From adamc at csail.mit.edu  Tue Aug  3 16:23:19 2021
From: adamc at csail.mit.edu (Adam Chlipala)
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2021 16:23:19 -0400
Subject: [Ur] No-code use cases?
Message-ID: <0056a58f-bf9b-152d-e3d7-c104244a6b7d@csail.mit.edu>

Folks, I apologize for being behind responding to Ur/Web GitHub issues 
and so forth, but I've been distracted trying to kick off an 
Ur/Web-based startup company.  I figured that, nonetheless, I'd try my 
luck here and see if anyone has any advice for us finding early 
customers or in a few other dimensions.

I imagine, for this audience, I don't have to work too hard to make the 
case that Ur/Web raises the abstraction level of web-app programming 
significantly.  As I developed UPO <http://upo.csail.mit.edu/> and 
applied it for a few medium-sized apps, I realized that the abstraction 
level had gotten high enough that we should even be able to build a GUI 
that lets laypeople design their own apps without thinking like 
programmers.  So we built that platform, called Nectry.  The way I'm 
thinking of it now is that it should be the perfect way to help 
non-developer, business-oriented folks within companies take advantage 
of all the local services, from standard ones like Salesforce to the 
company's custom REST APIs. Building blocks for all that can be 
provisioned, such that types etc. guarantee that apps others build with 
them are secure.  The game is really helping nonprogrammers build full 
web apps with dependently typed combinator libraries!

I would much appreciate hearing from members of the Ur/Web community 
about any of the following aspects of our quest:

  * Do you know anyone who might appreciate being an early adopter of
    tooling to harness the business know-how of nonprogrammers safely in
    do-it-yourself web-app development?
  * Would you or someone you know potentially be interested in getting
    involved with our effort?  We're open to remote work, though we
    can't pay anyone yet.  The most pressing roles would be in
    engineering, applying expertise in advanced functional programming
    and compilers; or a business-y role driving discovery of early
    customers and fine-tuning of our model for who we should be
    marketing to and how.
  * Do you know any investors who might resonate with the technology and
    consider seed funding for an early-stage venture just signing its
    first paying customers now?

Thank you in advance for any leads!

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.impredicative.com/pipermail/ur/attachments/20210803/cbdbfe4a/attachment.html>