August 2021, there was excitement and thrill in our organization as one of our teammates was to build an AI module in just 45 minutes… that too live! Very eager to witness the event, I sat in front of my laptop, dumbstruck as I saw him building the application so swiftly. As I had just switched to the no code platform and was not aware of the functionalities it provides, I was awed at how smoothly one could build an application using the WEM modeler. I silently wished if I too could reach such heights one day. But never had I imagined that this opportunity would knock my door so soon.

Six months later, when one day I was informed that my name had been forwarded as the ‘Doer’ for the WEM 45 possible challenge, I had mixed emotions: delighted, because my vision was turning into a reality; proud, as my colleagues considered me capable of accomplishing this; but at the same time, I could feel the pressure rather the ‘responsibility’ to attain the goal in the show, where I were to represent ‘a company’ that I now considered ‘my company’. Though, in the past months I had successfully developed projects using no code platform and understood its principles and features quite well but building a CRM in just 45 minutes!!! This seemed to be a herculean task.

With the support and guidance of my teammates, we decided the scope of the application in the next few days. The aim was to build a Sales CRM - Silverstreak, that would be a tool for an organization’s sales team for managing accounts, contacts and deals. Silverstreak would manage the lifecycle stages of the deals and the interrelations among these three modules. Suggestions kept dropping in every day to make Silverstreak a complete solution for any sales team. This required an attractive dashboard with indicators, graphs and filters to give clear visibility about the trend of the sales over years. Then came in a requirement to integrate it with Slack, a platform which helps a team to communicate. This would allow Silverstreak to send notifications for every reminder set by a salesperson on his/her private slack channel in the organization’s workspace.

Let alone few hours, building such an application in a week too would seem like a Sisyphean job for a traditional coder. But to a no coder, it seems feasible!
With the capabilities that WEM’s no-code platform provides, I could quickly build the Sales CRM, handling dependencies among account, contact and deals; managing their lifecycle stages; integrating the application with Slack and building a very attractive dashboard. Moreover, data model, flowcharts, sub flows, templates, folders, everything can be very well organized in the modeler. WEM provides capability to make reusable components and templates that can be re-used in all flows with similar functionality.

Once the elements of the project were well organized in the modeler, all that was required was some practice to build the whole system using the helper flowcharts that were prebuilt to initialize some variables and some templates that would reduce the repetitive work and allow me to execute the entire development in the given time frame. First round of practice: 40 mins with few errors due to shivering hands and the running timer on screen. A detailed error message highlighting the specific node of the specific flowchart helps to quickly recognize and resolve the error. Second round of practice with calm and gained confidence: 35 mins with no error. 

24^th Feb 2022, on the D-Day, I was really excited to build Silverstreak in front of the live audience. With lots of ‘best wishes’ messsages from the team mates, family and friends, I just hoped I would live up to their expectations. 11 am: the show began. After some introduction, with racing heart, I started the timer…next 35 mins I was creating the most memorable moments of my life… When the timer still showed 10 mins left, I was already demonstrating Silverstreak to the audience. 

With congratulatory messages from my well-wishers, I learnt that this was the first show which witnessed zero audience dropouts till the end. We did it!

After participating in this event, I realized the true power of no-code. No-code is truly the future of software.