Going on their eighth year in business, Blackburn Labs owners Rob and wife Julie Blackburn have worked with businesses ranging from the healthcare sector and life sciences to gaming and education. The boutique software company has projects spread across the U.S. but is based in Rhode Island.
As a company that works with a lot of startups, Blackburn said sometimes the client and company don't match up. So, instead of turning them away, Blackburn Labs built DevLess, a free, no-code app development platform for small businesses and organizations.
"We wanted to provide a solution to those clients for which it didn't make sense to contract a software development agency like ours to build a ground-up solution," he said. "A number of users have found it helpful already, including a few healthcare organizations and the local non-profit organization, PRCRI."
No-code development refers to web development that allows non-programmers to create software using a simplified graphical user interface. While there are loads of options available currently, Blackburn said many of them require some programming and engineering knowledge to get the most out of them.
Blackburn, who has been working as a software engineer since his teenage years, founded Blackburn Labs in 2015 after working in the corporate field and then as a consultant.
"We have a lot of clients come in asking for apps and they're usually cool ideas, but sometimes it just doesn't make sense to hire an agency like ours to do the job," he said. "It's usually something we can do, but the cost is more than expected. With DevLess, we can build a prototype, see if it fits the bill and move on from there."
Blackburn said DevLess won't do everything, but it wasn't meant to. The platform's strength, he said, lies in its flexibility. He said it excels in content delivery, working as a support guide or to deliver tech documents or training. Other companies have used it to deliver question and answer programs for employees or users. It also works well in delivering one off products, he added.
"The first version started off organically and over time, it's been evolving as needs pop up," he said. "It's also a great tool for our internal developers, who can work on it while we're waiting for other contracts to come in."
Over the summer, the company announced a partnership with AppSumo and launched Devless on the AppSumo discovery platform. In December, the company’s chief data science officer and co-owner of Blackburn Labs, Julie Blackburn, was awarded the Rhode Island Monthly and Tech10 Advisory Group’s 2022 Tech10 Award.
