At Sutro, we’re building a powerful AI platform and associated language that we think levels the playing field.
In other words, it puts natural language at the forefront of app development, meaning no programming is required for anyone to build and publish a full, production ready mobile or web app.
And we’re so in the depths of building this that the reasons for doing so seem obvious to us! But, deep in a night of building, it occurred to us (well, at least me) that it might not be obvious to others.
So here’s some reasons why you ought to consider it — whether you’ve never coded a day in your life or whether you’re a seasoned developer.
This is the big one. The one we’ve found to be the most compelling. You see, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a well-funded team, you’re going to have to take time setting up the very basic foundations. The stuff that isn’t unique. The stuff that everyone has to do. And that’s not what you want to be doing. What you want to be doing is focusing on the actual unique properties of your app and your business — the idea itself. The faster you can begin working on your idea, then the faster you can actually build an MVP that people can use. And that’s when the magic happens, when you’ll be able to start discerning whether or not there’s actually a market for your product, and how to get to product-market fit. Remember Paul Graham’s legendary advice for successful businesses? “Build something people want.”
When you’re stuck for days, weeks or months just getting off the starting block, you’re not building the thing that people may or may not want.
Nobody likes to talk about money, but we’ve gotta talk about money. Building a successful startup obviously requires many types of investment, but mostly time and money. We’ve talked about time, so let’s talk about money. If reducing the costs of development enables more ideas to come to market, more diversity of products and ideas, rapid prototyping and iteration to figure out what’s working and what isn’t — that’s a net win for everybody. There’s a reason we keep saying the phrase “let’s level the playing field” and that’s because we don’t believe that money should be as big of an obstacle for app development as it historically has been. With AI platforms like ours, development costs are significantly lower.
Let’s imagine that you’re a funded startup. Maybe you already are, and you’ll know this! Even in this scenario, you will run into situations where you have to “translate” requirements between technical and non-technical stakeholders. Typically, this would be a key responsibility of a Product Manager. This often includes a lot of people, from designers, to the CEO, to the engineers, to basically most roles that exist inside a company — all with varying levels of technical understanding of what’s possible, what isn’t, and how something could be implemented. This ends up taking a lot of time.
With Sutro, natural language is at the forefront, democratizing the entire development process. This means that everyone’s voice is heard, and everybody has the ability to contribute, leading to a more diverse and well-rounded product.
Building an app with an AI platform like Sutro means your software foundations are inherently scalable from the start. If your idea succeeds, you can grow from hundreds to potentially millions of customers without the need for any significant rewrites or infrastructure adjustments.
Let’s imagine that BigTechCompany™️ pioneers an entirely new feature that everyone wants to use. Perhaps a new type of input method, or a new way of thinking about UI that everyone wants to use (you might think of how apps like Tinder or TikTok got everyone wanting to build horizontal swiping or full screen vertical swiping). In the past, if a hundred apps wanted to integrate this new thing, they’d either all have to go off and figure out how to do it independently, or at best there might be a solid shared resource on how it’s done, and they’d still all have to individually integrate it.
With Sutro, anything new that comes along in this way only has to be integrated into the system once — by us. And once it is, anybody building on Sutro can implement it instantly — again, with natural language and no coding required. This dramatically increases the evolution of software and software tooling. We’re always thinking about that stuff — so that you don’t have to.
Let’s level the playing field.
