How Michael Shanks Built Budibase To $2M ARR
Budibase is an all-in-one low-code platform for building, designing, and automating business apps.
About The Budibase Founders
Who is Michael Shanks?
Michael Shanks is the CEO and Co-Founder of Budibase, a low-code application building platform that enables engineers to build projects in less time. Michael is a professional engineer and has held software engineering roles at various companies. He studied Physics at Queen's University Belfast.
About The Business
What problem is Budibase solving?
Technical and nontechnical founders want cost-effective and faster approaches to building and deploying applications.
Idea
How did Michael Shanks get the idea for Budibase?
The co-founders had previously developed internal applications and business apps in their careers. They realized that building these applications was not only expensive but also not the best use of developer time. Additionally, they found that it was not the most enjoyable part of software development.
They also observed that companies often used a variety of different SaaS products, paid for expensive subscription support contracts, and generally had to work around the tools and their APIs to get them to work together.
They set out to create a low-code platform that allows people to efficiently create different tools.
Compared to other platforms, we wanted Budibase to be as accessible and open as possible, with a real focus on user experience and ease of use, which is why it's open source and self-hostable, in addition to our cloud-based solution. β Martin McKeaveney, Co-Founder, Budibase (Source)
Build
How did Michael Shanks build the initial version of Budibase?
Weβre pretty much a full JavaScript house. The whole back end is written with Node and Koa, and our whole front end is written in Svelte.js, which we really love. The back end for app metadata, as well as the internal DB, is all running on CouchDB. Our cloud platform is all run inside AWS, and the production platform uses Kubernetes for management. β Martin McKeaveney, Co-Founder, Budibase (Source)
Budibase Techstack
- Backend: Node and Koa
- Frontend: Svelte.js
- App Metadat backend and Internal DB: CouchDB
- Production platform: Kubernetes
- Hosting: AWS
Budibase landing page from 2020
Growth
What is the growth strategy for Budibase?
Pre-launch engagement with online communities on indie hackers, creating value-driven blog posts, implementing SEO strategies, and engaging on social media helped Budibase garner 2000 prelaunch signups in just 8 months.
Budibase Pre-Launch Update
Pricing
How does Budibase price their products?
Budibase's pricing is structured to support growth. It starts with a free plan for initial exploration, moves to a Premium plan for expanding teams, and offers custom Enterprise plans for large-scale organizational needs.
- Free Plan (cloud or self-host).
- The Premium plan is priced at $50 per creator and $5 per app user (per annum)
- Custom pricing is available for Enterprise plans.
Budibase pricing as of May 2024
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More about Budibase
Who is the owner of Budibase?
Michael Shanks is the founder of Budibase.
When did Michael Shanks start Budibase?
2020
What is Michael Shanks's net worth?
Michael Shanks's business makes an average of $166K/month.
How much money has Michael Shanks made from Budibase?
Michael Shanks started the business in 2020, and currently makes an average of $1.99M/year.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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