I wrote this post up and it trended on the front page of Hacker News yesterday. The gist of it is this:
There are a class of problem for which the simplest solution is not a technical one but rather a human-powered one.
There are extremely cheap virtual assistants (VA’s) available and with tools like Zapier and Slack + Loom + the ability to easily expose a restricted admin interface in Adalo it may be faster/cheaper/easier to solve your problem simply by programmatically tasking a VA vs. trying to build an end-to-end automated solution.
This has another benefit in that it’s resilient in a way that technical solutions aren’t. I throw this out there because I’ve been reading the Adalo forums deeply for the past few weeks and I see so many instances of problems that could be sidestepped by Flintstoning vs. head butting the problem. Adalo being a young product means it has a bunch of deficiencies but Flintstoning is a superpower that you can deploy to paper over many of these once you understand how and when to use it.
That post above explains the criteria I use to determine whether Flintstoning is appropriate for the problem at hand.
Try it out and you may find you can knock out 30% of your issues with some strategic Flintstoning. Let me know if you have questions about this technique.