 There's no need to change your code. There's no need to migrate. MightyMeld is really, we think of it as a dev tool. It works on your existing code base the way it is right now. And we work on basically every way you can build a React app. MightyMeld plugs in very easily. Hi, this is your host, Parthia, and welcome to here for Let's Talk. And today we have with us Steven Skolny, CEO and co-founder of MightyMeld. Steven, it's great to have you on the show. Hey, thanks so much. Glad to be here. It's my pleasure to host you today. And this is the first time we're talking. And as before the interview, discuss the company was created in 2022, relatively new. So I would like to know the history, the origin of the company and what specific problem that you saw that nobody was solving that you felt that, hey, you have to do something which led to the creation of this company. Talk about the company. Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much. I'd love to get into that. I'm a developer. I've worked in a lot of different platforms. Recently, a lot of work on the web, but prior to that, working during game development with Unity and mobile app development. And in those worlds, they're these visual dev tools like Xcode that show developers visually their product as they're building it and allow them to have a visual intuition and build the UI quickly. But there's nothing like that for web. And this problem has kind of haunted me for a long time. And I saw an opportunity with the evolution of React to do something about it. And so I started building and the result is mighty meld. Now just look at some of the problem areas that industry is facing where we can see, hey, this is very mighty meld is helping these organizations. Problem area, let's look at it, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to be living under a rock these days not to see what's going on in the world of tech with the numerous layoffs and the kind of budget crunches even before the past couple of years there were a lot of you could never move your roadmap fast enough even when everything was booming and you couldn't get enough development horsepower. But today in these financially constrained times that's an even bigger problem. And so developer productivity is a big need and that's where mighty meld is aiming. We're helping developers be more productive with our visual tool that makes it faster to build high quality web apps and deliver high quality interfaces to your customers. And we're also integrating generative AI into the process in some very healthy ways. And that's really the primary focus of mighty meld is developer productivity, developer ease and elevating the quality of web apps. In the last one year, we are hearing a lot about focus going back to developers because we started talking about DevOps, SREs, all those teams, jargons which are good on paper but in reality the reality the way the companies still operate developers are still the one who write the code that add value to the business and we used to forget them. Now, as you mentioned, there are two or three things happening. One is the whole layout that is happening during COVID time, a lot of companies over hired and now layouts are happening. At the same time, the whole complexity of cloud cloud native word is also there which takes up a lot of developer time. So when we do look at some of these low code, no code development platform, they are not just for folks who are like they don't have those technical know-how but also kind of, I mean, a lot of things, you know, iPhone is a good example you don't have to be a computer scientist to be able to just use a computer. So talk a bit about the importance, the rule of low code, no code platform that you are seeing in the market looking at from this landscape once again that teams are smaller but you also need to free developers time to not waste too much time in unnecessary work. Does that question make sense? Yeah, yeah, it does make sense. I mean, it's been amazing to see the progression of no code and low code tools over the years. I've been watching them really since the days of a visual basic, we've had tools like that. They unfortunately remain limited. They're great for more simple apps but when you need to have more custom integrations with your tech stack, when you need certain levels of experience, when you need a certain kind of sophistication or performance metrics to be hit, there are a lot of architectural constraints that were no code solutions cannot really apply and that's why we see a lot of apps still being coded and the number of coded apps is growing as well just because the number of apps and products as we all know is growing with every passing year and that was also an inspiration for my email looking at the kinds of workflows that you can have in no code and wanting to deliver that kind of workflow to teams without the kinds of compromises that happen when you're siloed into a preexisting platform. So just to kind of put that briefly in a no code, it doesn't allow the kind of architectural flexibility and customization that sort of the top companies demand and MightyMeld is helping have that easy development without those kinds of limitations. Can you talk about your offering? Is it a software? Is it a service? It's SaaS? What is it? We think of it primarily as a dev tool but it is a SaaS product and what happens is you sign up for an account and basically the way it works is you take your existing React app and that's also another big difference between MightyMeld and no code platforms. No code platforms say, you know, hey, come here, start a new project, work within our ecosystem. MightyMeld is a tool that applies to any React app and we're going to be expanding towards other platforms as well and you take your existing app, you install a couple of things and then you can load it up in the MightyMeld visual environment and you can visually explore your web app while it's running. We have great integrations with things like VS Code so you can hop really quickly to your code if you need to do things the traditional way in your text editor and we also have a really nice visual editing environment where you can move around your UI and something that feels very similar to a Wix or Squarespace or one of those no code kinds of tools and as you're doing these visual moves MightyMeld updates your code with these small code updates and basically generates the same code updates you would do if you were making those updates by hand and all in all you have a really nice visual dev tool that runs in a browser and allows you to both understand your app and inspect it in new ways while it's running and also make updates to that app. Who is your target audience? Who is it for what kind of apps they can build with it? Are there limitations? That's actually the great thing about MightyMeld is that there are no limitations and we're very focused on these kinds of custom apps and working with any architecture. Our audience, our user base, all front-end developers, they're building apps using things like Next and Veet and hosting on Netlify or Cell, AWS, as well as other kinds of cloud hosted solutions and they're building all kinds of apps with our product, everything from SaaS dashboards to crypto trading apps to landing pages for products. We have a really interesting project going on which is a font, like a type system designer and it's these kinds of custom projects where MightyMeld really shines. It'd be really difficult to find a no-code platform that could generate a font system generator app for you and these are the kinds of things where people are coding as well as these larger scale projects and that's really what MightyMeld is designed for. Situations where you don't want to be limited you need to choose your architecture and build exactly the way you want to based on engineering constraints and things of that nature. Is it like for startups, smaller teams or even big organization enterprise customers can also leverage it? Right now we're working primarily with startups and smaller teams but we're looking to grow into the enterprise as our company grows. It may or may not be possible to share some names but I would love to hear some use cases also You have seen that your tool is really helping teams. Yeah, a really common use case we see is a SaaS products dashboard. I think most of our listeners here are probably familiar with SaaS products. They have these custom dashboards that allow you to either see data of people on your platform. Often they allow people on your platform to manage their accounts and we're working with a customer who has a store and you can see shipments that go out and your various store fronts and so that's a good use case for Mighty Meld where basically you need to customize the UI of that dashboard you need to build out new parts of the dashboard and you can do the UI scaffolding by basically using drag and drop and these visual tools and then as you're scaffolding out and building out the UI with the really optimized Mighty Meld flow that dashboard also needs to connect to all of their backend services and perhaps have some custom charting in there as well and so for those kinds of parts of the app they can be hand coded in the traditional way while Mighty Meld is used to lay out and build the UI and also get the styling good in a visual intuitive way. Any specific industry you're targeting or it doesn't really matter? Yeah, we're really more focused on our customers. We're focused on front-end developers and as you know, front-end developers work in a lot of different industries so we're not focused on a particular industry. You already also talked about Genitive AI and Genitive AI is one of the hardest topics to get. Talk about how you're leveraging it and you can look at it from two different perspectives. One is front-end developers who are building these Genitive AI base applications. Second is leveraging Genitive AI for Mighty Meld. We have a wonderful integration of Genitive AI in Mighty Meld. As you might be aware there are a lot of systems where you can submit a prompt and get an application of sorts for some basic kinds of applications. That's great if you're starting or you're doing a Greenfield project but when you have an evolving code base developers are needing something that integrates into their workflow and we've seen great results with things that integrate into the text editor and what we've done is done a similar kind of AI integration but into the visual app itself. So the experience of Mighty Meld is you're using your product, you point to parts of the UI, you ask the AI to update a part of your UI. It updates there right in front of your eyes. You see the code that it generated and also you experience immediately an updated version of your app. And so what we're focusing with our AI integration is a very tight human in the loop situation where as you're working you ask the AI for things and you see those results immediately. And so you can iterate very quickly with the help of AI and also exposing to the developer what gets created so they can either discard it and ask for another prompt or they can make slight modifications to the result that was generated by the AI. We are looking at, you mentioned startups but we are looking at a lot of green field a lot of brown field deployment. How about teams who already have their workflow and now they want to embrace Mighty Meld? Do they have to do a lot of reworking or the code? Do you have to migrate things? That's exactly the idea of Mighty Meld and as an engineer I know how painful it can be to have to do migrations to adopt products and I don't think any engineer wants to change their workflow if they don't have to. I mean, the idea of Mighty Meld is to speed up things for developers. So there's no need to change your code. There's no need to migrate. Mighty Meld is really we think of it as a dev tool. It works on your existing code base the way it is right now and we work on basically every way you can build a React app. Mighty Meld plugs in very easily. So quick to get going, no lock in and no change to the way you code. Excellent, now it's time to see the actions so let me do the demo. Yeah, let's do it. So I'm going to show Mighty Meld working on this actually one of our sample projects that we've put together that's available for developers to play with and we built this app using Chakra and TypeScript and I'm going to load it up right now in Mighty Meld and you can see we added our dev dependency to the build and once you've done that it basically instead of typing NPM start as you normally would you can type NPX Mighty Meld and that will load up your app in the Mighty Meld studio. And here I can see the app and this is actually a running version of the web app so I can click around, navigate the app test it as I ordinarily would in this view we actually have multiple responsive views here if we want to show multiple views simultaneously we can set that up in Mighty Meld and so Mighty Meld is a great way just to test and run your app but where things get really interesting is when I kind of pause time and go into edit mode when I go into edit mode I can click around and I see in real time this hierarchical visualization of my apps JSX and then I can go around and make edits like I can change the name here say from movie app to maybe my movies and when I do these changes Mighty Meld updates the code for me and it causes the app to hot reload. Let's say I want to put these titles above the details I can just drag this up here and I can see it rearrange in my app Mighty Meld is updating my local code I can see here the diff of the code updates that Mighty Meld is making as we can see they're very small clean minimal code updates Mighty Meld is also very nicely integrated with my text editor if I want to actually see this code I can open an editor and maybe look at maybe some of the callback functions or some of the non-visual things that are happening as I interact with this UI and so it's a great launching off point into my code base another thing I can do with Mighty Meld is build with these things we call prefabs which are basically building blocks from your favorite design system we're using Chakra UI and this app and so we have these building blocks set up for Chakra so I can actually take say a divider drag it in and it pastes it right here in my app for me I can see that it's also made the code update down here and edit the import and so you can see here I'm visually building on my running web app and of course I can go and run my app and feel out the changes that I made and since everything is component aware you can see this update here where I move the title is in other places in the app where the same component appears and that's basically in a kind of summary of Mighty Meld visual dev tool that allows me to do the visual part of my work visually in tight coordination with all my other tools in my dev tool stack VS Code, your favorite text editor GitHub and things of that nature as well as design systems like in this case Chakra UI we're using I believe this is the next app to build it so Mighty Meld is ready to work on any React app that comes its way Can you also talk about how developers can get started what kind of pricing offering you have for them? Mighty Meld is now available for the web development community to use free of charge and so yeah, go to mightymeld.com today we're inviting the web development community to come in and sign up on the free tier, give Mighty Meld a try and we think you'll love it And what after free tier and what are the limitations? The free tier is live and we also have an enterprise tier for teams with some advanced functionality around things like sign on and also some advanced build functionalities in that tier and we are working on a paid tier with some of our upcoming additional superpowers will be available in a paid tier coming soon So this free tier is not a trial mode they can continue to use it as well Yeah, it's not a free trial it is a free just a free level and basically the free tier gives devs enough powers to experience a big productivity boost with Mighty Meld and then the paid tiers will offer additional functionalities as well as additional features that are needed for bigger teams Right, so regularly in general they can continue to use it if they want and if they do want to move then they can move to the next paid tier Excellent, thank you Steven, thank you so much for taking time out today talk about the company and this excellent demo and I would love to chat with you again because I can see there are a lot of things in your pipeline Thank you Yeah, thank you so much, I really enjoyed the chat