Developer spotlight | How a half-day hackathon turned into a thriving business

Roberto Tremonti of Omnidea started as a staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Gold Channel Partner. During one of the company’s hackathons, he developed an app in half a day that has grown into a thriving business. His app, General Caster, was created to address a user need he identified. After rising to $350K ARR within 1 year, Roberto shares his journey and provides tips for building and growing an app on the monday app marketplace.

Why did you build your first marketplace app?

As a staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Gold Channel partner in Italy, we know the power of the platform and the missing features. Our clients constantly asked us for a tool to perform formulas and cast results into columns that they could then use in dashboards, trigger automations, or used as input for further workflows.

 

What type of app is General Caster?

General Caster is an integration app built from a set of recipes (trigger/action). A user chooses a suitable recipe based on which event should trigger the action. Then types a formula using a spreadsheet-like syntax and column references from which to get values. Finally, the user sets the destination column which will be updated with the formula result.

 

How did you come up with the idea for this app and how did you start the process?

We joined a staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud hackathon in 2020 and we built the first version in just a couple of days. We built this in order to address our clients’ demands during the time period before the hackathon. During the presentation to the dev community we received such great feedback that we decided to make it a commercial product.

 

What technology and integrations did you use when building the app?

The first version was built in NodeJS with limited functionalities in terms of available formulas. We switched to a PHP/MySQL structure with the release of v2 after a few months. This allowed us to offer more powerful functions.

 

What makes a successful app launch?

The most important factor was building a solution to a problem that wasn’t addressed. Being an early mover in the app marketplace put us in a leading position. You then need to keep your app up to date in order to be ready to meet the clients requests and the new features of the platform.

 

What’s your roadmap for the future?

We are growing rapidly with more than $40k of added ARR each month, and working on developing the next version of General Caster – It will feature a huge set of functions specifically dedicated to staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud.

In terms of growing the team, we are now looking for someone that could help us with the daily customer support and with the development.

 

Do you have any tips for future developers who will build apps for Monday marketplace?

1. Discover the missing feature in the platform and create a simple app.
2. Offer something useful for most users.
3. Don’t copy other apps.
4. Keep your app up to date.
5. Offer good customer support.

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