Honey Mittal is the Co-Founder & CEO at Locofy, previous to this he was the Chief Product Officer at 3 Sequence A-E startups (particularly – Homage, Finaccel & Wego) in early and development levels.
Locofy turns designs into production-ready frontend code for cell apps and net. It permits builders to ship merchandise 10x quicker utilizing present design instruments, tech stacks & workflows. Locofy provides a plugin for Figma and Adobe XD with which makes designs responsive for various display sizes.
What initially attracted you to laptop science and machine studying?
I initially needed to affix the Indian Air Power (and bought near choice) however after I couldn’t make it, I had 2 choices : Arithmetic/Economics and Pc Engineering. I bought a scholarship for Pc Science on the Nationwide College of Singapore, however not for the others, in order that was that.
My true curiosity in coding and constructing merchandise solely began growing in the direction of the top of college after I constructed an award successful product on trade on the College of California, Santa Cruz, adopted by an internship at Microsoft when i began constructing cell apps (earlier than the App Retailer was launched by Steve Jobs) and I began to see my code fixing actual world issues.
There was no going again from that time. I noticed I liked a extra holistic method at downside fixing and took the soar into product administration and met my cofounder Sohaib (in 2014) who was a significantly better engineer than me. Working with Sohaib, we’ve got labored on journey, healthcare, and dev tooling issues for greater than a decade now, and someplace mid-way we began tinkering with machine studying to construct higher advice engines, higher monetary end result choices based mostly on mountains of information, and now code era immediately from designs.
The current breakthroughs within the subject have solely made it simpler, cheaper, and quicker to unravel issues that have been simply not doable even 5-10 years again. That prompted us to start out constructing Locofy.ai in 2021, on the crossroads of the growing want for a design to code answer like Locofy, and the breakthroughs in ML.
In 2016-2017, alongside along with your present co-founder you constructed one of many world’s quickest journey cell websites. What was this website and what did you be taught from the expertise?
This was wego.com‘s cell web site. In 2016 – a number of Asian firms have been considering killing cell web sites utterly, particularly in rising markets the place units have been low cost and cell web was sluggish. Flipkart even famously killed their cell web site for his or her app (and later retracted), however we confronted an identical dilemma at Wego, the place our apps have been considerably higher than our cell website for efficiency, expertise, and unit economics.
We selected to rebuild our cell web site to work like an app, utilizing service employees, AMP and PWA ideas with none prior expertise in constructing for the net. My cofounder Sohaib, our VP Engg (Tien) and I labored on this for 2-3 months and constructed our new wego cell website and that grew to become the quickest cell journey website (amongst 150+ websites).
Our key takeaways – firstly the belief that we weren’t simply cell app specialists, and should you put first rules considering to any downside/ any know-how and put a workforce of decided people collectively, something was doable. This helps us until date, as a result of Locofy is a devtool and we by no means considered whether or not we had any prior expertise constructing for engineers. We simply considered it as an issue (one thing we confronted each day), and went for it. Additionally, the trio found out that we work nicely collectively and eight years later – we’re constructing Locofy collectively once more! If not for that mission, the three of us might not have realized how nicely we work collectively.
When did you first understand that low-code and no-code was the long run?
In 2020-2021, the entire tech world went loopy, with engineering salaries going by the roof, fueled by public market tech shares and a surge in VC funding into tech startups. We confronted this ourselves at our final firm. Hiring and retaining good engineers appeared near inconceivable and cheaper offshoring markets like India modified eternally as a result of sturdy home traction. We studied the market and found that for each 20 open CS jobs, there was 1 CS scholar graduating within the USA – shedding some mild on not simply the scenario we have been in, but additionally the occasions to come back.
Upon speaking to our mentors and founder mates, we not solely validated the issue but additionally bought funding provides from everybody we talked to, inside 48 hours of even serious about fixing the downside of writing ui code from scratch with AI-led automation. The truth that we have been fixing our personal downside additionally bought the curiosity of our fellow builders who confirmed curiosity in becoming a member of us. In a short time, it was clear to us that the time to affix the low-code revolution was right here.
How did this transition to you launching Locofy?
Sohaib – top-of-the-line net/cell/gaming builders I’ve ever met (I price him within the prime 1% on the earth) was tremendous pissed off in our final mission on the earlier firm. It required him + 2 builders to put in writing 500 screens revamp. Once I requested him why he did not do one thing about it as one of many prime builders round, it didn’t take him lengthy to come back again and inform me that we will automate UI code / 80% of the frontend duties. Within the subsequent 2 days we met some founder mates and so they all validated that we have been onto one thing. We registered the corporate and raised $1M over the identical weekend. We launched the primary beta product 5-6 months later in Jan 2022.
Locofy takes a little bit of a distinct method to low-code, are you able to talk about how the platform takes present designs and converts them to code?
Sure, our analysis confirmed us 2 clear outcomes.
- The marketplace for no-code helped principally non-developers and designers. Nice market, however not one thing that we have been focused on.
- The marketplace for low-code that principally helped professional builders and designers, however valued issues like code high quality and protecting builders inside their stack as their prime priorities.
We resonated extra in the direction of #2 i.e. constructing for professional builders and designers, however we discovered not one of the gamers within the design to code market doing even half a good job. In the event that they did, we might not solely not construct Locofy, but additionally begin utilizing these choices to construct the five hundred screens we needed to construct. As builders and designers ourselves, we knew our groups most well-liked their instruments (Figma as an example) and tech stacks (React, Nextjs for instance) and our thesis was to simply adapt and slot in (and therefore, additionally strive the software with out making modifications), whereas working in the direction of top quality code because the differentiator.
Locofy obtained some rave opinions and a number of suggestions from ProductHunt and different platforms. What have been some key takeaways from this suggestions?
We launched on Product Hunt 6 months after the primary smooth launch. The concept was to open up the lids and get suggestions from extra builders outdoors of networks. Based mostly on that suggestions, we higher understood who our superb buyer profile was, why they liked us, their ache factors and in addition who’re we higher off not catering to in any respect (and therefore get extra centered).
In open beta, we don’t block anybody from attempting Locofy, which means better suggestions velocity, but additionally a number of noise. We used the suggestions to be taught quicker and concentrate on customers who liked the platform, and customers who have been just a few modifications away from loving it. All of it culminated into Locofy Lightning – a 1-click answer powered by Massive Design Fashions. It made the platform extra correct and very easy to make use of. We are going to proceed studying with the identical method in free beta till we’re able to monetize ultimately.
Claims for the quantity of growth time that’s saved has a variety, what’s the common time financial savings that you’ve personally seen?
It’s troublesome to offer one quantity that matches all. Some firms with lean groups constructing an app from scratch have informed us they saved 80% of their growth time. Others constructing for present codebases have saved 50% of the time. For us, if we save something within the above 50% vary, we all know this can be very worthwhile right this moment, whereas we work on growing that much more.
What’s your imaginative and prescient for the way forward for low-code platforms and Locofy?
Frontend growth is a broad area – we need to assist make it simple first and outline this class ranging from design to UI code.
However in the long term, our imaginative and prescient is to assist go from thought to launch to impression a lot quicker and cheaper and make groups focus extra on the advanced engineering issues and enterprise mannequin innovation greater than worrying about constructing interfaces. This may assist the following era of class defining firms construct their merchandise quicker and cheaper and finally assist clear up extra international issues with the restricted provide of builders we face right this moment.
Based mostly in your journey with Locofy.ai, what recommendation would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs trying to enterprise into the AI trade?
Very merely, AI could be very highly effective and opens so many prospects, however you should focus first on the issue you are fixing. Discover an enormous downside after which see learn how to clear up the issue and the way AI makes it more practical/cheaper/quicker, relatively than the opposite means spherical. In 2023, I’ve seen too many new AI firms constructing one thing “cool” that does not actually clear up an actual downside. It jogs my memory of the saying “if all you’ve got is a hammer, every little thing seems to be like a nail” and that is actually the case with a number of new AI entrepreneurs who jumped shortly to experience this wave.
Thanks for the nice interview, I look ahead to following the progress of the Locofy workforce, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to Locofy.