Building with OB1

If you’re anything like me, you have felt the pain of an exhilarating new product idea quickly suffocated by the necessary-evil obstacles of setting up a new project. You’re excited to just begin coding your world changing idea but you’re stuck in the mud with setting it up. You have to spin up a hosted database on AWS RDS, and then an EC2 instance for your API, and put your static website files on S3 and all of that has to happen while you’re figuring out how to configure it all to work together securely and seamlessly. There goes your first block of free time in a week just on the setup.

That is not how developing your MVP should be. Keeping the excitement at its peak is hard enough, and in order for it to remain that way continuously you want to see progress quickly. All while rapidly developing that minimum viable product – those first moments you get to actually interact with your idea for the first time. So how can you avoid the setup phase and get straight to building?

[OB1 [...] can spin up a new database, give you a hosted API, and generate all the tables and endpoints you would need to go from idea to product MVP in 60 seconds or less.]

With a cape just long enough to seemingly float above the ground, OB1 descends gracefully into our presence. For those of you unfamiliar with the galaxy saving superhero who goes by OB1, it’s your headache freeing companion who can spin up a new database, give you a hosted API, and generate all the tables and endpoints you would need to go from idea to product MVP in 60 seconds or less. Don’t believe me? Watch.

Recently a friend of mine wanted to spin up a quick MVP that did 4 primary tasks. The application allows users to login to a demo account, run queries/prompts against various AI models, collect user feedback, and they want to log the events of the user to ensure any feedback they received could be backed up by a user's action. They had a custom API to handle interacting with the various AI models, so we had 3 tasks left to fulfill. Without a second wasted I quickly went to https://ob1.outerbase.com to see what OB1 could conjure up for this mythic quest. My prompt was something to the effect of:

“Create a user login flow that supports collecting user feedback, logging queries they run, and tracking analytic events of a user.”

I waited, breath held. Optimistic, yet nervous – and I’ve done hundreds of these runs on OB1 before, too, but this one was different. It was for a friend. After roughly 30 seconds had passed I was presented with 4 tables and 3 commands.

Tables:

1. user

2. session

3. user_feedback

4. user_event

Commands:

1. Login User

2. Track User Event

3. Collect User Feedback

In 30 seconds I went from idea to having a hosted SQLite database and deployed API endpoints that did all that I mentioned above. It didn’t take hours of setup, or knowledge of programming in a particular language – all it took was me describing what I wanted.

I share all of this with you to say, if you want to prove out your own idea then give OB1 a try. We want to empower the next generation of developers to spend the time building out their idea without having to spend the time with the headache of building out the boring parts.