Honey Mittal is the Co-Founder & CEO at Locofy, previous to this he was the Chief Product Officer at 3 Sequence A-E startups (specifically – Homage, Finaccel & Wego) in early and development phases.
Locofy turns designs into production-ready frontend code for cellular apps and internet. It allows builders to ship merchandise 10x sooner utilizing present design instruments, tech stacks & workflows. Locofy affords 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 Pressure (and acquired near choice) however once I couldn’t make it, I had 2 choices : Arithmetic/Economics and Pc Engineering. I acquired 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 direction of the top of college once I constructed an award profitable product on change on the College of California, Santa Cruz, adopted by an internship at Microsoft when i began constructing cellular 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 liked a extra holistic strategy at downside fixing and took the soar into product administration and met my cofounder Sohaib (in 2014) who was a a lot better engineer than me. Working with Sohaib, we have now 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 end result selections based mostly on mountains of information, and now code technology instantly from designs.
The latest breakthroughs within the subject have solely made it simpler, cheaper, and sooner to resolve issues that have been simply not attainable 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 along with your present co-founder you constructed one of many world’s quickest journey cellular websites. What was this website and what did you be taught from the expertise?
This was wego.com‘s cellular web site. In 2016 – quite a lot of Asian corporations have been considering killing cellular web sites utterly, particularly in rising markets the place gadgets have been low-cost and cellular web was gradual. Flipkart even famously killed their cellular 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 cellular website for efficiency, expertise, and unit economics.
We selected to rebuild our cellular web site to work like an app, utilizing service staff, AMP and PWA ideas with none prior expertise in constructing for the online. My cofounder Sohaib, our VP Engg (Tien) and I labored on this for 2-3 months and constructed our new wego cellular website and that grew to become the quickest cellular journey website (amongst 150+ websites).
Our key takeaways – firstly the belief that we weren’t simply cellular app consultants, and for those who put first ideas pondering to any downside/ any know-how and put a group of decided people collectively, something was attainable. 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 every day), and went for it. Additionally, the trio discovered that we work effectively collectively and eight years later – we’re constructing Locofy collectively once more! If not for that undertaking, the three of us could not have realized how effectively we work collectively.
When did you first notice 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 unattainable and cheaper offshoring markets like India modified endlessly because of robust 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 scenario we have been in, but in addition the instances to return.
Upon speaking to our mentors and founder pals, we not solely validated the issue but in addition acquired funding affords from everybody we talked to, inside 48 hours of even fascinated with fixing the downside of writing ui code from scratch with AI-led automation. The truth that we have 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 affix the low-code revolution was right here.
How did this transition to you launching Locofy?
Sohaib – among the finest internet/cellular/gaming builders I’ve ever met (I fee him within the prime 1% on the planet) was tremendous annoyed in our final undertaking on the earlier firm. It required him + 2 builders to write down 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 return again and inform me that we will automate UI code / 80% of the frontend duties. Within the subsequent 2 days we met some founder pals 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 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 have been serious about.
- The marketplace for low-code that largely helped professional builders and designers, however valued issues like code high quality and maintaining builders inside their stack as their prime 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 a good job. In the event that they did, we might 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 for example) and tech stacks (React, Nextjs for instance) and our thesis was to only adapt and slot in (and therefore, additionally attempt the software with out making adjustments), whereas working in direction of top quality code because the differentiator.
Locofy obtained some rave opinions and quite a lot 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 gentle launch. The concept was to open up the lids and get suggestions from extra builders exterior of networks. Based mostly on that suggestions, we higher understood who our perfect 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 in addition quite a lot of noise. We used the suggestions to be taught sooner and concentrate on customers who liked the platform, and customers who have been a couple 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 improvement time that’s saved has a variety, what’s the typical time financial savings that you’ve got personally seen?
It’s tough to offer one quantity that matches all. Some corporations with lean groups constructing an app from scratch have informed us they saved 80% of their improvement 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 invaluable at this time, 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 improvement is a broad area – we wish 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 concept to launch to affect 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 can assist the subsequent technology of class defining corporations construct their merchandise sooner and cheaper and finally assist resolve extra international issues with the restricted provide of builders we face at this time.
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 may be very highly effective and opens so many potentialities, however you have to focus first on the issue you are fixing. Discover an enormous downside after which see the right way to resolve the issue and the way AI makes it more practical/cheaper/sooner, somewhat than the opposite means spherical. In 2023, I’ve seen too many new AI corporations constructing one thing “cool” that does not actually resolve an actual downside. It jogs my memory of the saying “if all you have got is a hammer, every little thing seems to be like a nail” and that is definitely the case with quite a lot 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 group, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to Locofy.
