Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Pierce Baugh. Pierce has been in the software development space for over three decades, building custom applications used by large organizations like Crayola, Casio, Disney, and the NFL. He’s also built applications for numerous nonprofit organizations, particularly in the Child Nutrition Association space. In 2021, he launched Strategic Database Systems to help smaller businesses and startups succeed in their custom SAS and business automation efforts. He and his team are democratizing custom application development by using a combination of time-proven low code tools and cutting-edge technologies, often in hybrid solutions, which deliver maximum value to clients. Pierce, how are you doing today?
Pierce: I’m doing great, Dave. How about you?
Dave: I’m doing very well. I’m excited for the weekend. We have our Super Bowl coming up on Sunday; this is recorded on Friday, so by the time this is out, we will know the result. Hopefully, it’s in our favor. I know you’re excited as well because I believe you commented on the Eagle shirt the last time we spoke that I was wearing. But today, we’re going to be talking about software development, and there’s some interesting choice words in your bio that I’d love to learn more about because I’ve heard about them but I’ve never actually used them, and that’s kind of the no code, low code stuff. So, for starters, perhaps you could kind of define in your own best words the definition of no code, low code, and I guess code is probably the third alternative.
Pierce: Yes, so it has a long history, and I think not everybody really realizes how far back it goes. There’s been low code solutions from the ’80s on, so it’s always been there. Tools like Clarion and even things like Visual FoxPro were a lot of apps were built in the late ’80s, early ’90s on those platforms, and they really were introducing the idea of code widgets which is kind of more your low code side, and drag and drop interfaces where you’re just sort of visually manipulating the screen and not actually coding, saying at this position on the screen is what we’re going to show you. So it’s not new. And I’ve always been a proponent of getting from the concept to actually having a product or software that’s working, that’s the objective in my mind. It’s really what is the fastest way we can do this. And it gets into some other deeper realm thinking about visualization and how you think of things in your mind and how quickly you can go from there to actually having something materialize or making it real. How quick can you get there? And so low code, no code solutions help to shortcut that process. And so when I work with founders, owners at that level, I’m really sitting there and kind of just really coming in a kind of a mind meld with them. And as we talk to me, it just starts to formulate a picture in my mind of what this is going to look like and how this worked. And since I have a lot of deep work in databases my whole career, I just start to think about data structures almost instantly when I’m talking to people. So really, it’s about that sort of robust design in terms of data structure is important because if you have that, then you can kind of take your low code solutions, and the difference between low code and no code is low code means you’re going to go in there. I have a platform that I use, it’s little known, it’s called PHP Runner, one of the tools that I use, and a great amount of the application is just built by saying here’s the data, here’s the data structures, this is what we’re going to label these fields, and this is the order of them, and all sorts of stuff like that. But then you inevitably want to do some things that aren’t off the shelf, so you create a button, and when you click on that, what you do is you put the code in that button. So that’s actually hand-coded, but it’s only, I don’t know, 10, 15 lines of code. It’s not like it’s thousands of lines of code, so it’s really easy. There are so many advantages to that, but it’s really easy. You know, when you walk away from something, you come back three months later, it can be really difficult. But when it’s all visual like that, hey, there’s the screen, there’s the button. I open that button up, here’s what it’s going to do, so if it’s if you have to change it or something’s going wrong or whatever, you know exactly where to look. So there’s a lot of maintenance advantages to that as well. I like low code because it does allow you to create those really specific things. If I want to hit an API and pull data back, like for instance, like if I’m going out to ChatGPT or something, right, so that’s not going to be off the shelf, right? So I’m going to click on a button, and it’s going to say, hey, go take this prompt, go out to ChatGPT, bring it back, put it into the email template, and then they can go ahead and manipulate it from there. So that’s the power of low code because I don’t have to have that component available, but I can do all the rest. So 95% of the application I don’t have to do any of that kind of stuff for, but for that extra bit that we need, that’s where it comes in. A platform like Airtable is more of a no-code platform where you, even with Airtable now, you can do some code, but essentially you’re just working with all the components and you can’t allow that fine-tuning of customization, but low code does. So, but there it’s all kind of getting blurred because like I said, Airtable was no code but now it’s got you can code in it and stuff like that. So that’s changing, but the advantage is to be able to go from idea, visualization, concept to product as quickly as possible.
Dave: Makes sense. I’m sorry, I cut you off. Yeah, know that’s and that’s what’s so powerful and exciting about it and it really leads to great. Well, I you know I have sort of you know more questions here because so as a marketer, someone without a coding background but who has worked on software products before, my own, you know, I sense like no code, it feels a little marketer to me like it’s just this promise of a DIY solution and I’ve never actually experimented with it. I wonder if it is me. I guess, you know, Strategic Database Systems is somewhat of I understand to be somewhat of a software development agency, and so if these solutions are really no code or low code, why is it we need help from an agency to get it done, you know what am I missing here?
Pierce: That’s a great question. You, in some aspects, you don’t, right? If you want to go into like you can go to an Airtable and build up a little application for yourself with relational essentially relational tables, they kind of hide that nicely. But if it’s basically, that’s the power of it. And it has now all of these tools and stuff, and you can build yourself a nice system that allows you to, you know, like a group of people, let’s say if you have five people on your team, you guys can interact, you can do stuff, and you could build that on your own. And where you want a professional involved, there’s design like a professional, not I mean like we’re all professionals right, but where you want to bring in like professional sort of software design experiences is kind of like there are a couple of things. There’s if you want to run like if you want to sell something as a SAAS platform, then you got to bring somebody in that’s gonna kind of know how to do that because your solution needs to be something that’s what’s called runtime free. So when I build something in this platform, it generates code, and that code I can put on Azure, I can put it on Amazon, I can put it on Google, I can put it on any cloud, right, and I run it, and there’s a fee to run that application, but there’s no license that I’m paying because it’s all I own it at that point which is different than saying I’m using there’s a lot of low code type tools out there now where there’s a certain I’m looking something a platform called softer, there’s a certain seat, like do you have seat licenses, and you got to be careful with that because when you get into seat licenses, now if you’re doing well all of a sudden you have you know 500 users or more than that, and now you’re paying per person, right? And that’s like and that’s just coming off of your T, that’s off your profit you know but if you have a runtime free application which means you own that code, you run that code well you go up to 2,000 users, there’s no change in fee, the only thing you’re check paying for is CPU performance and database size but that doesn’t cost a lot, you can do that for like less than a hundred bucks a month and get a couple thousand users on a platform. So um much different than incrementally I’m paying $50 or $35 for each person that uses the platform.
Dave: So that’s you have to keep in mind that’s a very important distinction. I want to make sure I clarify so when you talk about runtime free software, am I thinking of like the traditional model of coding from scratch and putting it up on Amazon services or Azure or something like that, this is not like a low code no code where those pricing models tend to be like pay per user type of a thing
Pierce: Both that’s that’s the spectrum so you can definitely like the tool I use is a low code tool and if generates free software like free runtime free software so I pay for the license for the platform but it builds as many I could build as many things as I want with that, um flutter flow is kind of like in between because flutter flow will it’s flutter flow will build it’s low it is low code it’s it’s not as low code as I would like it to be but it’s low code and it’s very very modern and and you can do anything with basically anything with the interface and it and it will generate mobile software right so you can you can you can do an IOS app you can from the same codebase you can create a web app an IOS app or an Android app native Native Android and iOS. So if you want to sell it on on you know the Play Store whatever whatever you’re going to do it you can sell your app on those things and that you own that like and you can host it wherever you want so that is that there are tools that are low code that allow you to do runtime free but there’s a lot the majority of low code tools want of the newer stuff they want you to kind of run it on their platform and then you pay the you pay a licensing fee to run it on their platform. That it’s okay for small small audiences but if you’re thinking of scaling to thousand of users you’re gonna that you’ll get
Dave: Yeah economically it’s not really sustainable in the long run. Is it a fair statement that the majority of no code and low code products are for internal use? You know, where hey you can cut corners you don’t need the full you’re not looking to kind of grow a large user base you maybe don’t need all the security whereas if you’re looking to maybe commercialize a software product and maybe it to scale and and exit from it it’s less it’s less common. Is that fair or no?
Pierce: I think that’s pretty fair I mean a lot of the newer stuff is says right right there is for internal use um right like when you first look on the first page it’ll say for internal use I like early on that’s not the type of stuff that I built so i’ I feel like I’ve got a great combination of tools that that allow me to build real commercial software but use low code to get there faster and um but you kind of you just touched on something which really it’s really important things like security um and I don’t just mean like is it a secure platform I mean like what I call horizontal and vertical security so what you can see and who you can see so if you start to do something especially if you’re can go to a B2B in in a SAAS type environment you really have to somebody has to know how to do that kind of security structure so that when I log in I only see let’s say um it can be tenant based so multi-tenancy so that if you have multiple clients using one platform they log in they only see their stuff right um but it you know it can also be like within a within a company it could be a region like I only see my region or I can see my region but I can I can see all the regions but I can only edit in my region so all that kind of uh sort of granular control over security that’s where you need somebody like who’s got a lot of experience at it that knows how to build that out of I think a lot of people now are sort of start from the outside and work their way in and it’s it’s I sort of have a contrarian I guess by today’s you know mindset a contrarian approach to it because like I start from the bottom and then build the way build it out from there um but I I do see that where there’s such an emphasis on UX that you know you got this very nice looking package but when you started start to do anything like any kind of multi-tenancy or like it starts to scale it starts to really show like it’ll it’ll break because that stuff wasn’t built from the beginning and then you can’t it’s hard to tack that stuff on at the end actually doing that for a client where we’ve done a ton of reverse engineering to make it multi-tenant to be able to handle B2B um because once you go out of like a con director consumer mode you’re going into B2B mode then everything changes and and you and you’re you’re building something very different at that point and it’s just as important what your B2B client has access to in terms of analytics and everything else as it is the actual application so in a case like that I have there’s an application that people are hitting all the time but then there’s organizations that are sponsoring those people to be on that platform for let’s just say and they need a whole different set of tools so it’s like a whole another application so that they can kind of see well what’s happening what’s the engagement everybody kind of wants to know what their engagement is if you’re like I work with memberships Associates what’s the engagement what’s happening what’s the hypine of people coming in and and things like that so there’s like almost two sides when and sometimes you can kind of get hyperfocused on the look and the interactivity of the of what’s what’s public but that’s you gota you gotta look at both sides
Dave: Yeah and from the beginning you got to be forward Thinking right you know I want to mention a use case that I I don’t think it’s kind of come up yet but something that I’ve heard of you know in the no code low code which is really around ID validation and so it’s sort of you want to put out an MVP um you want to do it as quickly as possible and you know you don’t want to necessarily hire you know developers and things maybe you don’t have access to the resources so you kind of use a no code um Sol U and then if you get traction then you might think to go into something more I don’t know robust or something like that is that a use case that you see often or you see as viable?
Pierce: I do but I have some sort of thoughts on how to make that do that smartly, okay? There’s a product called super base I don’t know if you’ve heard of it okay so it’s a it’s um it’s a a very modern take on on postgrad so it’s a postgress database but it’s got a lot of stuff wrapped around a lot of functionality that’s wrapped around it like for security and Kon and things like that so there’s a lot that it’s got built into it around it so because of the way it’s structured it is like flutter flow will work with it soft will work all these platforms almost all them are now work with superbase, so superbase is more of like a tra traditional at the core of it it’s traditional SQL database. So what I’m excited about is I can build you can build something you could use these very modern tools use something like super base and then you’re you’re building your your architecture your database doesn’t have to change right so I’ve got like a low code platform I could build stuff on super base really quick right and I could have you know an MVP out like in in a couple months. Then when you get funding or when you get traction then you come you can hit that same database and that same architecture from a flutter flow or something like that right and have you know mobile and everything like noble native and all of that stuff so you sort of have your core hasn’t changed and now you haven’t lost that investment that you’ve got in terms of of your infrastructure and you can then seamlessly go to new products and things like that and you can like in my case like I like to use this Loco platform that I use as the admin tool then and then we can and I’ve been doing this for years where we build that the you can do like you can hit that use that database as your like sort of C Center of where your world your Universe then you can hit it from different places right so I can use a low clo platform that does it’s great for admin and all that stuff but then I could either I can use something like flutter flow or I can actually go choose to go you know straight code right I could run um you know a node stack against that and I can um you know I can be using react and like you know heavy Dev thing if I want but that but meanwhile nothing has changed your data hasn’t changed and now you’ve got a seamless migration to the future and you’ve got both and then youve and that to me that is what’s I’m super excited about the super base I that’s why they call it that but um but you know it really it it allows you to use it’s a great migration from old to new and um and it can be in the center of it all and you’re and you’re doing great you don’t have to go to a no like a nosql um you know Firebase or something like that because all that stuff you can use sort of this solid tried andrue data SQL database in the middle but it will work with all the new tools which is that’s that’s pretty cool.
Dave: It sounds it sounds interesting and I you know I’ll admit as a non-technical person I may not fully be understanding but I kind of had this assumption that you know sometimes when you’re trying to validate an ID or maybe build an MVP you might do that with no code low code and then if you validate it you might actually just throw out everything you did and now like okay we have validation let’s go code and build the actual thing what you’re describing sounds like this initial approach with low code no code and then you can evolve into the code without losing the work that you already did
Pierce: I’m you know working in a real world scenario where that actually I’ve done it multiple times but I’m working in a real world scenario where that is the case and um you know the uh they went from MVP was built and then they kind of like it it just you got to be careful that your MVP heat doesn’t become your product and you got to you know if you got a couple hundred users or a thousand users on there on in your MVP mode and all of a sudden I mean it’s one thing to show somebody a demo but it’s very different once you start to get traction you know what I mean like it it does allow you to move much more gracefully you know to the future rather than saying oh we’re gonna throw this whole platform around we’re gonna to do data conversions we’re gonna to do all this stuff to try to get in we’re gonna push a button one day and everybody’s gonna move over and you know that can be a nightmare that that can go well or not so yeah you know
Dave: My last question is whether or not there are certain types of applications that lend that you know should lend themselves more to a no code low code type of solution or or not you know like uh crms project management tools those types of things to me that they seem kind of straightforward they feel like they’d be a perfect fit for like a no code low code but um but maybe there are certain applications where just the natural elements or or sequence of events it just doesn’t fit the model have you come across anything that feels preferred or not preferred?
Pierce: Oh yeah I think you’re dead on I mean I think you know CRM and um you know I do I work with a lot like I said a lot of associations and and groups like that where it’s you know it’s membership um if you think about something like even something like like Facebook right I mean and that’s now massive right but that’s just a database application it’s just it’s just data like a lot of stuff is just data but if you get into something that’s graph highly graphical you know any kind of video video game or if you want to like really get into graphical stuff where you’re doing something you’re doing some real Cutting Edge work that’s that’s got to be that you’re into hardcode there there’s no way around it you can’t I mean you just don’t have the tools nothing has the tools to be able to like do a lot of visual manipulation on the screen you got to drop into some heavier stuff to do that you know um so I think that’s really the that’s where you there’s so many business applications where you don’t need that you know you just it’s more straightforward but yeah there’s definitely a line to where um certain technologies require that you know but you know the other thing we haven’t really talked at all about is all of these um you know process automation tools that are out there you know um starting with like zapier and nadn and all that and where they you know that’s the glue and you can kind of do this you know if you have database is even better because then you can like you can choose what you’re gonna dump off um but that’s a whole different visual programming and that’s like no code you know that’s you’re just saying hey I’m gonna and but the funny thing about no code is especially I saw this with like the flutter flow they say it’s no code and it’s no code but like there’s so many damn variables that you have to keep track of I mean you might as well be coding at that point it’s just so complicated um so you know it’s a great platform it does a lot of stuff but it’s it’s also endlessly complex in terms of what it can do
Dave: Does that mean easy?
Pierce: Exactly doesn’t mean doesn’t necessarily mean uncomplicated and you can get into like some scenarios with you know even with like with the zapier that where you’re you’re getting into some pretty complex stuff and you get to know some JavaScript and stuff like that to make it really do what you want um n8n is another tool like that it’s actually a little more cost effective but it’s it’s a little closer to JavaScript with some of the stuff you have to do
Dave: Cool! Pierce for people that want to learn more about uh you uh strategic database systems, how should they find you?
Pierce: strategicdatabasesystems.com. My name is Pierce Baugh, I’m Pierce Baugh on LinkedIn um and uh Pierce@strategicdatabasesystems.com
Dave: Awesome, thank you so much
Pierce: Cheers