Guest: Abhishek Nayak (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Appsmith (Twitter)
Show: 2022 Prediction Series

Abhishek Nayak, CEO and co-founder of Appsmith, joins us on our 2022 Prediction Series to predict that in every organization, developers are going to be even more important and more powerful. “I believe we are going through a decade-long problem of there not being enough developers available versus the amount of software that needs to be built. This will just increase the value of developers in every single organization. So they’ll have a big seat at the product or a big seat at how a company grows. All of these decisions I believe will be taken more often by engineers today. So that’s my first prediction that there is more power to engineers,” says Nayak.

Nayak also believes that there would be a big surge in the number of open source projects, which are replacing traditional proprietary products. What else did he predict? Check out our video.

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to our 2022 predictions series. And today we have with us Abhishek, CEO and co-founder of Appsmith. Abhishek, first of all, happy new year and it’s great to have you on the show.

Abhishek Nayak: Happy new year to you too Swapnil. I’m excited to be here again. Thank you so much.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Before I ask you to pick up your crystal ball and share your predictions for this year, please quickly tell us a bit about the company.

Abhishek Nayak: Sure. So Appsmith is a open source project that helps companies and developers build all sorts of internal business applications. So the idea is every company needs to build some sort of custom dashboards or internal tools to run their business and Appsmith makes it really easy to build those things without much effort. And because it’s open source, it’s really easy to get started hosting. It is free or you can use our cloud hosted version if you don’t want to host it yourself.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. We have covered Appsmith earlier so thanks for sharing the kind of summarized summary of the company. Now it’s time for you to pick up your crystal ball and tell us what predictions you have for this year.

Abhishek Nayak: Sure. My first prediction is the fact that in every organization, developers are going to be even more important and more powerful. I believe we are going through a decade-long problem of there not being enough developers available versus the amount of software that needs to be built. This will just increase the value of developers in every single organization. So they’ll have a big seat at the product or a big seat at how a company grows. All of these decisions I believe will be taken more often by engineers today. So that’s my first prediction that there is more power to engineers.

Now, my second prediction is that we are going to see a big surge in the number of open source projects, which are replacing traditional proprietary products. In the last decade, we finally saw successful open source companies making money. So I believe this year is going to be very pivotal because more open source projects will be created, which are alternatives to other proprietary products. So that’s my second prediction, more open source projects.

My third prediction is that low code and no code will actually enter most organizations and will become mainstream. So far, low code and no code have been a niche product. They’ve not been adopted by traditional enterprises, but I believe this is the year when it’s going to begin to happen primarily because maybe they’re not able to hire people quickly enough to build software or they just have a lot more software to build because of the crazy speed that we’ve seen in distant transformation. So, all of these three are my predictions for this year.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for sharing these predictions with us now. What is going to be the focus of the company this year? Anything changing there?

Abhishek Nayak: Not so much I would say. So the focus this year is very much on ensuring that our product becomes much better for everybody to use. Last year, we grew our user base by about 17 times in a single year and that was completely through word of mouth. I believe this year we are going to see a similar kind of growth and the product is just getting much better and a lot more powerful.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Abhishek thank you so much for, of course, taking time out to not only tell about the company, the focus, but also those predictions. And I think you are exactly on the mark where you say that developers will play a more critical role in all those predictions. But I would love to have you back on the show again at the end of this year, to just check how many of your predictions turn out to be true and get the next set of predictions for next year. I hope this year will not be as long as those previous two years have been and this is where we’ll start going back to a normal life. But thank you for your time and your insights today and as I said, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Abhishek Nayak: Thank you, Swapnil. I hope you have a great year. Thank you so much.

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