Sutro in 2023 — and what’s next for us in 2024
Here at Sutro, our mission is simple- but incredibly complex under the hood. We want app development to be available for the entire world, no matter your skill level. In fact, with Sutro you can already describe the app you want to build, and the AI will get to work building it, ready for you to customise and publish.
But we still have much more to do. With that in mind, we’d like to share a zoomed-out overview of much of what we’ve done in 2023, and a look ahead at what’s next. If this is your first time reading about Sutro, please take a look at our introductory blog post, as well as our coverage on TechCrunch.
Back in March, OpenAI released GPT-4. This meant that we were able to upgrade Sutro’s initial text-prompt wizard to the new system, which has proven to be much better at understanding your app ideas and breaking them down into the understood components that Sutro AI needs to start putting together your app. Our own testing has shown that this has led to a much more accurate starting point once you enter the Sutro Studio to customise your app, further reducing the time from idea to production and publishing.
At this time, the initial AI wizard was the only opportunity to use a chat prompt within the Sutro journey. What we found from talking to initial customers was that they expected to continue using the chat paradigm, and that not having that option past the initial stage felt jarring.
So we decided to fix that, and built the AI assistant inside Sutro Studio! Whilst the studio already had a great deal of customisation options, the AI assistant can make making those changes a great deal faster, and also assist users with changes who may not be used to the visual design of something like our Studio.
Over the rest of 2023, we’ve also improved visibility controls, made some UI improvements, and improved our analytics tracking.
As part of our commitment to transparency, we’d like to share a little about what lies ahead for 2024.
Two projects that have already been started are making an entire booking and scheduling feature, including a full payment flow available to Sutro users. Additionally, we’re building advanced sorting and filtering options that any Sutro app will be able to use. We expect to ship both of these in early 2024.
We’re also working on how we support custom components. This is something that not everyone will need, but many folks will. Essentially, custom components will allow you to integrate bespoke and existing code into what you’ve already built with Sutro. This is important, because in many cases, part of your business might already exist, or require the use of something that it won’t make sense for Sutro to replicate natively. Custom components will allow you to bridge this gap.
Finally, over the last few months, we’ve also identified the need for major default UX improvements for Sutro apps. Whilst Sutro Studio already allows for UX and UI customisation, we feel that it’s important that apps already look great as soon as the AI has built them. Our dream is that as many Sutro apps as possible are “publish-ready” as soon as they are generated. This means that not only do they need to have all the functionality right away, but they need to look fantastic too. That won’t be achieved overnight, but we’ve already identified and shipped several improvements to get us much closer to this goal.
Sutro is already the fastest way to get from idea to production. So if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur wanting to get started as soon as possible, make sure to join our waitlist at sutro.xyz!
Let’s level the playing field.
Team Sutro
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