Honey Mittal is the Co-Founder & CEO at Locofy, previous to this he was the Chief Product Officer at 3 Collection A-E startups (specifically – Homage, Finaccel & Wego) in early and progress phases.
Locofy turns designs into production-ready frontend code for cell apps and net. It allows builders to ship merchandise 10x sooner utilizing present design instruments, tech stacks & workflows. Locofy presents a plugin for Figma and Adobe XD with which makes designs responsive for various display screen sizes.
What initially attracted you to pc science and machine studying?
I initially needed to hitch the Indian Air Pressure (and acquired near choice) however after I couldn’t make it, I had 2 choices : Arithmetic/Economics and Laptop Engineering. I acquired a scholarship for Laptop 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 direction of the tip of college after I constructed an award successful product on change 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 spotted I cherished a extra holistic strategy at downside fixing and took the leap into product administration and met my cofounder Sohaib (in 2014) who was a a lot better engineer than me. Working with Sohaib, we’ve 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 suggestion engines, higher monetary consequence choices primarily based on mountains of knowledge, and now code technology immediately from designs.
The current breakthroughs within the area have solely made it simpler, cheaper, and sooner to unravel issues that had been simply not potential even 5-10 years again. That prompted us to begin constructing Locofy.ai in 2021, on the crossroads of the rising want for a design to code resolution like Locofy, and the breakthroughs in ML.
In 2016-2017, alongside together with your present co-founder you constructed one of many world’s quickest journey cell websites. What was this website and what did you study from the expertise?
This was wego.com‘s cell web site. In 2016 – a number of Asian firms had been considering killing cell web sites utterly, particularly in rising markets the place gadgets had been low cost and cell web was gradual. 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 had 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 staff, 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 turned the quickest cell journey website (amongst 150+ websites).
Our key takeaways – firstly the belief that we weren’t simply cell app consultants, and should you put first rules pondering to any downside/ any expertise and put a group of decided people collectively, something was potential. This helps us until date, as a result of Locofy is a devtool and we by no means thought of whether or not we had any prior expertise constructing for engineers. We simply considered it as an issue (one thing we confronted day by day), and went for it. Additionally, the trio discovered that we work properly collectively and eight years later – we’re constructing Locofy collectively once more! If not for that mission, the three of us could not have realized how properly 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 way of 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 unimaginable and cheaper offshoring markets like India modified without end as a consequence of sturdy home traction. We studied the market and found that for each 20 open CS jobs, there was 1 CS pupil graduating within the USA – shedding some mild on not simply the state of affairs we had been in, but in addition the instances to return.
Upon speaking to our mentors and founder mates, we not solely validated the issue but in addition acquired funding presents from everybody we talked to, inside 48 hours of even interested by fixing the downside of writing ui code from scratch with AI-led automation. The truth that we had been fixing our personal downside additionally acquired 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 hitch the low-code revolution was right here.
How did this transition to you launching Locofy?
Sohaib – among the best net/cell/gaming builders I’ve ever met (I fee him within the high 1% on the planet) was tremendous pissed off in our final mission on the earlier firm. It required him + 2 builders to put in writing 500 screens revamp. After I requested him why he did not do one thing about it as one of many high builders round, it didn’t take him lengthy to return again and inform me that we are able to automate UI code / 80% of the frontend duties. Within the subsequent 2 days we met some founder mates they usually all validated that we had 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 special strategy to low-code, are you able to focus on 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 largely non-developers and designers. Nice market, however not one thing that we had been thinking about.
- The marketplace for low-code that largely helped professional builders and designers, however valued issues like code high quality and preserving builders inside their stack as their high priorities.
We resonated extra in 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 an honest job. In the event that they did, we’d not solely not construct Locofy, but in addition 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 adjustments), whereas working in direction of prime quality code because the differentiator.
Locofy obtained some rave opinions and a number of suggestions from ProductHunt and different platforms. What had been some key takeaways from this suggestions?
We launched on Product Hunt 6 months after the primary gentle launch. The concept was to open up the lids and get suggestions from extra builders exterior of networks. Primarily based on that suggestions, we higher understood who our superb buyer profile was, why they cherished us, their ache factors and in addition who’re we higher off not catering to in any respect (and therefore get extra targeted).
In open beta, we don’t block anybody from attempting Locofy, which means higher suggestions velocity, but in addition a number of noise. We used the suggestions to study sooner and give attention to customers who cherished the platform, and customers who had been a number of modifications away from loving it. All of it culminated into Locofy Lightning – a 1-click resolution powered by Giant Design Fashions. It made the platform extra correct and very easy to make use of. We’ll proceed studying with the identical strategy 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 advised 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 beneficial right this moment, whereas we work on rising 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 straightforward 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 sooner 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 subsequent technology of class defining firms construct their merchandise sooner and cheaper and finally assist clear up extra international issues with the restricted provide of builders we face right this moment.
Primarily based in your journey with Locofy.ai, what recommendation would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to enterprise into the AI business?
Very merely, AI may be very highly effective and opens so many potentialities, however it is advisable to focus first on the issue you are fixing. Discover an enormous downside after which see the way to clear up the issue and the way AI makes it more practical/cheaper/sooner, relatively than the opposite method 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 gotten is a hammer, the whole lot seems to be like a nail” and that is definitely the case with a number of new AI entrepreneurs who jumped rapidly to trip this wave.
Thanks for the nice interview, I sit up for following the progress of the Locofy group, readers who want to study extra ought to go to Locofy.
