looks incredible. I feel like Webflow has inspired kind of a whole new style of product. Web builder with kind of the left and right panels. Almost like, almost like how Photoshop kind of like redefined that so long ago. Looks a lot like Webflow. , but then you've got all the logic stuff and the database and all that as well.

Well, flutter flow is really sexy and it's really nice. There's been app builders out there for a while. Do you remember who the OGs were? One of the earliest ones I remember hearing about was ado, ada, A L o. Oh yeah. They were doing that really early days like Glide, and I think the grand scheme of things are one of those more accessible ones.

So I think flutter flow is more. Expert end of the spectrum in terms of flexibility on styling and like you said, more hardware based stuff. I think I stumbled through ADA a couple of times. Do you ever play with that at all? I looked at it once, but only because it was from, uh, growing Twitter I follow called Lacy Kessler from, uh, visual dev fm.

She was actually at Adao. That's how I found out about it. You know, just kind of stumbling around, listening to people talk about this. It's a huge unlock to see, you know, where do people work? What are they talking about? What are they using? Uh, Twitter's just such a big unlock for that kind of stuff. So, short answer, no, but.

It's one of those things where at least you know about it. Boy, no. Boy. What la Who is? I've gotta move to a new park. Gil, Chad. Great news, by all means. Oh. Oh, Gil. Hi. Quite the party. We gotta going here. Gil, have you met Paul? Who can say for sure. And Amelia. Hi. Nice to meet. Boys. I did it. I got the promotion.

Wow. Skill. Nicely done. We'll put 'em over the top. You can probably guess live. Live flow, baby. So check this out. My regional manager tells me that while I'm doing great, our region has been underperforming. I don't have access to our entire company accounting file. They won't give me that, but I show 'em how to share our region's profit and loss with me.

With live flow, you use their profit and loss by class template. It syncs that data from QuickBooks over to Google. Then he shares that Google sheet with me. That's smart. So only have access to your own regional data, not the entire file. Exactly. So I put together an analysis of our region showing some opportunities for improvement.

They ended up having me run the same analysis on each of our other regions and offered me a promotion to report directly to our head of finance. Gil, that's amazing. Oh, thanks to you boys. And live flow. And live flow. Gotta run hitting the town with the team to celebrate. Bye Gil. Nice to meet you. Bye.

Automation pod. Woo. So, so. , you talked about those mobile app builders. Are people able to use those apps on a regular computer? Uh, sometimes some of 'em do both. Some of 'em just do one. Some of them do it for desktop really well, and you kind of make them work on mobile. If you have to. Mobile first is probably fine for my use case.

If you were to build something desktop first, what apps would you use for that? Well, I think the big, uh, sweaty elephant in the room is bubble, right? That's kind of the leader right now. seems like the big one. Yeah. We've built a couple things in Bubble and it's both a heavy lift and a not heavy lift at the same time.

Comparable to like regular development. For those that haven't worked in Bubble, but they might have just heard the name, like how would you explain Bubble to someone just kind of getting into the space of building for a desktop app or a web app? It's a visual builder. Not totally unlike what you would get from like a website builder.

If you've ever used a website, Billy, the big difference is on the backend, you. A database that's built in, you can use that database. You can also connect bubble with external databases if your data lives elsewhere. And then you've got this layer of kind of logic between that. Database and what you see on the screen.

So they've taken kind of all of the troublesome aspects of building apps, like signing into the app and password management and stuff like that, and try to pull all that together in the most accessible way possible. Which admittedly is a humongous lift. Like there's so many things that go into that and so many things as a normy that you don't think about.

And so I think they've kind of tried to find the happy medium between putting all the really dev heavy stuff kind of behind the scenes so that you don't have to think about it because you probably wouldn't do it right to begin with, and kind of tow that line between. Giving the user as much flexibility as possible while trying to keep it as accessible as possible.

So the big unlock for me was, it's like the early days of drag and drop stuff like Photoshop. You said you can design stuff, it's really great, but this goes like that one step further, right? It's got the database, it's got the front end websites, it's got the connections to all the other things that, like the tools that we grew up with never really had.

And when we started first using Bubble, the really powerful element. that we never really thought about was one speed. Like you could put a login flow with magic links where people could, you know, click into your app and log in without a username and a password, like it's built into that tool. So it can be up and running inside of 10 minutes versus, you know, weeks in a traditional development environment.

Yeah. Two was plug. When you've got an environment of a lot of users, they have a lot of different use cases, and it's really cool to see people building in these plugins where, oh, you want to work with. Here's the Stripe plugin. Oh, you want to go grab your data from plaid because you're grabbing, you know, credit card and banking details in your app.

There's a plaid plugin. You want some crazy emoji sets. Grab that plugin. Like there's just some really cool use cases where it just feels like everyone that's excited about this area is almost just jumping into this one tool and making it better. But on the flip side, it creates a ton of platform. What happens if something happens to bubble?

What happens if it gets sold? What happens if they go a direction that you can't afford anymore? Right? You've got all these users on free plans and all of a sudden the entry price is five or $600 a month. Mm-hmm. , I mean, that eventually happens to a lot of these tools that get pretty popular and something we don't talk a lot about but is really going to be, or is an issue, is this idea of platform risk.

I think that's why so many people design their apps. Custom. So you don't have that platform risk and you can control everything. Yeah. It really applies to most things. Automation you get that with was app beer with Airtable, with anyone. Like all of these things are kind of borrowed land like you're building on their real estate and so you're kind of beholden to the direction they end up going.

Um, shouting out a few other desktop builders, desktop app builders. I say that cause I'm staring at builders website, B I L D R. I've seen that one around quite a. Really in many ways whether an app builders necessary depends on the use case, but in many ways, Webflow is moving more that direction with built-in sign on and like a beefed up cms, that kind of thing.

And then they've got the, um, the sort of add-ons with Get Wised or Wised and like building an app inside of Webflow. Now you've got a whole community of, of people getting excited to build inside of, uh, framer now, which is, which is kind of cool to. Yeah, you were a big proponent of another sort of like enterprisey web app kind of tool called Retool, right?

Yeah, so Retool is more a internal app builder as opposed to something that you would open up to a bunch of external users. Super simple, really easy to build a UI and basically just sits on top of your database, the main barrier to entries being able to write your own SQL queries, but, . That completely changes with things like chat, G P T, where you can show it your data structure and say, write me a query that'll do X, Y, Z.

Mm-hmm. also, this just happened, they just announced mobile support as well, so now you can build retool apps that will play nicely on mobile. So really love that one for the. Simplicity of it really. I like, I've had a hard time, I've started down the bubble path a couple of times, and both times I've just come back and been like, yep, nope, I, I gotta like decide what I'm gonna be good at.

And this is really hard, . I think I know the projects in my brain that are suited for bubble, but for me that's probably gonna mean going out and finding a bubble developer. I would a hundred percent recommend that everybody we've worked with on the bubble side is a bubble person. Like they know it inside out.

Yeah. It's nice to be able to like drag a little map on and put your, like Google map key in and follow their tutorials and there's lots of courses for it, but it's a higher lift than something like Glide. For me, personally, the most important element for. like pricing and assessing a tool is how do they price for external users?

If you're paying seven bucks a month for every user, that gets really expensive. But if you've got unlimited external users, yeah, and then you only pay for like the builders or the internal admin people. That's what gets me excited. So, , that's what bubble is all day long too. Right. Being able to have unlimited users and not worry about that kind of work, but things like, like retool and, and others, there, there are caps on some of the, um, the users, which is why it's built for internal and not necessarily external.

So you made, you make a good point there. Great. That was very informative. Uh, we should get going on the pod recording. If I'm gonna have time to edit this tonight. Uh, Amelia, you want me to run you back to your car? Do you want to hang around? You're going to record now? Uh, yeah. We kind of have to. I can hang around.

Will this be the first episode of the show you've listened to be honest. I hang on a minute. What? I mean, technically I've listened to a few when I was the automation show engineer, right? Amelia. That hurts. Okay. You guys ready to roll? I've got the questions queued up. Wait until you hear Pat 2.00. I can't wait.

Pat 2.0. You'll see. It's weird. Okay guys. Mics are hot. We got hot mics. We're ready to go in three, two. Welcome in to Automation Pod. I'm Chad Davis. And I'm Jason Stats. We're gonna run through questions from the lovely folks of automation town in an effort to just just automate a little more of the ugly stuff, you know?

Right, right, right. Okay. Hey, big announcement though. Big news. Chad has completed some upgrades on Pat, who is now. I dunno. Pater than ever. Pater than ever. That's right. Let's kick things off. This was an email from Anthony. Let's hear it. Pat, curious to know your thoughts on Jake now being the interim mayor of Automation Town.

It sounds like he'll run for mayor in the runoff, but have either of you considered running for mayor? How about that? Wow, okay. There's definitely an element of. This feels like he's trying to capture the scary narrative around automation, like appeal to the voter who's concerned that automation's happening too fast, the impact of ai.

Am I gonna lose my job? All that in regards to running for Mayor Chad, I know you've talked a bit about it. Yeah, I'm, I'm thinking about it. Wow. Yeah. Look, I'm, I'm just worried our town's being set back. Like this whole premise of automation is to just be more automated, but focusing on the life giving stuff and automating the rest.

I just worry. Jake could set us back decades. Just worries me. Chad Davis, the hero. We all needed rags to riches. RV to capital building. How's that thing gonna look? Parked outside the capitol building ? That would, it would be an adjustment. Where would we record the pod? Chad? We can work that out when we get there.

Okay. Pat, what else you got? No. No. We've got an ad read. Oh, we've got an ad read.

It's Synder. Synder is an e-commerce accounting software that brings complete automation to your accounting and connects all your sales channels into one common ecosystem seamlessly synchronize your favorite online sales channels with Cinder and get your financial data reconciled and accurately organized in a snap.

Wow. A snap connects with a ton of e-commerce platforms to take the pain out of the accounting reconciliation, and it is a pain. Check out cinder, s y n d e r cinder.com. Thanks cinder. Okay, pat, this question is from Julia. I'm building my first app that I'm planning to begin selling next month. Any tips you'd offer to a first time app builder to a first time app builder?

Jason, you ever build an app and sell it? I've built things unsold. Like, and I've done like big projects and then had that terrifying ta-da moment where you like put it out in the wild. How'd that go? Oh, a mixed bag. , I, the one thing I always come back to is, , why should anybody care? Uh, like there's a very, uh, real element of like, humility that comes from shipping things that I actually think is healthy.

Mm-hmm. , like if you don't have an audience, if you don't have a network, if you don't have a way to get that thing in front of people, oftentimes it doesn't matter how cool it is. Like that's, that's kind of a sad part of all of this, especially as everyone is building software now and you just, there's new things.

Mm-hmm . You see people on Twitter too that are posting, I had built this incredibly great thing where I put it up on Product Hunt and you're like, yeah, that actually was really good. I like it. But then you see they shut it down or they sold it, you know, a a, a month or two later cuz there's been like not a lot of traction.

And I think that's the world we're gonna be living in where distribution and market. Is going to be almost more important than the actual building. And, you know, that's, that's, that's both good and bad at the same time. Yeah. It's one of those things where you may wanna start selling products because you love building products.

And then you find that you spend 80% of your time trying to figure out how to market your product, which isn't what you wanted to do in the first place. So definitely, definitely have a plan for how's it actually gonna get out there? Are people gonna be willing to pay for it? Is there a way that I can assess that before going through a hundred percent of the workup building?

I'm gonna step outside and take this. Okay, so that's your tip, right? So what tip do you have? Hi, uncle Buzz Amelia. What? Rumor has it. You've still been kicking around with the automation Show Boys, the automation show. If you haven't figured this out yet, those guys are bad news. They nearly got you killed in the GR center collapse, and I don't wanna know what they have planned next.

Nearly got me killed. It was you who stake me at the park. That's right. I put you in that role and let's not forget how you ended up there. Now have I made myself clear? Thank you, Alex.

I never really thought about that for personal budgeting. Yeah. Once you got a fee in transactions, you can create all the rules, but the transactions in various buckets automatically. Then as it's trained on more data, it gets smarter. Yep. That's cool. Let's wrap things up here. Thanks for tuning in to Automation Pod.

We'll be back tomorrow night with more q and a on how to be more productive and who knows. Maybe Chad will even update us on his bid for Mayor . Very nice. Nice work gang. Thank you. Thank you. Paul. Was it everything you'd hoped? It was great. You tour our very natural together. I gotta run. Yeah, of course.

Can I walk you back to your car? Sure. It was so great seeing you, Amelia. Yeah, you too. Have a good night. Well, didn't see that one coming. Does Amelia like, I don't know, make you uncomfortable at all? In what way? I just, I honestly don't know who to trust anymore after what we've been through. That's probably healthy.

You've got Mayor Goodway who's tied to the Spooky police. Like whatever weird stuff is going on below the Capitol building just irks me, by the way, a great reason for you to run for mayor to learn the truth about what's going on down there. You've got Jake who left the note and Paul's desk at the Grimley Center, which references the collapse that was about to happen, but then the spooky Billys turn up the night of the collapse, which we'd only seen them before with Mayor Goodway.

So that seemingly ties Jake and Mayor Goodway together the new buzz who fired Paul. But according to Amelia, buzz has a beef with. I don't know. I have a hard time trusting him by extension, Amelia. Well, I can tell you one happy chappy and this will curve Fluffle. Yeah, Paul. Oh, bless him. Did you notice he had a little pep in his step tonight?

Yeah. Was that Cologne? Oh, it was like a middle school locker room in here. Okay, so you noticed that too. I have to imagine. It was a whole mishmash. A lot of Theodor and lack Cologne

Automation Town is written and produced by Chad Davis and Jason Stats edited by Paula Murra. Keep up with the characters of Automation Town on Twitter. At automation tone.