Appfarm - Born in the Cloud

Only a few years before they began writing the platform in 2017, this was an unthinkable task for a team of two people, and no-code was almost an unknown concept. Suddenly, a technological breakthrough happened which opened up for the development of a product like Appfarm.

“The open-source environments had in many ways matured. Large technology companies developed their own projects with open source and contributed resources to open source projects in general. Simultaneously, there was a rapid development in cloud technologies,” Ole Borgersen says.

“Combined, this suddenly opened up for a team of our size to create a product like Appfarm: a platform enabling the development of highly advanced and in many cases business-critical applications, for companies of all sizes and industries – completely without coding,” Simon Larsen says.

Since then, no-code has gone from being a concept few had heard about, to a sought-after solution to a problem most organizations are facing: the time-consuming and costly affair of creating custom software from scratch. That’s why more and more companies are embracing no-code technology, as it drastically speeds up the development of software solutions and applications.

“Most people find it boring to write the same code over and over. There are way more efficient ways of doing this, and a lot can be generalized and reused. This is the basic idea of no-code, which is also the foundation for how we work when we’re developing Appfarm,” Simon says.

In the past, it was mainly the heavyweights in the IT industry delivering projects for big organizations with their own server rooms and large IT departments. Appfarm unlocks the possibility for digitalization for more customer segments by offering custom solutions running in the cloud.

“We wanted to make custom software available and less daunting for any organization, especially those without large IT departments. Now they can construct solutions in the cloud without having developers internally, or having to outsource,” Simon says.

“Also, the fact that people with other skill sets in the organization are able to partake in the actual development of solutions they will be using creates for more accurate and user-friendly applications,” Ole adds.

Under continuous development

A lot has happened since the start-up in 2017 and the platform is growing large and robust. The fact that customers aren't buying the actual technology on the platform makes the work of developing this product even more exciting. New functionality is created both by requests from customers and through the hunt for components customers didn’t know they wanted.

“Our job is to dig through new technology we can provide our customers with, such as new cloud solutions, amazing front-end visualizations, and more efficient ways to build with,” Ole says.

“We spend a lot of time finding and developing reusable concepts that are good and thorough,” Simon adds.

However, they both agree that the best part of their job is having no idea of what the customers will end up creating with the product they are developing.

“There is so much satisfaction in being blown away by the creativity in a customer solution that has been developed with the platform and tools we have built. It says a lot about the opportunities no-code provides,” Ole says.

"This is a product that by nature is boundlessly scalable, which in itself is an amazing journey to be part of. We are going to write Norwegian IT history, and the growth we have had so far has already been fantastic,” Simon finishes.