Hi!
I am looking to see if anyone has been able to start a successful company that rolls out custom apps for clients. Specifically, I have been thinking about templatizing an app for a specific industry and then selling it. So each client would have a different version of this templatized app that I could customize for them. Is anyone doing this?
Brian
Hey man,
Unfortunately, Adalo is not the platform for growth. Most of the original players in the Adalo market have since migrated to other platforms. It’s a shame, but Adalo seems more focused on simple “tricks” to make money, like the marketplace, rather than robust services that give beneficial app experiences to users where templates would be a beneficial place to monetize.
Interesting take. I love Adalo for how approachable it is, but the lack of confidence always makes me reconsider if my time is worth investing into the product.
I spent a lot of money with Adalo (over $1500.00.) Also, I spent a lot of time (1 year) and all I can say is that it was time and money wasted. You would be better off learning to code straight up. Adalo, is extremely limited and because of that it is not worth the time or money. In my opinion, Adalo was created to draw in people who believe they have a great app idea, but have NO coding skills at all. Adalo paints a picture that you can build a NO CODE app and make your dreams come true, but doing with ADALO is difficult at best. Dont get me wrong, you build extremely simple apps, and you can even add in some cool stuff to make you app stand out in your own mind (mainly impressing you or a friend) but the reality is that’s where it ends. You cannot run background services, the system. has serious performance issues, in my time with them the system was down more than what I felt was reasonable. At the end of the day, I wish it was a better system, but there is a reason coding is hard to learn.
You highlighted some great points. At most I try to proof out if an idea can materialize, but I find myself stuck trying to solve issues that are more workarounds to limitations. To be clear I am not a coder at all, and Adalo is approachable. Additionally they offer mobile and web app deployments. I have tried other platforms, but keep coming back in the hope they continue to improve the product.
Yeah, I am the same way…keep returning with the hopes that they have made some drastic changes and improvements to the entire system. Look at the end of the day, with any luck, Adalo will see that their users are growing and needed more from the platform. With that, maybe they will add more functionality and Adalo would be better for it. Good luck everyone!
Hello,
In my opinion, Adalo is a very good tool for creating application concepts that allow you to understand how they work. This tool lets you share concepts with friends to get their feedback on your “genius idea”. But I’m still convinced that if the idea is good, you need to get in touch with a DEV to code your app so that it works perfectly on the stores, but above all, so that he can carry out the updates imposed by Androisd and IOS, and finally, to have an after-sales service in case of problems.
There needs to be a distinction between a project not succeeding because of Adalo’s limitations and when you’re simply blaming your unsuccessful projects on Adalo.
Being arguably the easiest no-code platform for people non-technical people (like myself), Adalo has a lot of users that besides not knowing how to code, don’t know basic UX/UI principles and common strategies to optimize performance when designing and building an app. And that can be extended to marketing, design, copyrighting, etc…
The majority of app showcases I see here, while based on interesting ideas, have such an amateur-looking interface that I don’t believe will inspire confidence and attract a lot of users.
Being an Adalo maker for more than 3 years I can say that almost every day I surprise myself by discovering things that are possible in Adalo, both in terms of performance and features, that make me realize that the main cause of previous projects’ lack of success was my lack of skills / knowledge / creativity.
I also see a lot of people complaining about Customer Support but I’ve never had any issues. I almost always get a same-day reply.
And as far as performance, Adalo has improved SIGNIFICANTLY in the last year or so.
So, you can have no coding skills whatsoever, but if you pair that with having no design skills, UX/UI skills, marketing skills, math skills, etc etc, there’s not much that Adalo or any other platform can do for you. Adalo has removed the need to learn the most difficult one, but you still have to learn a little about the others.
I was thinking about building internal tools for small companies to manage their work. For example, let’s say I came up with a great app template for commercial real estate. I like the idea of reaching out to a bunch of commercial real estate companies and having a ready made template that I could just duplicate and then customize it for their business. I’m wondering if anyone has been able to do something like this.
Hey Brian @bdolan2532,
Based on my personal experience, this “customiseable product templates” approach isn’t easy even with a fullcode stack.
In the ideal world you have some “platform core product”, which you iteratively enhance based on customer requirements, adding features one by one, enhancing product functionality more and more.
The reality is that usually you have scarce resources and you need to decide which feature to implement first. Moreover, features could be mutually exclusive, or they may be specific to just one customer, or they may lead the core product to the path you don’t like, diluting its client value.
At the same time there is a pressure from another side - pricing. If you position your product as a “customiseable template”, the client expects to have relatively low price for it. The beauty of software sales is that each extra copy costs 0 to produce, so product sales can scale massively, therefore leading to economies of scale and low prices for each copy.
But if you need to customise the template for each customer individually, you will have to cover your customisation labour costs (uncomparable to the license price). So you will have to explain to the customer why the product costs is X and customisation costs are 100X (to make breakeven), or you will lose money on customisations.
Adalo makes this case even more difficult.
In the fullcode stack you can have one “main” code branch, where you keep the up-to-date product version. And if your engineers are skilled enough, they can incorporate client-specific changes in a way that there will be no need to keep separate code branches for each client. Why this is important: when you make a change in the product, you would like to have it available for all your clients (imagine you have 100 installations), and you don’t want to update each client individually.
But in Adalo code branches concept does not exist. So if you have developed some app template, and made separate apps for each of your clients based on this template, you will have to update every client app manually when you’d like introduce new app changes.
The possible solution is not to sell product, but a service (I mean that you are not selling a cheap template but a service of app development in a real estate). The company won’t be scaleable because services doesn’t scale well, but at least you can get decent money from a client: they understand that they’re paying for custom development.
I can’t find the article/book which I’ve read on this subject - it resonated with my personal experience greatly - but you can try searching google with keyword like “software startup should I customize my product for a large client?”, and first few articles on Medium and Reddit are quite interesting to read.
Just my 2 cents 
Best,
Victor.
thanks for sharing the information…
Hi Alfonso! can you share with us an example of any app made with Adalo that is published today please!! I am developing an idea and I am almost done but I wonder if it is going to work effciently. Thanks!!