I’m James, the new CEO at Adalo after the company brought in new management late last week, and I wanted to give everyone interested in this amazing company a view of where we want to go.
Firstly, I fell in love with Adalo because, quite simply, it is the most beautiful app builder in the world. One of the team members in Adalo I think said it best:
“If you can build on Powerpoint, you can build on Adalo.”
Adalo’s success to date has been built atop the following six things:
- Making something that looks good, even if you can’t design yourself;
- Making something that works, even if you don’t know how apps need to be structured (more on this below);
- Accounts for every single version of iOS and Android devices out there, so interoperability with the anyone and everyone isn’t a problem;
- Bypasses the byzantine world of App Store & Play Store publishing by auto-publishing for you, so you don’t waste a month in the app store asylums;
- Requiring one app, but servicing iOS, Android and web apps with a single master version so you don’t have three separate versions to maintain & sync; and finally
- Not requiring $60,000 for a basic app MVP, but as little as $45 a month.
Looking at the above, it requires a special synergy of design, engineering and business processes to achieve the above. I count myself very lucky to be in the pilot’s seat of an amazing company that gets to chart the trajectory from here.
Where Adalo is headed
To be candid, what we see today is a beautiful app building experience second to none with thousands of makers with some pretty incredible apps–ranging from DIY builds of moms looking for a side hustle all the way to external facing apps of some global corporations like Wilson Security, to internal apps launched by the employee that was driven mad by so much inefficiency they built an app to finally reclaim their sanity.
However, the undeniable call from our makers base is for a focus on performance and support.
And that’s exactly what we are going to do.
My intent is to deliver Adalo 3.0–an Adalo that will be 3x the speed without sacrificing any of the functionality that allows you to go deep into customization. This work has already started, and although it is early days, we anticipate rolling upgrades
Our secondary focus is going to be on support, or as we are going to start calling it as of today–Client Happiness. We are going to become fanatical about your success, and staff up significantly in an effort to hold your hand whenever you want it:
- Chat will come online with people trained to guide you through not just how to use Adalo, but how to build successfully so your app can scale;
- Implement a benchmark of five-minute responses to requests for help; and
- Hold webinars or open sessions anyone can pop into to ask questions, pull up their app and walk through issues.
Under support, we’ll also be more candid when our internal team or the Adalo Experts might be good to step in and help. Makers are sometimes of the belief the Adalo Experts are going to slug them with a $60,000 bill for their app. The truth is that if you, as a new app maker, haven’t done the free Adalo courses, especially the 40 minute Getting Started Course, then you are going to spend a lot of time in trial and error, because even with no-code and the world’s most beautiful builder, making an app requires certain architecture and flow.
If the course isn’t for you, then an Adalo Expert could very well help you ship your app 10x faster with 3x the performance for as little as $300. When you consider the upside of your app, and what you could be doing with your time, that is an amazing return on investment.
The AI question
Yes - more AI (other than your Magic DB adder) will be coming shortly. We have something that should help many people out ready for release in a few weeks.
Integrations
Another element that has come up a lot are for makers looking to connect enterprise-grade databases and services, such as on-premise MS SQL Server and the like. We’re pleased to say that we have something under the hood that will help out significantly with backend integrations to virtually anything (even AS200s from decades ago) that should also be ready to go in a few weeks.
Over the coming weeks
You will start to see the impact of our commitment to Client Happiness, and the performance of your apps.
I’d also like to extend my own availability. You can reach out to me directly at james.crennan@adalo.com. I’m striving to get myself to the position where I can jump in and help makers build their apps, and am finding the time to build my own app on Adalo (an app to help me stop forgetting important dates for my wife, and help auto-generate gift ideas suited to her :) If anyone else wants to build that, I’d become a happy paying customer!)
There is always a bit of chaos following a team changeover, so we hope to get over-deliver noticeable improvements to the community of Adalo in the coming weeks.
