In March 2021, we successfully sold our first company. It was an exhilarating milestone as a team and one of the most exciting times of our lives. We built an enterprise SaaS company from ideation to becoming a high growth, high profitability business and one of the leaders in its industry. In the journey, we made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot. Even with the acquired knowledge of how hard it is to build a startup, we couldn't wait to do it again. And this time, it was to build the product we wished we always had: Blaze.
A problem we frequently experienced at our previous company was a need to build internal tools to improve sales and operations, but there were never enough engineering resources available. Our Account Managers wanted a simple tool that could quickly lookup what marketing emails a customer had received so they can have better context in their sales conversations. Our Operations Analyst wanted a dashboard that combined customer data from multiple places (our sales CRM + customer support database + marketing list) into one to have a comprehensive list of all prospects and active customers. As the CEO, I wanted a live dashboard of KPIs across all teams. We all understood exactly the kind of tool we needed and its functionality, but we also knew it would require engineering work to execute. What if we had software that enabled us to build all of it without any code? That would supercharge our already talented team.
We made Blaze so that anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit can build custom software with no code and build it fast. You know how the tool should work, but maybe you don't have the coding skills to implement. With Blaze, we give you everything you need to build the tool from start to finish.
Justyna, Bruno, and I had worked together for the past 9 years building a leading global digital signage software called Enplug. Our product powered screens in elevators, corporate offices, stadiums, manufacturing facilities, banks, and colleges. From Google's offices to elevators in Finland to Dodger Stadium, we helped organizations show real-time, custom content on screens. We knew nothing about digital signage when we first started in 2012, but when we were acquired 9 years later, Enplug was recognized throughout the industry as the innovator with customers around the world who loved our product.
When I first met Justyna and Bruno, I already knew about their impressive engineering backgrounds. They both had led massive engineering teams in the past at companies like Microsoft and Motorola. After being co-founders with them for nearly a decade, I not only know they're two of the most talented coders in the world, but that they're people I always want to work with because of their integrity, worth ethic, creativity, and love of building great products. You can find people with some of those traits. To have all of them is special.
Blaze came so naturally to us because of three main reasons. One, it's a product that would have been so positively impactful for our teammates at our old company. Two, building Blaze leverages our past experiences and learnings in the B2B SaaS space. Third, it's a huge challenge and what we might have once upon a time found daunting, big ideas now energized us.
Asking our past teammates and friends who are managers at a variety of different companies, it was clear that Blaze would solve a ton of their issues. The existing no-code and low-code solutions didn't work. We knew exactly where they were coming from.
We had used many of the no-code and low-code tools out there and they couldn't fulfill our common use cases. No-code solutions we tried had a narrow scope of what you can build and often required learning new language (although not a coding language, that no-code tool's language nonetheless). The low-code solutions had the capability of building more custom systems, but they still required code and if you weren't an engineer, you really can't use it. Blaze is addressing the opportunity to create something that is both no-code and powerful. We want to make super intuitive to build complex workflows, customer portals, sales tools, and more. What Squarespace or Wix have done to make creating a website super easy, we're doing the same for applications.
So why hasn't a company done what we're doing? To put it simply, it's really hard. But with the team we have at Blaze, we're making advanced no-code tools a reality.
We're here to build the smarter no-code tool. One that finally does what you want fast and reliably. Our vision of the future is one where you no longer need to know how to code or be an engineer in order to build complex multi-system applications, connect with databases, or infuse AI and automation into your software.
We want to share with you Blaze's Core Beliefs. These are the tenets that drive our product, team, and mission.
To build the best no-code product, we believe Blaze has to be intuitive, enable users to build exactly what they want, ensure security of our software and data, and provide our users with top-notch customer support. We know it's going to take time and all our energy to fully achieve each of these.
Thank you for getting to learn more about Blaze! You're one of the first to see what we're up to. We'd love to invite you on our journey to be one of our alpha customers and experience smarter no-code. Try Blaze out here.
-Nanxi Liu, Co-CEO and Co-Founder
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