What was the thesis behind starting Appsmith, and what inspired the founders to create the platform?

I'm part of Appsmith’s founding team of three. Appsmith was originally started by my co-founder and CTO Arpit, who’s been a backend engineer for a really long time. In fact, we co-founded two startups together, before this. 

Pre-Appsmith, Arpit was working at CureFit, and I was an EIR at Accel Partners. Arpit from his previous startup experiences had seen that, at every startup, he was building a lot of admin panels, control panels, and a lot of tools to basically display some database data and interact with that. As a backend engineer, he had always struggled building the UIs for these kinds of database applications because he didn’t like working on HTML/CSS.

He was tinkering around with this idea of how you might build these UIs faster than using HTML and CSS, and yet more flexibly than using something like Django Admin. This was all happening before this whole low-code/no code space emerged. 

The company really got started when I was helping him out with some research about this, and I realized there was a huge space in between simple CRUD apps and the heavy enterprise apps that SAP or Salesforce sell.

I realized that this was a nice way of entering a market—by targeting developers and those who have not been buying traditional low-code products.

There are a few main differentiators that we were focused on day one and that we continue to focus on today.

The first is that Appsmith is open source.

Second, you can self-host Appsmith on your servers, and Appsmith was the first product like this where that was possible.

Now, of course, a lot of players in the industry have adopted the self-hosted model as well, but back then, there was literally no option if you had to self-host.

Next, we had noticed the other app builders—companies like OutSystems, Mendix, Power Apps, Google AppSheet and all of these players—were quite focused on the semi-technical or the non-technical user. There was nothing that was focused on the developer. 

There are very specific things that developers need that a business user or a semi-technical user doesn't care about. 

A developer wants flexibility to extend the platform using code. They want the ability to write code instead of clicking dropdowns to configure something or create logic. They want to be able to write and maintain the code along with any applications that are built so that in future, it's easy for a different team member to either pick it up or extend that.

That's another area where we realized, “Hey! Here's a new chance of differentiation.” Focus on the developer as the main user and the engineering team as the buyer for a product like Appsmith versus looking at traditional companies like OutSystems and some of these other low code players. They have focused on the CIO or the business head to buy their platform and not the engineer. It's a top-down motion and not a bottoms-up adoption. 

These were sort of the multiple things that convinced us to start. It was definitely exciting to be the first open source player in this entire category because we knew that any category where you're building something for developers, is ripe for disruption by an open source product. 

We have seen that with web frameworks, CMSs, and databases in the 2000s. That's something that we knew had to happen even for these low code application builders. We're very clear that open source is going to be a disruptive innovator to all of these other proprietary players.