Is Momen the Next Big No-Code Platform? Interview with CEO

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You're listening to This Week in No Code Plus AI, with weekly episodes sharing the latest advancements of AI plus exclusive interviews with founders using these tools. So without any further ado, let's get started.

Welcome to This Week in No Code. I'm your host, JJ Ang, here with my co-host, David P. Excited for another great week of No Code Plus AI. We have another interview with the CEO of our Noode tool for you this week. This one is called Moment. It's a full-stack no-code builder that maybe you've never heard of, but you're going to want to hear about them and the CEO talking about everything that they can do.

It's extremely affordable to use as well, but we have our news of the day to get into before that interview, which hits around the 10 to 15-minute mark. So, David, why don't you get us into the news of the day?

All right, let's hop into this. The first news story we have here, and I have one to add to this as well. Sure, Copilot Vision has been announced. It seems like Microsoft has included the OpenAI Vision models now into their Edge browser, which is a tool that I think one person in the world uses. Not a very popular browser, but it is a tool now to help you read web pages faster, her own summaries.

It is about kind of a set of eyes to help you read and learn for anyone who is interested. Yeah, I mean, AI assistant browsing off of real-time analysis. Did you hear about the browser company update as well and their new AI-focused browser, David?

Oh, Arc, like they switched? Yeah, I'd heard they were like scrapping Arc, the current one, and going all in on AI browsing. The new one that they have is really cool. There's essentially an autopilot feature where it's just like, "Hey, go do this," and it's literally AI doing your browsing for you.

Then it's just reporting back once that thing is done, but you can kind of see the mouse move, and if you want to, you don't even need to be there for it. Yeah, but it's redefining AI in the browser, and this feels a little bit like that, where we're bringing Vision into the browser. AI is co-browsing with you, and it's like AI is part of our everyday life.

Okay, so this thing you're talking about, this is what I was going to bring up later, but we can just... Okay. So, Alman went on stage at a New York Times event. I don't know if you saw this clip, basically saying we are closer to AGI than you think, and it will matter less than you imagine.

It's interesting because there's been a lot of rumors, and this is kind of what prompted this, rumors about some internal conflict between Microsoft and OpenAI. They're not moving fast enough; they can't get the compute they need, like the sales, whatever, right? Some like... but in the cause of Microsoft complaining.

Yeah, no, OpenAI is complaining about Microsoft, but in the clause of the agreement, it basically says that when we hit AGI, OpenAI can back out of the agreement. They get the money, but they can back out. It feels like Sam Alon's trying to move the goalposts of what AGI is, and they're like, "Yeah, we're about to hit AGI. I don't know what you're talking about," and then change whatever it is they need to do.

Now they're using a new phrase called superintelligence, which is like now what they really meant by AGI, but now it's something else, and they're just semantically changing what this AGI means. But to bring up your point, this idea of AGI versus superintelligence versus AI is going to be everywhere.

I kind of fall more into the category of Sam Altman at the moment, even though he's maybe just gaslighting everyone. It's less meaningful to just have a tool that can open your browser and read things in your browser. It's not a browser; I don't need to be there. It's just a tool now to go access a website and do things.

But I think the browser still needs to exist. They're not getting rid of the need for a browser. No, and they're just rethinking what you do or interact with the browser and how much you actually need to do.

Think about it like this: I have three things on my list today. I need to find a place to take my wife out to dinner on Friday night, so go off, find that place to dinner, book that reservation, put a time in the schedule, email my wife that it's done, and then report back.

Then I also need to book a hotel for an upcoming trip. You can prompt each one of those three things, and it goes off and does that for you, and that is significantly more efficient in your life, and that's a good thing.

Yeah, I mean, I'm curious to see how well that does. Sure, sure. Yeah, like just how hard it's going to get there, right? How is this AI system going to know?

Yeah, we don't even know what right is. Satisfied with their choice? Probably not. That's fair; humans are very flawed in that way.

We'll see how well it goes. It does feel like reading between the lines. Well, on to the next point is OpenAI's Shipmas announcement, which is essentially 12 days of celebration starting December 5th, which we're already in here, featuring daily announcements of new pitches, products, etc.

Yesterday, we saw an 01 being released out of preview mode, and so that's now available multimodal as well. They also released a pro version, which is $200 a month, a premium version with unlimited use for that as well, which is great.

So excited to see what happens. One of our friends online was joking that by the end of the 12 days, they're going to have no more money left. We'll see how that goes. It's definitely an exciting time in the AI space, and I feel like a lot of companies are racing to get the year-end feature announcements out before the holidays.

I feel like this is one of those things of just like go, go, go, go, go, promote, promote, promote, and then take the holidays. But the last of the day, what do we got here with Amazon?

Amazon's making some crazy splashes now. The news we're going to talk about is this video analysis news, being able to search scenes, and they have better multimodal models to process videos, images, and ask questions. I think it's really cool.

But the thing that's really underlying all of this is Amazon's announcing their own chips. So Amazon has been coming out and basically going, "Hey guys, like Nvidia, we're here," and they basically doubled down on this Anthropic investment. They put another $4 billion into Anthropic, which is now pushing through AWS using these chips to train.

They're seeing great results. Well, the news says they're seeing great results; who knows? Amazon's got this data center infrastructure unlocked, right? I don't know what happens. I'm sure they're not as far as they say they are, but everyone's excited about it.

They're talking about Apple using their chips to help train. I think chips are like, you know, they're getting in there, and of course, you have to use them in AWS. That is pretty impressive to see how that comes out.

But it's been amazing to see Amazon innovate in every industry at the rate that they have. If they're behind, it's only by a couple of months, maybe a year at most, but they're in there: cloud computing, entertainment, now NFL on Thursday night Prime. They're in every industry; it's very integrated. It's very impressive.

Yeah, they're really not sitting by the wayside. I think OpenAI was first. I mean, it seems like from what I've been reading and what Sam has been saying, it's plateaued a little bit, right? In terms of even what Sarpy said, all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and the hill is now steeper, right?

We're going to need big breakthroughs, not just more training. I mean, breakthroughs being like more energy in the world, like nuclear energy, things like that. Tons of investment: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, they're all plowing money into nuclear energy.

I think we're going to see... I mean, OpenAI is the only startup left, and so they can act like a startup and be nimble and do things faster than the guys can. But unless they have some crazy tricks up their sleeve, I think startups and the AWS and Amazon of the world are just going to win.

I think that's unless they can really continue to ship at this pace. Harrison's raising his hand. You're going to have to hang in there on This Week in No Code to see how this all plays out. We'll keep you updated every week with the pop culture of it all, not get into the details, but just like what do you need to know about this industry as it's moving?

A lot of different innovations are coming, and we have an interview right now with the CEO of a full-code, full-stack no-code platform similar to that of Bubble, a Bubble competitor. So let's welcome him to the stage now.

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Well, it's going to be a great episode, but we have no drama because we're talking with Yaai, the CEO and founder of Moment, the full-stack no-code editor. Get it, JJ? There's no tea like spilling the tea. Anyway, we're here with the full-stack no-code editor giving Bubble a run for its money.

Yaai, why don't you give us a quick intro to Moment and what it is you're building?

Sure, yeah. So I guess I'll just start off with myself because I was an engineer all the way along and was basically trained in the field. I went to CMU for computer science. I worked in a tech company before we even raised money, and it was on furry analytics. I worked as a back engineer, and I was interested in all things performance.

During my work there, I was working on, I think, five different side projects. Most of them felt repetitive in the sense that the core number of lines of code that's actually in a core business is no more than 500 lines. It's all about boilerplate front-end hooking things up.

So I thought there must be a better way. By 2018, my previous company went public, and then I left the company, and then I started this one to scratch my itch. The reason is Moment. Sorry, you can't even give me a moment.

The reason was we liked the name Moment, but we couldn't afford the domain, and also it's difficult. So like, yeah, just get rid of the tea; we'd be good. That checks out. I buy that story. Fair.

So you are a traditional programmer. You got sick and tired of writing many of the same things over and over again. There's got to be a better way. This led you to founding a no-code full-stack platform called Moment.

Now, was it always full-stack, or was it full-stack? I always wanted to scratch my own itch, so it was always being full-stack from day one. Looking backwards, it's probably a stupid decision that I made.

The thing is just so big, like surface area. The things it has to be able to do is so... yeah, like back-end, front-end, all the things, workflows, and everything. So it was way too ambitious now looking back.

So what, you right? You're solo? No, no, it was me and T. I had, well, I have a team of like 37. About 23 of them are in research and development. So yeah, it's not just me; otherwise, there's no way I can't finish this.

But it didn't start that big. So tell us about that first step. Tell us also why didn't you just start building with Bubble? It's like, "All right, this is 2020; Bubble already existed."

I didn't know that. So stupid part, I didn't know about your competitor research. It was the only full-stack no-code builder. It wasn't that hard to... I literally had no idea Bubble existed.

By the time I found out about Bubble, it was already like 2021, late 2020, at the beginning of 2021. I was raising money, and then people were like, "Who are your competitors?" I was like, "I better check this out." I covered Bubble; it's fantastic.

So did you have a prototype in the beginning, or how did that go about? Did you just one night like, "Oh, can I figure this out, prototype it, and then raise money?" Or tell us about taking that first step.

Okay, so between 2019, it was like six months I was in a different gig. I was helping people with their hiring and the tower engineering team, and then that company went bust. So I picked out about seven, no, 10 of them that I thought were good engineers.

After the company went bust, we just started doing this. I still remember having arguments about the feasibility of such a thing and who would actually need it. Now it sounds easy, like, "Oh, all the non-technical founders would need it."

Yeah, but that word didn't even exist in my mind. I was like, "Who am I serving?" Somebody similar to me, not exactly, because I want it to be easier. Because I thought you didn't need six years of university to do this; there's complete no need, right?

So it has to be easier to do and has to be more efficient because you don't have to write all the boilerplate as possible. But yeah, the ideal customer profile wasn't even clear at that point.

But we kind of focused on feasibility in terms of technical feasibility because it was just one or two years, and we thought, "Okay, it could be done." We thought about the front end, the back end, how we can hook things up, and we decided on GraphQL early on.

We built on a core system in architecture already, and okay, sounds like it could be done. By July, which is like four months later, we had the first prototype that actually can deploy.

What was the first app that you go tested with? It was an app for an excavator rental company. Obviously, that's what the first app was.

Yes, yes. And to showcase their existing inventory, friends company or something, and you just needed to show something. No, it wasn't; it was just an acquaintance of an acquaintance.

He didn't even know me much. We didn't even charge him because... oh no, we did charge him. We charged him like a nominal amount, and we did the implementation. Until like 2020, we were doing the implementation because the thing was just so bad that very few people could use it.

But now, fortunately, by late 2021, there were a couple of customers that for some reason had faith in us, and they still stuck around until now. They were doing it on their own, but at that point, we were still doing implementation.

So your pitch to them essentially is like, "Hey, non-technical founders, come build software with us for the first time." Was it like MVPs or internal tools? Is there any kind of niche that you had?

It wasn't basically exactly Bubble, but they didn't know Bubble existed, so they were not looking for... you barely knew. Yeah, it's crazy how few people, when they stumble on an idea or an app that they want to use, go, "Oh, I should look for competitors."

No one looks. That's not the normal behavior of like, "Oh, I have this cool tool. Are there other things that might be better than it?" This one's good. That would be the normal passage, right? But apparently, they didn't.

I mean, if they did, they probably wouldn't have chosen already. So, Al, I cheaper, much cheaper at that point, so that might be a reason.

Yeah, yeah. All right, so how did you convince these engineers to come over with you, though? Did you have your own money that you were able to pay them, or did everyone just...

I have invested about $3.5 million into this company. My wife... okay, so did you get that from your recent public exit from the previous, or just previously you had it?

The exit certainly helped, and also I was in Bitcoin in 2021, so that helped. Good for you! All right, good for you, but you're all in. That's a big investment; you're all in.

And then you raised... but I'm fairly committed. I have skin in the game. But what made you have that conviction that I'm going to spend $3 million of my own dollars on this idea?

I know it sounds good, like a little crazy. It's like someone, you know, we shouldn't have to rebuild this over and over, but I'm not going to spend $3 million on whatever. You know, what gave you that conviction?

The conviction? I was one of those people very comfortable with chaos, I would say. Unpredictable. You're a startup founder.

Yeah, I always knew I wanted to do a startup. Even when I was super young, before I even started high school, I was like, "I need to be a startup founder." It's the way of life.

The reason I joined my first company was, well, it was very small when I was there, and I also knew I kind of needed the experience of working in a more structured way to know how a proper company actually functions.

And also, luckily, it went through all the first round of fundraising and the second rounds. Eventually, it went public, and seeing the team expand, how things change, that was certainly helpful.

But working for a corporation and climbing that ladder was never in my books. If I lose all my money, I'll go back and make some more. I'll go...

That's the Elon Musk strategy too. I mean, I didn't know what the Elon strategy was, but I guess he's like, "I'll go all in. It doesn't matter if I lose it all; I lose it all. I can make more."

Yeah, I mean, plus I'm fairly frugal otherwise, and just, you know, I don't... My wife is that frugal too; we are very low-maintenance.

So you hired engineers from this team, you guys got started, you built the prototype. When did you start raising money? Was it 12 months after, 18 months, etc.?

So the crazy thing is we started raising money the moment we got the demo out, and the demo sailed on the first try to the investors. Yes, all the live are destined to defy.

So we actually raised our first round in the beginning of 2021, so like a year after we started building. Then we raised a second round, but then the two rounds... well, the two rounds was a total of $4.5 million.

By the middle of last year, we spent all the money, and initially, I didn't spend... I didn't mess like $3.5 million; I only messed one, right? And then the follow-on that was from last year onwards.

So yeah, we spent all the money, but the fundraising moment wasn't so good, and I was like, "Yeah, I don't really want to raise more money because I don't think VCs have enough patience."

Right, because this stuff takes a long time to build. So I'm like, "Now I just put in my own money," and then I talked to all the existing shareholders, and I was like, "Okay, I'm just going to put my own money, and I'll have it at a flat valuation. Are you guys okay with it?"

They're like, "Yeah, seeing the valuation is declining across the board, go ahead." So here we are.

Fantastic! So you're now up to 35, 37 people, like you said. Where is the product at today? Maybe that would be a good chance to show us the little things.

So it's fairly complete now. Yeah, I will show you the screen; that's probably the easiest way to deal. So full stack, you have a built-in database, you have built-in automations, workflows, you have built-in UI, and from the front-end UI, you can drag something out there and connect it to your database.

Yes, so this is just one of my demo projects. You got the front-end builder here; it's fairly simple. But if you want to see a more complex one, we have...

Yeah, and for audio listeners, he's showing his editor. It looks like a Figma-like front-end builder. So it's simple, but it looks like it has what you need to fully customize it, or at least from the early looks.

Hold on, this is the big one because this is our corporate website. Did you build your own website with this?

Yes, yes. The Moment website is built on Moment, so that whole thing is great. Because it's a full-stack one, right? You kind of have to do it; otherwise, to deflect your own muscle, otherwise, it's not very convincing.

And you got all the pricing things, and you have the breakpoints, and it's responsive. So it looks like... I'll just share this tab instead.

Question: We're seeing desktop and mobile side by side. When you build desktop, does mobile come auto-responsive there, or do you build mobile afterwards?

So the components are the same, but you can override certain aspects on it. So if you look at the ID of this, we're looking at your home screen right now.

Oh, sorry, that's a... So let's just look at how this kind of looks. Maybe we'll just do that.

So it's responsive, and then you can make it adapt to mobile, and then this kind of adjusts after a certain breakpoint. It becomes the desktop layout, sure, of course.

And you can assign those breakpoints, or is that built-in? You assign these breakpoints?

Yes, you assign these breakpoints. Very cool. From breakpoints, and this would be the pricing because this is just a corporate website, right?

So it says it's a marketing website; it's fairly simple. There's not much data going on about it, even though if not much, we still have a ton of tables because there's some data entry, and then we have some automation going on here.

So we're looking at your data model right now, and so we're kind of seeing it in the... what view is it called?

The data view. The data view, but normally we think of this as what, like the data types?

Yeah, in Bubble, it would be the types. The types, yes. Interesting. And so it shows the maps between everything, and you can see all of the one-to-one, one-to-many relationships between different tables.

And these are the relations, and then obviously you have different types. Okay, yeah. And then you got the API connectors.

Don't ask me why this one has so many API connectors because this whole website is built by the marketing team, so yeah, I did not build this website.

It has way too much front-end stuff for me to be comfortable with. My upper limit is at like... I can figure out how to lay things out a bit, but it has all the fancy stuff going on.

I like I don't want to touch any of the motion stuff. Is the motion stuff built into Moment, or are you using third-party builds?

For example, this thing, when you throw it down, it would have things that kind of popped in.

Okay, so you have animation effects within the platform basically, but we do it for you, so it's easier.

Okay, it does have a kind of framer feel to the canvas as well. Is any in there?

So initially, it wasn't built like this, and then we were like, "Okay, what is the best way to build a front-end editor?"

We looked at Framer, we looked at Figma, we looked at Bubble, obviously, by that we knew. Yeah, and then we decided, "Okay, the Framer way is the best way," and then we basically...

Okay, we will use all the Framer terminology. It looks like a lot of that now. Can you make an adjustment without screwing things up right now?

Yeah, sure. Full zone P, we can... You can grab a group and just like... Is it one of those things where you can grab a group and kind of reshape it in the canvas, or do you have to reshape it via pixels?

I didn't pixel; you can reshape it here. So let's see. Let's just load it up right. We can change it here and see how things change.

Is this mirror that you're showing us? Is that like the pre... The mirror thing is basically a live preview. You can edit and see your changes instantly, but that's not deployed yet; that's just a live preview edit, right?

That's just a library here. Yeah, cool. So let's see in here. We're going to go for... What are we going to do?

We'll move this to... As I said, I'm pretty bad at the UI stuff, right? Even though you broke the platform, yes, I'm the problem, but I'm pretty bad at UI.

All right, yeah, so I see it's changing. My question is, if you go over to that mobile view in the editor, can you just drag that rectangle sideways to change the width in the canvas?

Okay, yeah, it depends on... Yeah, you can drag this. Yeah, like right. Can you just move that? That's what I was asking.

Yeah, that's that Framer-ass feeling right there. Even though it's relative in size, it would try to calculate how that...

You know, how you moved it, it would try to calculate face make it, and I'm going to undo it before my mark.

All right, so then you have basic... Is it you call them groupings, folders on the left-hand side where you kind of create divs essentially, and then within that, you create what do you guys call it?

We'll just call them views. Views, okay. And then, see, that's this... It's a view, and then you can even do an F, and then you can do a view.

Okay, and then all these components on the left-hand side kind of bring us through some of it. I see that we have what, like a list, horizontal work?

Yeah, we have all the components; they're very basic. They are all atomic components. We don't have things like a voting thing, no widgets, only atomic.

But can you build those voting things? You can build them, and you can save them as custom components. You can even import code components.

Okay, and then I will show you a code component. Yeah, I'd also love to see the actions, like what happens when a button is clicked.

So that just... Go into here, then you have a flow editor. You can open it up; it can have conditionals and all that beautiful stuff.

Yeah, one of the things I was in Framer, and I was trying to get a button click to open a new tab, like a dynamic tab. So Framer has a CMS, and then you can have CMS pages, or one of the button clicks open a new tab, and there actually just wasn't a way to do it.

But you can in this case; we're very similar to Bubble. So you just open... My thing, I think this particular one...

Okay, let's say I want to go to... I want to go to... Right, let's say I'm just going to question the page, and then it has... This thing doesn't have any parameters, but if your page does have parameters, you would have it in here.

Sure, makes sense. Yeah, got it. All right, so yeah, we're seeing a basic flow tree for the automations where you can kind of create your if and then statements.

You do RS well; I can do... Yeah, you can do loops in here too. So there is talk about the scale of those automations. At what point would you say our automations aren't good for, like, you know, if you need a process, you know, like update, you know, 100,000 records a day, something like that?

It's like that's too much for us. What's the scalability of these actions at Moment?

So those you're seeing is on the front end, right? So you don't really want to update 10,000 rows in a loop on the front end because that's just bad practice. You do want them to be updated here in the back end.

We have a back-end workflow, which we call flows. So those are your server-side workflows essentially?

Yes, these are server workflows, and then they are fully ACID. You can make them fully ACID. So if your execution mode is synchronous, which is the default...

And what do you mean by ACID? Atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable. So those are like database lingo because I'm a back-end guy, so sorry to kind of assume that you knew about ACID.

But one thing that's important about ACID is imagine if you're updating things on Bubble, right? You have two concurrent users running the same server-side actions, and they update... They're trying to increment the value by one.

Both of them are trying to increment the value by one without explicit locking in Bubble. You potentially can end up with incrementing by like once instead of twice because both of them read the same value, and then both of them add one to it and then write it back, and then you end up with plus one to the plus two, right?

Very impressive problem, right? Now, yeah, so that doesn't happen on Moment. Okay, because of the way that you built your structure on the server side essentially?

Yes, yes. And also, you mentioned the number of updates. We have customers that update millions of rows every day. They have no problem with it because the biggest amount of energy we spend on this platform is on the back end.

Yeah, I would say this, and you're a back-end engineer, so... Yeah, I'm a back-end engineer is kind of what...

Yeah, so updating on a number of rows, I don't think there's like a practical limit. For, yeah, because the guy would frequently export and import things that are million rows, which is bad practice, but I don't...

He's testing the system for you. Yeah, yeah. And then lastly, I would like to showcase this AI feature.

So we have... I can run this, and then basically in here we have like an agent, an AI agent. This is like relevance. You know, if you know Relevance AI, people in Bubble use it a lot for integrating with large language models.

We kind of built this. You got the inputs, you got the prompt templates, and then you got where you do RAG. You can do RAG with vector... You can do vector similarity research in this thing too.

So you can look at all those fields at the same time in your AI search. Yeah, and you can choose which one you want, and I think this thing...

Yeah, you can even do a cosine similarity to any text field. So in here, you would be like, "Okay, maybe go anything that's the four most, three most similar lines I will return that."

And then within those, I will only return just name and price, and then maybe I'll also do, you know, in a related table, I'll get their whatever stuff they want.

This is like a real RAG type. Lon, it is a real RAG. Yeah, and not just, "Hey, you ask OpenAI for some answers." This is all built in.

And then, was that you also got the tool utilization? These are all the stuff that you have in the platform already. So you got the action flow, which as we said is our name for server-side...

Server in Bubble, and you got the APIs. So these APIs are just a bunch of Google APIs. They go to the render, do stuff, and the API...

The thing here is we got a custom code to convert the date format because Google's API sometimes wants a specific format, and then you also got like...

So you're just essentially running code in that workflow to... That one is just running code. So for example, this one is just trying to refresh the Google token because that thing expires every hour.

So you have to like constantly refresh it, and you refresh it, update it, and put it back in the database. And we can see how this works in real life.

I'm going to... What's the scenario that you're trying to do now? So I have this fake, not fully fake, somewhat fake calendar.

I'm going to tell the AI to schedule me a meeting tomorrow morning, avoiding conflicts, you know, going to Whole Foods, let's say that, right? So I have something scheduled for 7 and 8, which is fake, and I have something in Palo Alto, which is 11 and 12.

That's real, so it's somewhat fake, somewhat real. You know, you said you were frugal, but people frugal don't go to Whole Foods.

I don't. In fact, we should say we should go to Safeway. Yeah, okay, there we go. We're going to Safeway now.

Okay, Safeway in San Antonio Shopping Center, whatever, right? And then that'll be tomorrow, and summary... Oops, that'll be tomorrow.

Okay, by stop duration, 1.5 hours. Okay, so now you put that in; it's going to run the prompt, and it's going to involve all the...

It's... Yeah, where you go? Oh, that's odd. So maybe like all live demos strike like all...

At least this I can explain this one because that's just the language model thinking. Not this, so hey, sorry, you can't possibly do this and go to...

In San Antonio, it's like it's going too far. Okay, the reason is it's speaking. I'm going to like San Antonio in Texas, and you can actually tell why that's the case.

So, but you live in California, so it's just... I live in California. So what happens is this is what we sent to...

Very difficult to read here, but that's what we send to the large language model, and the large language model said, "Okay, we are going to look at your Google calendar."

Right, and that's what they got. We're going to... I was going to P here, and then there is Stanford University, and the next thing it did was, "Okay, we're hours later; it's not going to work out."

Yeah, the drive intelligently worked in a way. It worked, so maybe use a different thing in Mountain View.

In... Very cool. Yes, in Mountain View, that should work. I don't know how many Safeways there are, but it might say, "Sorry, there are no Safeways in mid-league here."

Oh, there's... Because I go to them all the time. I just like... I don't know which one it would pick.

All right, so which one did it pick for me? It went to... Which one in Mountain... So it did schedule one, I guess. This is the one it went to, and then that's it.

It said it left even time between these events because I told it to in the prompt. So sure, sure, looked at your schedule, found this Safeway, gave you enough time to get there, reading the addresses, and then book that appointment.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds difficult, but what you showed us didn't seem all that difficult to do.

No, no, it did. Did you basically just hooked up a few tools for the AI to use, and then you have your keys, and then you tell AI what you read, what...

Yeah, and then it comes out as a structured output. So you have your... Can you know on the front end? We had a link and an explanation of why it did so.

Let's get into a couple of things. If we look at platforms like Bubble, one of the big things about it is lock-in, right?

Is that still a thing with Moment? I saw you writing with some code, accessing code within it, within the components. Where are you at in terms of like, can you export this kind of stuff into code? Where are you guys at?

You cannot back-export the code, and that's partly a business decision, partly because we couldn't make it work properly.

So what we have is we want users to be leveraging existing code assets. So you could be using existing libraries or whatever existing libraries, React, basically, right?

And on the back end, which we're not fully there yet, we want them to be using Node.js, proper Node.js runtime, so that they can use all the things that's available on GitHub.

Also, it kind of makes transitioning out easier because your code is going to run on other platforms, not just ours.

And I think that's as far as we go in terms of trying to avoid lock-in, is right, like making integration with everything as easy as we can make it, which I wouldn't say is perfect at the moment.

Yeah, we're still working on that. The front-end thing is pretty cool. In fact, let me just show you the front-end thing.

What, in terms of taking coding and creating those components? So this thing is actually made in code, so that's why it kind of shows in this odd way.

And does this... Let me see which one did I... Oh, this is the one that works. Yeah, this is the one that works.

So this takes input from another code component, which is here, this guy, and this thing outputs a selected city.

So there are ways for your code components to declare what it outputs. You can see it say, "Select the city," and it takes a year from this guy, which is a date we call a data selector.

That thing is basically a dropdown, and that's built in no code. And then the data of this thing comes from the database of this project, right?

So if we run this, can we make it bigger? Can I... Yeah, let's make it bigger.

Okay, so all this data comes from the database. This is like a sales chart of something, and the year here is all the valid years.

So if you choose something, it will like instantly cut it out, and we're seeing like a 3D model on the screen that he built with code, but also it's reflecting his own database and no-code dropdowns that as he changes it, that is being updated in the embedded code.

Or then not... It's not embedded code; it's a coded component. Yes, and then this one is like a searchable dropdown, which I wrote in code.

And then if I like DN, it would come up with Denver, and if I chose Denver, obviously now you're looking at Denver 2020, and that's what shows.

If you got R of this, you kind of created a central place for code or no code to exist in one spot.

Whether you don't want to use code at all, that's fine, but if you do want to inject code in many different places, you can do that as well.

You can expose these components with their own code as well. Yeah, it's a... It seems like a very friendly interaction between the two.

Yep, yeah, and I also thought to myself that this whole code versus no-code is a false dichotomy. We are here just to make software building fast and easy, right? Whatever works, we should use it.

And having the ability to import code also allows the user to leverage larger language models because building code snippets is what the CHT is best at. They're like, "Oh, you know, build this specific component in React. These are the ways to build it," and then they're like, "Oh, here is the entire code."

And it just... That'll be the best experience I think that I can provide to the users.

And as we... I want to keep an eye on the time here. Tell us where the company's at now. Do you have a customer account, a big success story that you can share, and kind of what the next future plans are for Moment?

Yeah, so before we... Moment internationally, we had a Chinese establishment. So we had a bunch of customers in China, and they were just building mostly WeChat mini programs.

You might have never heard of it, but it's basically like apps running in WeChat, and that's one of the reasons you never heard of us because for the first few years, it was all in China.

Now we have about 250,000 registered users, but out of those, I would say maybe 5,000 are active. A couple thousand are paying us.

Sure, and the larger ones, the largest one has like 68 million rows in a single table. Wow!

And that one, we had to do special tuning for, but there are multiple clients with multi-million row tables. We don't really do anything for; everything kind of just works out of the box.

The reason we actually do automatic indexing on our database, so that's why it kind of works. And the next step for us next year, that's anything that's visible, we will get our mobile app builder out.

So we already thought about how that can be done, and everything seems to be feasible. It should take us maybe two man-years, not less.

That should be the amount of investment we have, and yeah, I think we're planning to release a beta by the middle of next year.

So great! That would be for... So you could build one app for web and then a native mobile app as well for iOS and Android with that same app.

Very cool! Yeah, well, you can have multiple formats, so you can keep adding. You can have like three web on the same database if you want or like...

Oh, cool, cool. What's your pricing like?

So pricing is... I think best explained if I just share my screen again. That's our pricing, and if you want multiple front-end, obviously, you have to go for pro.

What Pro gets you is 25 requests per second. If you want more, you would have to buy this single-tenant kit. That basically means that instead of sharing an instance with other people, you get your dedicated instance for $120.

For $120, and wh... like I'm thinking about like for $120, someone you get basically nothing.

Yeah, true, and that's one of the... One of K, it starts at $1,200 a month. You're adding a couple zeros to that.

Yeah, and what this gets you is we had a user who's... You know how the Chinese lockdowns and COVID, right?

Yeah, one government actually hired a contractor who built one of those PCR registration machines, if I'm... and nothing handled 120,000 users in a morning with four of these.

Okay, yeah, we're very stingy when it comes to back-end.

Yeah, yeah, you can stack the single tenants if you need more. You can stack about currency. We allow you to stack 16 of them, and if you want more, each of them are four gigabytes of memory with onboard storage and whatnot.

So essentially, you're just allowing them to add CPUs? Yes, yes, you stack up to 16 of them on your own, and if you want more, you have to contact us because then we have to get you bigger machines on.

Yes, very cool. This has been pretty eye-opening. It's the first time I've really heard of it, a full-stack platform similar to that of Bubble, but in some ways, like even the UI seems maybe a little bit easier to work with.

You have full access to code in a lot of ways and build those components with code. Really fair pricing across the board; it seems like it scales.

What am I missing? Oh, compared to Bubble, we don't have plugins because they have a huge plugin thing, right?

So that's something we can't compete against. And also their community, at least, you know, the non-Chinese one. I don't think you guys care about the Chinese.

All the people talking Chinese, so it's much more engaged and helpful. All right, we have a few people talking on our forum, but that's because it's still young in that way.

So those are probably the two things that if Bubble didn't have plugins and certainly if they didn't have the community, they wouldn't have survived or they still...

Right, and in terms of plugins, you can already see that we have the code components, right? So we're trying to make sure that we have a way for people to share their code components and maybe even sell those stuff.

And that would be similar to Bubble's plugin, not fully because their plugin is full-stack front-end and back-end, right?

Ours, the code component on the front end is detached from all the code on the back end, so there's no way to have them together. We're still thinking about exactly how to design that product, what the product would look like with the code and no-code mixed together.

And other than that, well, they do have their AI Builder, which we don't yet, and that's something we will do next year as well.

We'll see. Yeah, we're not doing the same way as Bubble; we're doing bottom-up, not top-down because AI sucks at doing things top-down.

So we're going to do like, "Oh, can I make this button look brighter?" Or, you know, "Can I go to the other page? You know, go to the details page for my posts?" You know, do that instead of like, "Build the entire app for me."

Yeah, yeah, great. Thank you for hopping on the show today for This Week in No Code. I really appreciate having you here.

For those that want to learn more or to get started with building an app at Moment, where should they go?

This is just go to moment.com, M-O-M-E-N-T.com. Great! It's free to get started; you could start building your first app there.

And again, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate him coming on the podcast.

I got a really cool story here. So I actually met him, well, his team, through my new SaaS tradeback links.

And so, you know, I'm using my own domains to test this, and No Code Alliance is one of them. No Code Alliance found Moment, their blog, as an opportunity to cross-link no-code tools, no-code platforms, no-code builds, etc.

As part of our autopilot outreach, it reached out to their blog, whoever manages it, found their contact information, sent them an email, and then they responded like, "Sure, let's collaborate."

Then we were able to get on this podcast, and so I really love that because one, that was a thing that I built, but two, it's like, you know, it's finding opportunities that you wouldn't think of.

You know, like Moment was not on my radar. I've been in this industry for a long time; this is the first time I've heard of them, but they're actually quite impressive, and they're very affordable.

If you're actually looking to build something scalable that you need without spending a ton of money, like dedicated CPU for $120 a month on a full-stack platform with, you know, you could bring in your own code and build components, like that sounds really promising.

So I'm really glad that our paths crossed. I'm interested to learn more. What do you think, David?

Yeah, I think it's cool that there are segments of the market that find tools that are helpful and useful that are what everyone's using.

It goes to show that markets like this are huge. If you had asked me in 2020 or 2021, would I build a no-code platform, I'd be like, "You're crazy; Bubble's going to win."

Like, obviously, Bubble, and you know, I feel like... Yeah, yeah, but even like... Even if you knew about Bubble, you'd go like, "Oh, like it can't be big enough; it's fine."

And he's like, "No, we have 250,000 users, you know, a few thousand active users. You got a real business here; that's pretty surprising."

The other thing, 37-person team. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that RAG component is like real RAG, and that's really cool.

Like to be able to really get into your user database like that at that level of ease, that was really neat.

Yeah, some cosine similarity and all. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, you know, I love engineers like, you know, just like get sick of this and just build it themselves because, you know, it's like going to be a really good foundation.

Like seems to be a really good engineer, his training, his background, etc. So you know that the server side, at least his side of it, is really strong.

And they had the privilege of... or not the privilege, but the timeliness of building this in 2020 rather than 2014, right?

And so they had six years of more modern infrastructure that they started building on than Bubble did in that way.

And so while Bubble's probably rebuilding a lot right now, Moment's probably just building it for the first time still and in the latest infrastructure.

Yeah, I mean, I think we've heard this now a couple of times that like Bubble just was so early they missed a bunch of these libraries that could be super helpful, and they spent a lot of time playing catch-up.

The other thing that now we keep seeing that is kind of surprising to me is like Bubble's editor is now so different than everybody else's.

Like Webflow, Figma, Framer, Taddle, WeWeb, Moment, they're all like the same paradigm. Like there's a big canvas in the middle that you can move around, and you can have a bunch of screens, and Bubble's is just like so confined and very different.

And I wonder... Yeah, I feel like as soon as I saw Moment, I felt like I was looking at like a Framer, very familiar, like I can hop right in there kind of thing.

But yeah, Bubble's its own breed, you know, for the better or worse, I'm not sure. One of the things I have seen now a bunch of times on Twitter and watching, looking at his action workflow editor, it's interesting because his editor, his action editor looks more like the new Bubble workflow tab.

But everyone on Twitter complains about the new Bubble, like all the Bubble users who are used to the old way now complain about the workflow tab, the new workflow design.

I think that, yeah, I think with all users, you get used to one thing, and then change is hard. But I think the workflow tab that they have is a modern workflow tab.

Like you're seeing that all across the board; it looks very modern, you know, the way it was built with a visual structure.

I'm interested to know more about like, do they have branching? Do they have different environments? Like the production stuff that goes into it?

Like how do I run a real production app? But I mean, if they have people, you know, modifying their database like they do, like he said they do, like that doesn't seem like it's a problem.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so well, another great week for This Week in No Code. I appreciate you all for joining in.

If you guys have any thoughts, drop us a comment on our socials. You can find David and me on LinkedIn or Twitter or on our YouTube channel.

Otherwise, thank you for tuning in, and we will see you next week in No Code.

Okay, see you guys. [Music]