What are your thoughts on building a platform vs. building applications?
At Tendrel, we've recently been thinking about how to strike the right balance between our flexible data platform and simpler, self-service applications.
For the past year, we've been using our platform to deploy customized enterprise solutions. Some of the use-cases we've crushed:
???? Tracking harvest yields for indoor agriculture
?? Uptime vs. downtime monitoring for manufacturing lines
?? Quality control sampling for packhouses
?? Scouting for pest management (let me know if you want to see some gnarly pictures)
? Time tracking for light industrial labor
?? Logging for our own data warehouse
These enterprise deployments have been amazing for use-case discovery and testing the limits of the platform. But we've also learned that they're time and labor intensive.
So for the past few months, we’ve been quietly building a suite of “Tiny Tendies” – standalone apps designed to solve challenges we see repeated over and over again.
Our secret? Our platform’s design makes building standalone apps surprisingly easy.
By focusing on smaller use-cases, we can simplify onboarding for our customers. They strip out some of the complexity of the full platform, allowing customers to get most of the benefits with far less effort.
So far, we've built out our Timeclock app and we have apps for tracking checklists and mapping geo-locations coming out soon. Along the way, we're using everything we learn to keep building the platform.
If you're interested in trying out our apps, or building one of your own, let's chat!
How do you think about balancing platform flexibility and simple, scalable applications?