The idea for PerformaGo really came into clear view around the end of April, early May this year (2025 for readers from the future).
By the end of May, the overall concept was clear and I had identified the underlying performance support principles and approaches that it needed to be based around. (I’ll write more about that at some point in another diary entry).
Although I didn’t know much in the way of specifics about no-code tools, by that point I had done enough general research to satisfy myself that a no-code approach to building PerformaGo probably was achievable.
I woke up one morning with a mix of excitement and trepidation having said to myself the night before, “Well, Andrew, it looks like you’re going into the software business!”
The idea did sound exciting. But the reality of implementing the idea filled me with horror. What did I know about building a piece of software? Let alone turning it into a viable product that people might actually pay money to use. Had I gone mad?
At moments like that, it helps to have a bit of faith – in yourself and in the idea that the universe, a higher power (or whatever you want to call it) might actually be guiding you in the right direction. But it also helps to underpin that faith with some knowledge and good advice.
I’m lucky enough to be part of a business mastermind group that just happens to have a couple of people who know a bit about building and selling software applications, so naturally I consulted them. That certainly helped ease some of my concerns about the business aspect of things.
But they didn’t know so much about no-code tools (being accomplished coders themselves) and they were not so familiar with how an LLM might be integrated into the wider system architecture that I would need.
So, I realised I had quite a bit of learning to do.
One of the things that I love about learning new stuff is making connections. Realising how something you know about already connects up with something new. In those moments, you realise how much you are starting to build up a fuller picture and a fuller understanding of the topic in hand.
I know quite a lot about a whole variety of software tools but knew very little about individual no-code tools, so I was curious to see how many dots would get connected, as I started my exploration of this new world.
Quite a few, as it turned out. I was also starting to realise that quite a few things that I had some familiarity with already would definitely make life a lot easier once I got into the actual design and build of the tool. All those years of designing and building e-learning (and having a hand in designing a few business websites) were not going to go to waste.
Today, I won’t bore you with a great long list of tools I learnt about or considered using because I’m more focused on telling the story of how I got started. (Although I’m pretty sure some serious ‘tool talk’ will find its way into a dairy entry somewhere along the way)
But what I will tell you is that generative AI made researching this topic so much quicker and easier. About half way through my research, I started to realise just how difficult the task would have been had I just relied on a standard internet search.
I would have spent hours wading through individual websites trying to work out what all the different tools did. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have unearthed the breadth of tools that I did using AI.
It made understanding the key differences between tools and their relative strengths and weaknesses so much easier to identify.
Now, was everything that AI told me about all of this stuff absolutely 100% accurate 100% of the time? Definitely not. But it was good enough.
And you can prod and provoke and just keep asking question after question until you get to an answer that is satisfactory. With the amount of digging and questioning I kept doing with AI, even the most patient person on the planet would have eventually snapped.
But ultimately, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the no-code tool universe. The next big step would be to work out which of those no-code tools would be right for building PerformaGo.
And that, as they say, is a story for another day!
