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Comment by Scramblejams | Hacker News Reader

Amazing story, glad you made it.

Potential customer here, and I have a question. I'm a programmer, very happy making backends, setting up the infra, maintaining it, and so on. I often want to make web pages, but I just hate dealing the web front-end stack.

Is this product a good fit for me? I could visually design the website, avoid getting my hands dirty with HTML/CSS/JS, then have an easy way to connect it with a backend I'd make?

If this isn't a good fit, any suggestions?

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From my experience with a different but similar tool, it follows the pareto principle. It will do 80% of the work very effectively, but as your business grows and you need more niche functionality, you will need a developer to figure out a way to make the platform behave in a way which it doesn't expect, which can be time consuming.

So great for MVPs or getting a business bootstrapped quickly and cheaply, but once you have enough money to afford developers without breaking the bank, your money may be better spent elsewhere.

For a business, I agree. I should have clarified, I'd be happy with something that works pretty well at the hobby level.

Ah, these are more for making standalone simple frontends. Think more landing pages with built in email conversions or some payment integrations and not front end connections to a back end API. I've had to make some backend api connections on the different service and it was a PITA.

I often wonder how much of that 20% of functionality is really needed. What if we as society spend the 80% effort that goes into customising things into building more that uses the readily available features? This is not an argument of quantity over quality. It’s just that I’ve seen so much effort going into doing the last 20% with so little outcome that it has me made skeptical.

Of course, for products deeper in the stack we should strive to implement that last 20% because the quality of the stack depends on it. I just don’t think it’s worth it for leaf/end-user projects.

I hear what you're saying, but for successful businesses in competitive spaces, those last 5% or even 1% are the sauce that sets your business apart from your competitors. Of course you won't know it is until you build it, but that's what quick mvp cycles and "lean startup" methodology is all about.

Exactly. So such a company should focus their effort on discovering that 1-5% edge and not waste effort going beyond 80% on things like hr/tooling/billing/etc that are irrelevant to (finding?) their value proposition.

(Not OP) I know replying "seconded" is out of line with Hacker News guidelines, so I'll add that in addition to the above, I'm also curious about whether it can cooperate with any front-end frameworks

When I worked for Snipcart (HTML/JS shopping cart), many of our customers used webflow as their website hosting. Even though site builders and developer / third party tools are generally not a good match, Webflow seems to be the less painful to integrate with other stuff among site builders (it's not first hand experience, but still encouraging).

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