In the evolving landscape of software development, the demand for powerful, scalable applications often outpaces the supply of engineers. This gap has fueled the rise of no-code and low-code platforms, but many come with limitations in scalability and security. Enter Xano, a platform dedicated to providing a robust, enterprise-grade no-code backend. We sat down with Prakash Chandran, co-founder of Xano, to explore his journey from leading design at Google to tackling one of the biggest challenges in modern development. Prakash shares how his experiences, including a self-described “failed startup,” shaped his vision for Xano. He discusses the platform’s unique approach of focusing solely on the backend, empowering citizen developers to build complex, scalable applications without writing a single line of code, and moving beyond the prototyping phase to full-scale production. This conversation offers deep insights into the future of software creation and the power of abstracting complexity.
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Nataraj: On the Startup Project, I like to feature interesting products solving interesting problems. As I explored Xano, I found it’s at the intersection of a couple of very interesting trends in how we develop and scale applications. I thought it would be useful for our audience to discuss what you’re building at Xano. Before we get into that, can you give a little introduction about yourself and your career before starting Xano?
Prakash Chandran: Absolutely. After I graduated from Cal Poly Pomona, I joined a small startup called Picasa. Google ended up buying Picasa, and it became Google Photos. My coworkers called me very lucky because I had no idea; I just joined, and then that happened. I spent the next eight and a half years at Google. I had the privilege of leading the design on Google Calendar for a bit and led the design and research team for Google Enterprise, which became G Suite and Google Workspace. I had an amazing career there, learning a lot and working with brilliant people. After Google, I left for the startup world. After a short break, I did a startup, which I call three and a half years of getting the crap kicked out of myself. Then I went into consulting, as one does after a failed startup, for a couple of years before starting Xano. That’s been the trajectory. At Google, I evolved from a UX person to a product person, and after doing a startup, you become more horizontal across the business.
Nataraj: I have this thesis about software products: cracking the right software product is about finding the right abstraction layer at which people want to work. Exploring Xano, your background makes sense. Someone like you starting Xano makes sense; you need an eye for what level the product should be designed at.
Prakash Chandran: That’s a keen observation. One of the main pains I felt during my startup was my lack of control as a design and product person over the engineering process. You have to pay for an expensive engineer. They’re kind of like a car mechanic. If they tell you something is going to take a month to make and tens of thousands of dollars, you just have to believe them and hope that it works out.
Nataraj: With that, explain what Xano is.
Prakash Chandran: I always knew that was a painful process. Then I learned that 80% of the time and resources in software development are spent on the backend. So, Xano is a scalable no-code backend. For those who don’t know the no-code space, it’s about helping people create software without knowing how to code. No-code has been around for a long time; a tool like Squarespace is considered no-code for website building. It’s gone through a couple of different iterations. We’re part of a new wave of no-code where you can build anything and scale without limits. We 100% focus on the backend—the server, the database, the API layer—and we connect to any front end you want.
Nataraj: What kind of applications does Xano enable people to build?
Prakash Chandran: Xano is really meant to be a visual programming language. It’s Turing complete. Anything you can articulate in a software programming language, you can do in Xano without code. In terms of the types of applications we see built, we see everything from a dog-walking application all the way up to a customer advocacy platform at a big company like Qualtrics. It’s kind of like asking what you can build with JavaScript; the use cases are endless. In the same way, we see our customers building many types of things on Xano.
Nataraj: One of the assumptions people often have when they hear a product is categorized as no-code is that it might be good for experimentation, but not for running production applications. Can you really go from a demo or a hobby project to actually running something that makes money or building a company on top of it? How do you see Xano fitting in?
Prakash Chandran: I always say that no-code and low-code have some baggage associated with them. This is because the no-code vendors and tools of the past have had limitations, generally around scalability, security, reliability, and compliance. The hesitation is that no-code is something you should just prototype and tinker with, not take seriously at scale. But as I mentioned, these next-generation tools are architected fundamentally differently. For example, as a no-code backend, we are architected differently than some of our predecessors that might look like a spreadsheet on steroids, where scalability and compliance are layered in as an afterthought. We were architected from the very beginning to be enterprise-grade, portable, allowing you to move it to your own infrastructure and control the resources yourself. The flexibility in what you can build was also addressed very early on. The concern is definitely valid, but one of the things we hope to do is break that stereotype and show that you can start with no-code tools like Xano and scale without limits.
Nataraj: While exploring Xano, it almost felt like… because I was a backend and frontend engineer, I’ve played around with different backend stacks. One of the problems I see is that building a small application is getting really complicated, even for seasoned developers, because things are so rapidly changing. It’s becoming more complex even to get started. What is your thought process on this? Am I just a bad developer, or is this really happening?
Prakash Chandran: No, not at all. You call out something that’s pretty important. As we’ve introduced new technologies to handle different use cases, especially on the DevOps or site reliability side, it gives the consumer more choices, which leads to confusion. The most important thing when building software as a business is validating it in the market. You want to get it out the door. We believe vendors should be responsible for making good long-term decisions regarding infrastructure and DevOps, so you can focus on the business logic and your relationship with customers. The more quickly you can do that, the better. You’re either going to fail and learn and then iterate, or you’re going to get it right and scale your business on something you can trust. A general rule of thumb we tell everyone is you’re always going to rebuild. No matter what stack you build on, you’re going to rebuild it at some point. So the stack you can use to iterate the quickest is probably the best one. We wanted that to be true to our spirit, but on a trusted infrastructure, so if they did find product-market fit, they could rely on it to scale with them.
Nataraj: Whenever I talk to early-stage founders, what they start with and where they end up is slightly different. Talk to me about the process of finding product-market fit for Xano.
Prakash Chandran: We generally knew that this no-code, low-code space was growing. More people were turning to it despite its limitations because there’s more demand than there are engineers. We saw this limitation on the backend regarding security and scalability. So we made two decisions. One, we decided to 100% focus just on the backend and not do the full stack. This was the non-obvious thing everyone said was probably not a good idea. The second piece is we decided not to abstract away the core principles of a software development language. For example, we chose to call it an API instead of a workflow or a Zap. We chose to call it a webhook. We believe you should teach the next generation of software developers by abstracting away the code but making those concepts more accessible. Those two decisions were non-obvious. Getting product-market fit started with a landing page as we were building, saying, “Hey, this is a no-code backend. If you’re interested, sign up for early access.” Then once you have people using the product, you see how quickly they start relying on it. The next step is, will they pay for it? And over time, you see that word of mouth grow and how sticky it becomes. We got lucky in that we had this non-obvious approach and we thought it was a need in the market.
Nataraj: Because the backend has so many components, was there a specific customer use case that gave you the confidence that you had really found something?
Prakash Chandran: It wasn’t a specific customer or use case, but Xano was actually born out of a development agency. It started as a command-line tool to make backend creation easier without having to grow the team. When you see hundreds of different use cases, you realize most software is the same. They have the same kind of infrastructure setup, the same database. There are the same motions you’re doing over and over. For us, it was less about the specific use case and more about the procedure and those steps you had to go through just to start validating your idea. You could do this on other tools, but you couldn’t rely on it once you started to get usage and scale, or if security was a prerequisite. So that was the approach we took, and we found that being pretty horizontal has worked for us so far.
Nataraj: You mentioned it came out of a studio. Is it from your consulting, or were your co-founders running a studio that gave you that insight?
Prakash Chandran: My co-founders were running the development agency. I had done some consulting work as an individual for that agency. It was in doing some of that joint client work where I had seen the evolution of Xano from the very beginning as a command-line tool to a decade later, having served hundreds of use cases. I told my two co-founders, “If we took this and we productized this, I think we could serve a pretty big need in the market and we might have something special.” That’s how it came about.
Nataraj: We’ve evolved products based on the cloud, right? We had infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and now probably with AI, intelligence as a service. We are moving higher in that abstraction level. I was thinking at some point someone has to abstract away why everyone has to build a scalable website. You’re sort of an evolution of abstracting away that complexity from a backend perspective.
Prakash Chandran: 100%. We could serve that use case pretty well. A lot of companies in the no-code space are very good at building building blocks, these connectors that connect one service to another. We took the other approach and built the engine and the foundation, this visual development layer on top of an engine that abstracts away the DevOps component—the infrastructure, Kubernetes, Docker, Postgres. You don’t have to worry about those things. So if someone wants to build, which you can do in Xano today, an Amazon.com template with the right database schema, and you want to be in multiple geographic regions, you can start with that business logic layer and the database. And then from the infrastructure side, we’re able to deploy in whatever region you want. It’s really just building the foundation where people agree this is the right layer of abstraction for business logic in the backend, and then they’re able to move it as they grow.
Nataraj: Who is the ideal user today for Xano?
Prakash Chandran: We service primarily the citizen developer. If you haven’t heard of that persona before, it’s a Gartner-defined persona. You can think of them as a product owner type. They’re a systems thinker, they don’t know how to code, but they need to build software leveraging low-code tools. There are also developers on Xano as well, but primarily we serve the citizen developer. Now, there’s a wide spectrum of experience. People more on the citizen side will use tools like Airtable or Google Sheets because it’s very easy to pick up. That serves simple use cases very well. We serve an advanced citizen developer who needs to graduate out of tools like Airtable when their needs require scalability, security, and reliability. That’s who we serve. And we’re constantly working to make ourselves more accessible to the broader citizen developer.
Nataraj: Let’s talk about how you’re doing as a company. I think you raised your Series A. What is your revenue split between enterprise and SMB or citizen developers?
Prakash Chandran: We launched in January of 2021. Since then, we’ve seen some pretty exponential growth, largely due to word of mouth. We’re just a backend, so we’re front-end agnostic. All the different front-end forums, whether it’s a JavaScript forum or a no-code front-end forum, mention us. We have over 70,000 backends that we’ve deployed. In terms of the enterprise versus self-serve split, it’s about 20% enterprise revenue, and the other 80% is self-serve. We’re obviously working right now to develop our muscle in the enterprise go-to-market motion, but for right now, we are mostly known in the small to medium-sized business space. In the enterprise, no-code is still very early in adoption, and we’re trying to prove ourselves there.
Nataraj: How is the competition in the space, specifically at the abstraction layer you are operating at, focused on the backend?
Prakash Chandran: There’s a spectrum between citizen and developer, and then a spectrum from developer to engineer. We service the upper end of the citizen developer into the midway point of becoming an engineer. In that space, there are a number of different tools. When you think about the backend specifically, if I’m going to pick the number one competitor, I think we serve different markets, but we definitely see them, is Supabase. Supabase is basically Postgres in the cloud. They’ve done an amazing job. Great founders, they execute very well. But I think there are tools that believe making a developer’s life easier is the future, and then there are tools like us that believe the next generation of software creators are going to look more like citizen developers. We serve these two markets, but because we serve the upper end, we tend to see each other there.
Nataraj: You mentioned you almost thought of Xano as a design language. That gave me a thought that AI could use this design language to make things happen on Xano. How are you thinking about AI intersecting with Xano?
Prakash Chandran: I mentioned visual development because we use all core foundational software engineering principles—variables, loops, conditionals—things that every programmer knows, and we visualize that. When it comes to AI, AI understands these concepts. AI has been such a beautiful thing because it has opened up so much more opportunity and built awareness around creating software and making it more accessible. People can ask AI to generate simple applications for them. I love AI for that reason. That being said, something else is needed to pick up where AI leaves off. If I say I want to build an Uber-type application and you give the same prompt, we’re probably going to receive two different code sets. Even if we don’t, what I mean in my mind with an Uber application is very different than what you mean. In that case, we’re going to keep re-prompting until it spits out obfuscated code. What’s better is you need to pick up from that scaffolding and take a visual canvas where you can infuse your intention. We believe Xano will be the visual canvas that can pick up where AI leaves off. I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying AI is going to replace coders or replace no-code. I don’t think that’s going to be the case. They’re going to work very well together.
Nataraj: I’m curious, what are some of the techniques you guys use to acquire new customers?
Prakash Chandran: One thing that we’ve done very well is create lots of valuable YouTube content. If you go to our YouTube channel, you will see videos starting from, “How is software made? What is a backend?” all the way to, “How do you merge two JSON arrays?” It is very important to continually put out content because this is how people consume it these days. It’s probably our largest source of high-quality traffic. The beautiful thing about content is it just keeps giving; some of it is just evergreen. We also started running office hours, which was pretty unique at the time. Every user, even a non-paid user, has the opportunity every week to come and meet with the team and get their questions answered. If they ask something unique that can help other people, we clip that and put it on YouTube. The final thing is having a community tool that can be indexed on the questions that are answered and searched for. The chances are the problems your customers are having today is a problem a customer is going to have three months from now. It’s a mistake to have a community on Discord or Slack because all of that knowledge evaporates.
Nataraj: I’ve seen this in other tools which became ecosystems, where you have marketplaces of people who can develop things. Are you seeing a marketplace evolving in Xano?
Prakash Chandran: Absolutely. We already have a marketplace of developers, agencies, and coaches. We’re currently working on a marketplace where people will be able to release and soon be able to sell capability, all using the Xano platform. The ecosystem and this partner marketplace are extraordinarily important. We’re even working on a certification process because our agency partners need to separate themselves from everyone else that says they build on Xano. So we have certification programs that we’re actively working on as well.
Nataraj: It looks like you should almost rebrand yourself to calling as a ‘backend cloud’ instead of a no-code backend. We’re almost at the end of our conversation. What are you consuming right now that’s influencing your thinking?
Prakash Chandran: I listen to a lot of podcasts. I subscribe to podcasts like the All-In podcast, Revenue Builders, The Logan Bartlett Show, and Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy. I learn something every single week. Some people will work out to music; I’m working out to podcasts. I’m listening on my commute. I’m one of those types that listen at 2x and skip around because I’m at the point where I kind of know the nuggets of wisdom I’m looking for. I’m just so grateful for the community of podcasters that have amazing guests I can learn from about management style, growing a business, or customer acquisition.
Nataraj: Who are your mentors that have helped your career?
Prakash Chandran: There are moments of wisdom you pull from all of these podcasts and individuals that influence you. Two people I’ve never met but who have really influenced my way of thinking are Chamath Palihapitiya, who has a wonderful framework of intellectual honesty and seeking the truth, and Dev Ittycheria from MongoDB, for his philosophy around management. In terms of in-person people, I used to work with Adrian Graham and Carl Showalter. They were at Google with me, sold their company to Facebook, and then created Seesaw. Working with them directly, they’re just brilliant individuals. They work really hard and always have this healthy dose of skeptical optimism that has taught me to build in a very measured way, where you have your head in the clouds but your feet on the ground.
Nataraj: One final question, what do you know about being a founder that you wish you knew before starting Xano?
Prakash Chandran: I’m very happy with all of the mistakes that I’ve made. Obviously, it’s shaped where we are today. But if there was one thing, it’s that the things that matter take time. I think when we’re younger, we’re always in a hurry. We think there might be a silver bullet shortcut and we’re always looking for it. But when you’re trying to do something impactful that will have a long-lasting impact, there’s no shortcut. It just takes day-in, day-out work, trying, and learning. It’s important to align yourself with your zone of excellence and what gets you excited because it’s going to be a very long journey. In this case, Xano is it for me. I really feel like I’m doing what I’m meant to do. But when I was younger, especially before my first startup, I didn’t really have that mindset.
Nataraj: That’s a good note to stop the conversation. Again, thanks for coming on the show, Prakash. Really looking forward to what Xano will do in the future.
Prakash Chandran: I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.
Conclusion
Prakash’s journey with Xano highlights a critical shift in software development towards more accessible, yet powerful, tools. By focusing on an enterprise-grade, scalable backend, Xano empowers a new generation of builders to bring their ideas to life without being limited by traditional coding barriers.
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