Back to the roots 

Tracing back the App Builder story, it all started with a closed deal and a promising beginning: a first DNN product and a license sold within 10 minutes after being launched. Its author? Bogdan, the CEO, stirred by an adventurous and entrepreneurial spirit. Highly driven to innovate and own something great, he breaks the corporate, repetitive cycle, dedicating his time solely to this. 

As exciting as new beginnings might look, they’re not at all rainbows and unicorns, especially in the tech industry. This new start also implied cut expenses and no vacation. Following this first NavXp module being released, gradually, in a quest to both intuit and respond to DNN market needs, DNN Sharp became the number 1 Vendor in terms of sales as more and more products were launched.

As a result of attending two major events in the industry (DNN Summit and DNN), an engaged community coagulated around the product. On a business level side, a steady network of clients was created and strong relationships were built over the last 8 years.

App Builder: Genesis

The App Builder came as a natural result of hard work over these years. It was an intrinsic wish to bring to market a full package of web business development applications. In the industry, the concept is called low-code (or no-code) and it has seen accelerated growth over the last 2-3 years, but back then when it all started for DNN Sharp, this term was far from familiar to players. As any company willing to innovate, a part of its DNA was to continuously keep an eye on everything new in the business application field. 

For the first time in a while since the beginning of the phenomenon, Gartner and Forrester started mentioning the concept. DNN Sharp takes notice of this new wave, while The App Builder was naturally evolving from DNN Sharp.  In time, this turned out to be an intermediary step, as now the whole product morphed into something greater, called ‘’Plant an App’’, an all-in-one platform for all your DNN projects. 

Product history, first iterations

In the beginning, the application was pretty basic, lacking visuals elements and not very intuitive. It was mostly a rough infrastructure (see snippet below) aimed to serve all the functional side of it. 

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Evolution

Once all the functions were mapped out from roles, users, entities, they started to get a more intuitive look and allowing an easy navigating experience.

Features

The App Builder is an all-in-one platform for all your DNN projects. But what does it make it complete?  Anyone can gain access to a combination of exclusive features, modules, and add-ons, all of them being orchestrated by the app builder. 

At the level of features, one has a visual way to define the data models in the application through the entity builder, changes can be tracked and audited due to GitHub Integration, while visual business processes and flow charts can be used to build a list of actions with the Workflow Builder. 

Other features worth mentioning would be: Single sign-on, Built-in capabilities, Email Marketing Automation but more on each one of them plus an overall introduction to the App Builder can be watched here narrated by our CEO, Bogdan. 

Plant an App and Future Plans

Future plans are manifold, but they’re taken one at a time. A strong focus at the moment is making sure the product is strong enough leading to an engaged audience.

We are still in this process and so far it only reinforced a lesson we were already aware of: the real value is what matters both for us to deliver and for our community to benefit from. Being community-focused means we develop the product in close relationship with the users, and in this respect, flexibility has always been our secret sauce. We listen, we find the most feasible methods to implement the feedback, technically-wise and we get back to people for demos and final thoughts.  
 

Speaking of thoughts, we’d really appreciate your feedback on the platform. We put our best effort to come up with these results, but we’re aware there’s still room for improvement.  Request a demo, try it for free and drop us a line here with your feedback. We promise to read each one of them!