1. Generally her inventory increases in value over time because it grows. Over time a plant will grow from a smaller pot to a larger pot, plants in large pots sell for more. 2. She wants to track which suppliers provide better quality plants (do the plants die quickly?). She also wants to track how fast different plants grow.
I could pretty easily write a django app that tracks this stuff.
Any recommendations for a platform I could build on top of (airtable? google forms+sheets?). Maybe some type of marketing automation platform.
Custom business apps are tricky. As a programmer it's easy to turn my nose up at excel based solutions, but I totally see how they end up being built.
Both of these are true. And most people do not appreciate how tricky niche apps are. When I started writing PartsBox (for myself initially, later grew it into a business at https://partsbox.io/) several years ago, I thought I'd be done in a weekend. Nearly 4 years and almost 3000 commits later…
Spreadsheets are a pain for anything but the simplest things. And yet they are useful to a point, because making a domain-specific application is surprisingly hard: there are lots of edge cases that you don't think about initially.
"There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"
"An operating system," replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.
"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."
The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"
The programmer made no reply."
We're inspired heavily by Excel and visual programming. The idea is that business apps — even custom ones — all have the same building blocks for their front-ends: tables, buttons, dropdowns, textinputs, etc. And so we give you all of these building blocks, as components that you can use.
And most custom business apps interface with SQL databases or APIs, so we have native integrations with those. If you want to render a list of users in your app, for example, you could write the SQL query (`select * from users`), and save it as `users_query`. Then, you can drag on a `Table`, and have its `data` property set to `{{users_query.data}}`. Then you're done!
This probably all sounds a bit abstract... so here's a 3 minute demo video, if you're curious: https://vimeo.com/303811211
Let me know if you'd be interested in trying it? I'm at david@tryretool.com if you have any questions / feedback! :)