Peaka CEO Mustafa Sakalsız Featured in Website Planet

Website Planet contacted us for an interview with our CEO, Mustafa Sakalsız. Mustafa took this opportunity to explain Peaka's mission and vision to Website Planet readers. You can find the original version of the interview here.

Please present Peaka to our audience.

We are a startup focusing on no-code technology. Peaka was founded at the beginning of 2021, and after receiving seed investment from ScaleX Ventures, we launched our product in April 2021. Our product was well-received by the no-code community, and we have had thousands of users since our launch. The feedback we received from our users guided us as we adjusted our roadmap and introduced new features.

The Peaka team is a tight-knit group of developers passionate about innovation. The tech leaders among us have years of experience in the telco, banking, and defense industries. Our team has grown by 3X over the last 12 months, with additions of younger, aspiring developers.

Peaka is a no-code platform that allows users to create customer-facing, fully-functional web apps. It comes with a drag-and-drop visual interface so that even people with no technical background can build apps. If you come from a coding background and are comfortable working with code, Peaka lets you inject code or use APIs to extend your app as you like.

Peaka reduces by 10X the time it takes our users to create apps, letting them customize their apps as they see fit in the meantime. We are combining advanced customizability with workflows, which makes our offering unique in the industry.

Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?

There were two main reasons that prompted me to seek a no-code software solution. Being a software engineer with 20 years of experience, I never liked the repetitive side of coding. I resented having to code from scratch every time I started a new project because I knew I could spend more time on tasks requiring creativity if I had the tools to take care of the tedious parts for me. Blocks of code arranged like Lego bricks that you can pick and choose from–that’s how I envisioned software technology evolving. No-code helps you do just that.

The other reason behind my interest in no-code was witnessing first-hand how many solid projects and business ideas ended up getting shelved because people didn’t have the technical skills to implement them. People have asked me to become a technical co-founder in their projects for years. I had to turn down those offers because I didn’t have enough time as I always had my own startup projects. However, it was evident that regular people from non-technical backgrounds had a huge technical barrier to overcome whenever they wanted to implement a project. It occurred to me that there was a huge market for the right kind of software that could lower that barrier.

What services do you offer?

Peaka is a no-code platform that offers its customers a seamless end-to-end app development experience. Ours is a unique proposition in the market because no other no-code platform can integrate UI, Data, and Logic the way Peaka can.

In addition to enabling our users to develop customer-facing, fully-functional web apps, we offer startups and SMBs complementary software solutions they can deploy to address the out-of-scope feature requests from their customers. These out-of-scope feature requests create a predicament for startups fighting to gain traction: Turning them down can alienate customers. On the other hand, trying to accommodate them causes the startup to deviate from its roadmap. By enabling business leaders to create the forms, customer portals, internal tools, and partner portals their customers demand, we help them keep their customers happy without pulling resources away from their main line of work.

What is the mission of Peaka?

Peaka's mission is to make the software more accessible to the masses. In Marc Andreessen’s words, the software has been eating the world for more than a decade now. But, the demand for developer talent far outstrips its supply, rendering developers quite expensive to hire for startups and SMBs. I believe that software should not be the sole prerogative of software developers. Regular people should be able to implement their business ideas without the need for technical assistance from developers. This is what we are striving for: Lowering the technical barriers for regular people so that everybody can unlock the power of software for themselves.

Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?

Our typical customers are solution-driven people who want to create web applications by just picking the features they’re looking for. These are freelancers, founders, and tech enthusiasts, who do not want to get deeply involved with technology to achieve scalability, a slick UI, and a secure backend. At the same time, they want a platform not barely adequate for automating a few tasks but capable of building real full-fledged production-ready applications.

Current solutions in the market are not up to the task–none of them can bring together UI, Logic, and Data on a single platform. They overpromise and underdeliver, which makes paying customers feel shortchanged. These people are disappointed by the scalability problems of the current offerings, and they get stuck using the platforms out there. Having little or no technical skills to solve their problems on their own, no-coders tend to get discouraged easily because of these problems and quit their projects.

Peaka already boasts a fantastic UI. By integrating Logic and Data capabilities into that slick UI, Peaka’s solution becomes unique and unrivaled in the market.

Being a founder myself, I empathize with other startup founders. I know that they want to quickly launch an MVP using templates, high-order blocks, and a little customization. Once they get traction and create some revenue stream, they can always hire more technical and skilled team members to scale up, but first, they need to get over the hump. Peaka will help them do just that.

How do you envision the future of your industry?

I envision another breakthrough in the software industry coming up in the near future. The engine of this leap forward will be the no-code technology.

The most recent breakthrough in our industry was the rise of cloud technology. By introducing abstraction to server infrastructure, cloud technology changed the software stack forever. Today startups can serve the masses because they no longer are burdened by hardware, management, and maintenance costs. The cloud revolution took care of those issues. This abstraction level introduced by cloud technology also gave rise to a whole new ecosystem of developers, startups, and applications.

Today, we need another layer of abstraction on top of cloud services to serve less skilled developers and no-coders. This layer will practically be an a la carte menu of features. It will comprise high-level building blocks that no-coders will use to quickly build applications for their particular use cases. Developers, domain experts, and no-coders will diagnose their problems, dive into that menu of features, and mix and match them to compose an app that will achieve the desired outcome.

This breakthrough will be complemented by the seamless integration of UI, Data, and Logic, which is lacking today. Together, they will give the users the customizable, scalable, and frictionless software experience they seek.