My Journey with Knack: A No-Code Web App Builder

I was the 2nd employee at Knack, a no-code web app builder. As an early hire, titles were taken with a grain of salt, and I had a voice in nearly everything at the company. During the 7 years I was there, I did everything from answering support chats to troubleshooting bugs and building product roadmaps. Creating the roadmap was particularly challenging - how do you decide what to build in a tool that can be anything to everyone?

Knack, the No-Code Web App Builder

First, what is Knack? Knack is a subscription-based service that allows you to build web applications with complex business logic and workflows, without having to write a single line of code. Don’t let the simple UI fool you - these applications can easily transcend from a small intake form to powering your entire business. Soon, your peers start to notice all the cool stuff you’ve built and they’ll want to get in on the fun. Before you know it, your entire company operations rely on Knack, and your needs evolve from building an application to scaling a platform.

The Everything Tool: One Size Does Not Fit All

Knack has often been referred to (at least by me!) as a “Swiss army knife”. It has extreme utility, but carving out something meaningful still requires practice. And just because you could carve out a rock with it, doesn’t mean you should. Even though you’re building with no code, there are engineering limitations behind the scenes. At some point, you will reach a limitation that may seem like an obvious feature gap, or maybe seem like you’re not using the product as intended. This typically means you’ve graduated from app building to the strategic scaling of no-code infrastructure, where what once worked is now pushing the limits of the playground a tool like Knack offers.

Complex products such as Knack often need to decide whether they want to be a specialist product or a generalist product. Do they provide just enough of everything, or do they double down on what makes them unique?

The Feature that Wasn’t Built: User Analytics for Knack Applications

A great example of this type of limitation is one of the most popular posts in the Knack forum: a feature request for user activity analytics. Did you see the date on that? This is a nearly ten-year-old feature request. This sounds simple, but from a product perspective, it could be a huge feature. We have to ask, what problems are we trying to solve with user analytics? Is it for marketing? Product usage? Let’s look at our options.

Workarounds that Kind of Work

Knack is also like a huge Lego set with no instruction manual. While Knack is no code at its core, you can still add additional custom code or use the Knack API - if you dream it, you can likely build it. But even then, you’re still confined by the laws of computing. I’m absolutely amazed by the hard work and dedication that goes into producing something like this custom toolkit library, but unfortunately, these intricate solutions often fight an uphill battle against limitations like record counts and API limits.

You (Probably) Don’t Need Marketing Analytics

Several users say they tried external integrations like Google Analytics, but it only got them so far. Even a leading solution like Google Analytics is a specialist product, geared towards marketing analytics. It’s great for producing quantitative analysis needed to calculate metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and customer acquisition cost (CAC), but marketing sites usually contain static content, so Google Analytics can’t track things like the click of a button without manual intervention.

Why You (Definitely) Need Product Analytics

While integrations like Google Analytics fall short in capturing the depth of interactions, this is where product analytics becomes indispensable. Product analytics tools are designed to deeply understand how users interact with your application. They track user actions and behaviors directly within the app, providing insights crucial for refining user experience and driving product development.

For a Knack app, implementing product analytics means gaining the ability to:

• Monitor performance analytics to see how well different parts of your app are performing.
• Analyze behavioral patterns to understand how users are actually using your app, which features they find most valuable, and where they encounter problems.
• Utilize testing and staging environments to experiment with changes in a controlled setting before rolling them out broadly.

If you were able to utilize product analytics with Knack, you could not only enhance your ability to make informed decisions but also tailor your app more precisely to meet the needs of your users, ensuring a more effective and satisfying experience.

Knack Shouldn’t Build Analytics Features

Wait, wasn’t I just making the case for a product analytics feature? Yes, and no. There are tons of different needs for tracking things like user activity, with competing business goals and requirements. Sure, Knack could deliver simple user activity features like “last login”, but ultimately they won’t excel at any one thing. Knack needs to double down on its core value because the no-code landscape continues to grow more crowded by the day.

You Should Build User Analytics Features

What if I told you that you can get user analytics, and more? No waiting for Knack to build your wish list. What if I told you it can be integrated in less than 5 minutes, for free? At the heart of the no-code movement are citizen developers and tools building symbiotic ecosystems where multiple products can thrive together. Make and n8n are great examples of this. When you think of your app, don’t just think “Knack” - think “Knack and …”

So not only will I show you how to do this yourself, I’ll show you how to leverage different analytics strategies to build a Knack product that your users actually want. Using integrations with tools like PostHog, you have countless opportunities to get critical insights on your app like:

• Replay user sessions in a Knack application
• Mapping user paths for a Knack application
• Track user lifecycle for a Knack application
• Measure the performance of a Knack application

Join me in my series exploring analytics in Knack, where I’ll share thorough how-to’s and strategies for getting more out of your app.

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