So long and thanks for all the fish

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@James_App_Maker thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Some comments from a customer’s perspective:

  1. Adalo’s mental model mapped more directly to how I’d want to build a no-code iOS app. That’s why I chose it over the others I evaluated.
  2. I’m not using Adalo for fun - I have a goal. That goal is to ship an app.
  3. In order to ship the app, three things need to happen: Adalo needs to be capable of doing the things I need, I need to know how to use Adalo, and Adalo needs to not be broken.

Here’s my perspective on those three:

  1. Adalo needs to be capable of doing the things I need:
    Adalo’s great! If it wasn’t I wouldn’t waste my time. BUt finding out capabilities or workaround can be painful. If the self-serve resources aren’t clear and community isn’t responsive, Adalo support is the last resort. Honestly the discussion volume in the forums doesn’t seem high - seems like Adalo could devote one on-staff person to reading threads and answering questions every day. That’d go a long way.

  2. I need to know how to use Adalo
    The product helps a lot w/ this. I’m a dev so none of these concepts are foreign - it’s a genuinely great experience. The self-serve resources are great too. For things that I don’t know how to do the forums would be helpful if I knew I’d get a speedy answer.

  3. Adalo needs to not be broken.
    This is where things fall over a bit. I’ve noticed two bugs that - if I was running Adalo - would be close to “showstoppers” (I’ve built and sold two B2B SaaS companies BTW so am no stranger to the challenges of scaling - it’s tough.) The edit text component doesn’t behave like a normal editing surface. And publishing didn’t work yesterday. The latter is an absolute showstopper. No amount of forum posts will help fix that if we have to raise the Bat signal to get someone from Adalo to respond.

I get why it’s desirable to have community support for a product with 200k makers, many of them non-technical and on a free plan. But I’d offer two suggestions to make the experience better for those of us who are serious about using Adalo to build apps:

  1. Charge more. Charge what you need to charge so paying customers get responses within a reasonable amount of time.

  2. Improve your support experience. I don’t mind filling out a 10q form once. But from there I should be able to have a back and forth exchange with support from my email client. It’s not clear to me today whether that’s the case. FWIW the support response from Adalo to my initial ticket gets off on the wrong foot because my original message is not quoted in the Adalo response… so any nuance about the problem is not available to me.

My 2c. Honestly I care enough about getting my problems solved that I’m contemplating upgrading to a $200/m plan for the account rep. But I’m not sure that experience will be much better. Is there an SLA on response times? The text component bug won’t be fixed if I upgrade either. I really don’t want to switch but bugs and poor support are a lethal combination.

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