Experience-as-a-Service start-up gets AWS tick of approval

Appeggio is an eXperience-as-a-Service (XaaS) platform which enables anyone to build, deploy and manage enterprise grade websites and native mobile apps, all from the same effort, without ever having to write a single line of code.

Key highlights

With technology as their core business, the Appeggio co-founders knew the substantial amount of work to set the foundations when building a start-up and the challenges that went with it. Maximizing the strengths and talents of their small team, Appeggio discovered that the fastest way forward was to partner with an experienced AWS Partner, such as Thoughtworks, so they could focus on building the core functionality of the Appeggio platform.

• More time and energy to concentrate efforts on building out the core functionality of the platform

• Saving six months and potentially unaffordable expenses, eliminating the need to hire 'in-house' technical resources that would have achieved the same outcome

• Cost parameters of a start-up and availability of good technical resources were additional challenges

• Partnering with Thoughtworks meant that the platform’s time to market would decrease
  
  

   

Overview

Founded in 2020, Appeggio is a start-up with the simple vision "to remove barriers, enabling anyone to build software (no code!)". Co-Founders James Ladd, CEO and Alex Twigg, Executive Chair, are the chiefs-of-do-what-needs-to-be-done and are passionate about democratizing software development and unleashing the power of human innovation.

The challenge of building high-quality customer experiences

Building high-quality customer experiences is complex and costly, with most organizations building the same thing at least three times. This means building for the web, native Android, and Native iOS, not to mention the cost of ownership of three separate platforms. Factor in the development resources (the talent), which are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive with the demand for change constantly accelerating, and you're left with overwhelming challenges. 

The software development life cycle is also fraught with dangers. Product owners don’t really know what they want until they see it; designers are frustrated by the resource constraints of development teams compromising their designs; engineers take shortcuts to meet deadlines that increase the cost of change or compromise non-functionals; business owners want everything faster and cheaper, and CIOs want to maintain the integrity of their systems and build value for their business through APIs. Organizations are constantly finding ways to ease these symptoms, through Agile teams, DevSecOps, RPA etc. Appeggio was conceived, however, to try and tackle these problems with a blank sheet of paper. No-code / low-code was the obvious place to start, but it has four fundamental issues:

1. Although the outcome is no-code, users still need to understand the development process.

2. Low-code, albeit potentially allowing more flexibility, still introduces all the same old problems.

3. Ironically no-code platforms generally produce code that you then must deploy and maintain.

4. No-code has been used very effectively to build prototypes or even enable start-ups to trial new ideas, only resulting in having to then re-build them ‘properly’ later for scalability, resilience, security, and maintainability.

So Appeggio set out with two fundamental ideas: 

1. How to enable anyone to build enterprise-grade software, irrespective of their previous experience.

2. How to liberate software engineers allowing them to focus on generating business value.

The outcome was not a no-code platform, but an eXperience-as-a-Service platform, that could act as a catalyst for the ‘compassable’ business. Allowing business owners to rapidly develop beautiful customer experiences by orchestrating the business IP contained in APIs.

Key risks

One of the biggest learnings Alex and James acquired over decades of software development is the importance of often forgotten non-functional requirements. However good the intentions are, non-functionals get forgotten or deprioritised until the end. These are not just the ones that can cause immediate pain, like performance or security, but major business impacts and high-risk items like back-ups, data sovereignty, and resilience. 

For Appeggio to build an eXperience-as-a-Service platform, it was necessary to have all these 'non-functional' requirements 'baked-in' from day one. "We didn't want to rely on technology-literate people to know how important they were but create people-literate technology that would understand that most people wouldn't know they had to ask for, even if they knew what 'it' was. This, after all, should be the essence of no-code," said Alex.

Thoughtworks has been an invaluable partner because, like Appeggio, Thoughtworks has worked in the most demanding financial services environments and understands the importance of getting the foundations right. Thoughtworks freed up Appeggio, allowing them to focus on their core platform, whilst Thoughtworks took the lead in designing and configuring Appeggio’s end-to-end cloud configuration and support operations, in line with industry best practice.

Solution - enabling Appeggio to focus on their core platform

As Co-founder and previous CIO of Judo Bank, Alex, states, "This was not our first rodeo working with Thoughtworks. We had relied on Thoughtworks as a pivotal partner in an Everything-as-a-Service strategy, building a successful end-to-end customer platform without owning a single server or employing a single developer and with minimal in-house technical resources. So Thoughtworks was once again the obvious partner of choice when we started Appeggio."

There were a host of vital and value-add Thoughtworks solutions utilized by Appeggio.

Well Architected Framework Review

The Well-Architected Framework Review kicked off the process, providing the basis and understanding of what needed to be achieved to get Appeggio up and running in the smoothest, most efficient way possible, with clear, actionable steps.

Foundation

Commencing a Foundation stage was the next step. Alex explains, “Thoughtworks helped us create the end-to-end infrastructure and support solution for Appeggio and made sure we complied with industry best practice at every point, through the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review process.”

After the Foundation was built, Thoughtworks worked with Appeggio to clearly outline the best way forward, allowing Appeggio to focus on the core platform functionality whilst Thoughtworks took the reins on everything else. 

Professional Services - Pipeline Deployment

A Deployment Pipeline solution was proposed, which meant the heavy lifting was taken care of, and everything was deployed into the newly established Foundation, factoring in best practices. Being the technical powerhouse behind the scenes, James Ladd explained, “It was fantastic to know we could hand over this element of the platform to Thoughtworks, so we could focus on building the core functionality of the Appeggio platform. It would have taken us six months to hire a team that could have done this for us, even if we could have found and afforded them.”

AWS Marketplace Accelerator

As a start-up, the other thing to consider for Appeggio was the high cost, time investment and hard work that goes with building a trusted brand and gaining access to new audiences. With an eXperience-as-a-Service platform, the logical next step to access new audiences through an established, trustworthy avenue was to look into listing on AWS Marketplace.

Thoughtworks facilitated the start-up to list on AWS Marketplace and become an AWS technical partner, opening up even more growth opportunities across more extensive global markets.