I don't normally comment here, but I'll bite on this one. ;tldr - I find the goal and customers here confusing, questionable, and not well thought-out. Additionally I find the founders insulting and naive in the article.

I still don't get who is the current and future customer even after reading the other posts here and other available material. I fail to see line of business users writing anything in this as it is too complicated for them and too close to programming. I cannot see an experienced dev introducing this in a stack and investing the time in learning the tool/libraries, building a system visually (super slow), and tying themselves to a 3rd party unknown start-up this tightly. As for the indie developers mentioned in the article who cannot build a scalable back-end, who are these people? Why are they developing apps? Maybe I am a grouching aging developer, but I really don't understand who these people are - "Indie developers comfortable building the user-facing side of an app themselves, but who would need assistance to build out a scalable backend."

I would argue that if you believe you are a person who builds apps, you should be capable of actually building the app you are building. Beyond that, you are just another person with an idea, which in our world means absolutely nothing. While I can see how people can build a prototype not knowing exactly what they are doing and become successful, the keyword here is prototype. A prototype doesn't usually need to be scalable. If you want and need scalability, you need to build something carefully which matches your app's use cases and real-world usage. This is a difficult problem and not one that can be solved by plugging in anything and waiving a wand.

Listen, I've worked as a developer since the late 80s, consultant since the 90s, spent many years at Microsoft, and worked for a few startups. I suppose I am one of those weird people who doesn't care about the tools, language, whatever, just give me the task and I will find the best tools to do it, and learn them in hours if I must to get the job done so I am open to anything to help, but this app makes me feel like I live in the Twilight Zone. I have seen this exact product in some shape or form so many times whether it was Visual XXX or ABC Builder or even some layer on a product like SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Wordpress, whatever. The closest tools that have had at least practical success I've seen have been Excel and Hypercard. My hats off to you if you can make it work, but really I have my doubts. There is nothing written so far that is convincing me or more importantly, that would convince any of my previous customers (including private, government, and start-ups) to use this. And I assure you that my past customers would like nothing more than to take shortcuts, not pay for my hours, and/or find some way to in-house many development tasks. There are just so many things wrong here I don't know where to start. I'm not saying this to be mean, but rather I am genuinely curious who would use this and why. On top of this, you have tons of related competition, and hype around everything from Wolfram Language to Eden in this space if we broaden the scope to visual builders in general.

I think it's a bit telling that one of the first comments is, "Treeline is different." I am pretty sure everyone who builds a product like this says exactly this, including my former colleagues who built real, very large, and even well-selling products. I have never seen any product genuinely succeed in its goal here, at best these products just sold the sucker's line and did not retain their customers long-term. Alternatively, these products succeeded in something else, but failed in the "app" or "back-end" builder category.