Honey Mittal is the Co-Founder & CEO at Locofy, prior to this he was the Chief Product Officer at 3 Series A-E startups (namely – Homage, Finaccel & Wego) in early and growth stages.
Locofy turns designs into production-ready frontend code for mobile apps and web. It enables builders to ship products 10x faster using existing design tools, tech stacks & workflows. Locofy offers a plugin for Figma and Adobe XD with which makes designs responsive for various screen sizes.
What initially attracted you to computer science and machine learning?
I initially wanted to affix the Indian Air Force (and got near selection) but once I couldn’t make it, I had 2 options : Mathematics/Economics and Computer Engineering. I got a scholarship for Computer Science on the National University of Singapore, but not for the others, in order that was that.
My true interest in coding and constructing products only began developing towards the tip of university once I built an award winning product on exchange on the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by an internship at Microsoft when i began constructing mobile apps (before the App Store was launched by Steve Jobs) and I began to see my code solving real world problems.
There was no going back from that time. I spotted I loved a more holistic approach at problem solving and took the jump into product management and met my cofounder Sohaib (in 2014) who was a a lot better engineer than me. Working with Sohaib, we have now worked on travel, healthcare, and dev tooling problems for greater than a decade now, and somewhere mid-way we began tinkering with machine learning to construct higher advice engines, higher financial final result decisions based on mountains of knowledge, and now code generation directly from designs.
The recent breakthroughs in the sphere have only made it easier, cheaper, and faster to unravel problems that were just impossible even 5-10 years back. That prompted us to start out constructing Locofy.ai in 2021, on the crossroads of the increasing need for a design to code solution like Locofy, and the breakthroughs in ML.
In 2016-2017, along along with your current co-founder you built one in all the world’s fastest travel mobile sites. What was this site and what did you learn from the experience?
This was wego.com‘s mobile website. In 2016 – a whole lot of Asian corporations were contemplating killing mobile web sites completely, especially in emerging markets where devices were low-cost and mobile web was slow. Flipkart even famously killed their mobile website for his or her app (and later retracted), but we faced an analogous dilemma at Wego, where our apps were significantly higher than our mobile site for performance, experience, and unit economics.
We selected to rebuild our mobile website to work like an app, using service employees, AMP and PWA concepts with none prior experience in constructing for the net. My cofounder Sohaib, our VP Engg (Tien) and I worked on this for 2-3 months and built our recent wego mobile site and that became the fastest mobile travel site (amongst 150+ sites).
Our key takeaways – firstly the conclusion that we were not only mobile app experts, and in case you put first principles considering to any problem/ any technology and put a team of determined individuals together, anything was possible. This helps us till date, because Locofy is a devtool and we never considered whether we had any prior experience constructing for engineers. We just considered it as an issue (something we faced day by day), and went for it. Also, the trio found out that we work well together and eight years later – we’re constructing Locofy together again! If not for that project, the three of us may not have realized how well we work together.
When did you first realize that low-code and no-code was the longer term?
In 2020-2021, the entire tech world went crazy, with engineering salaries going through the roof, fueled by public market tech stocks and a surge in VC funding into tech startups. We faced this ourselves at our last company. Hiring and retaining good engineers seemed near unattainable and cheaper offshoring markets like India modified eternally because of strong domestic traction. We studied the market and discovered that for each 20 open CS jobs, there was 1 CS student graduating within the USA – shedding some light on not only the situation we were in, but additionally the times to come back.
Upon talking to our mentors and founder friends, we not only validated the issue but additionally got investment offers from everyone we talked to, inside 48 hours of even interested by solving the problem of writing ui code from scratch with AI-led automation. The indisputable fact that we were solving our own problem also got the interest of our fellow builders who showed interest in joining us. In a short time, it was clear to us that the time to affix the low-code revolution was here.
How did this transition to you launching Locofy?
Sohaib – the most effective web/mobile/gaming developers I even have ever met (I rate him in the highest 1% on this planet) was super frustrated in our last project on the previous company. It required him + 2 developers to jot down 500 screens revamp. After I asked him why he didn’t do something about it as one in all the highest developers around, it didn’t take him long to come back back and tell me that we will automate UI code / 80% of the frontend tasks. In the subsequent 2 days we met some founder friends and so they all validated that we were onto something. 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 approach to low-code, are you able to discuss how the platform takes existing designs and converts them to code?
Yes, our research showed us 2 clear results.
- The marketplace for no-code helped mostly non-developers and designers. Great market, but not something that we were all for.
- The marketplace for low-code that mostly helped pro developers and designers, but valued things like code quality and keeping developers inside their stack as their top priorities.
We resonated more towards #2 i.e. constructing for professional developers and designers, but we found not one of the players within the design to code market doing even half a good job. In the event that they did, we’d not only not construct Locofy, but additionally start using those options to construct the five hundred screens we had to construct. As developers and designers ourselves, we knew our teams preferred their tools (Figma as an illustration) and tech stacks (React, Nextjs for instance) and our thesis was to simply adapt and slot in (and hence, also try the tool without making changes), while working towards prime quality code because the differentiator.
Locofy received some rave reviews and a whole lot of feedback from ProductHunt and other platforms. What were some key takeaways from this feedback?
We launched on Product Hunt 6 months after the primary soft launch. The concept was to open up the lids and get feedback from more developers outside of networks. Based on that feedback, we higher understood who our ideal customer profile was, why they loved us, their pain points and in addition who’re we higher off not catering to in any respect (and hence get more focused).
In open beta, we don’t block anyone from trying Locofy, which means greater feedback velocity, but additionally a whole lot of noise. We used the feedback to learn faster and deal with users who loved the platform, and users who were just a few modifications away from loving it. All of it culminated into Locofy Lightning – a 1-click solution powered by Large Design Models. It made the platform more accurate and very easy to make use of. We are going to proceed learning with the identical approach in free beta until we’re able to monetize eventually.
Claims for the quantity of development time that’s saved has a big selection, what’s the common time savings that you might have personally seen?
It’s difficult to provide one number that matches all. Some corporations with lean teams constructing an app from scratch have told us they saved 80% of their development time. Others constructing for existing codebases have saved 50% of the time. For us, if we save anything within the above 50% range, we understand it is amazingly invaluable today, while we work on increasing that much more.
What’s your vision for the longer term of low-code platforms and Locofy?
Frontend development is a broad space – we wish to assist make it easy first and define this category ranging from design to UI code.
But in the future, our vision is to assist go from idea to launch to impact much faster and cheaper and make teams focus more on the complex engineering problems and business model innovation greater than worrying about constructing interfaces. This can help the subsequent generation of category defining corporations construct their products faster and cheaper and ultimately help solve more global problems with the limited supply of developers we face today.
Based in your journey with Locofy.ai, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs trying to enterprise into the AI industry?
Very simply, AI could be very powerful and opens so many possibilities, but it’s good to focus first on the issue you are solving. Find an enormous problem after which see the right way to solve the issue and the way AI makes it simpler/cheaper/faster, fairly than the opposite way round. In 2023, I even have seen too many recent AI corporations constructing something “cool” that does not really solve an actual problem. It jogs my memory of the saying “if all you might have is a hammer, all the things looks like a nail” and that is actually the case with a whole lot of recent AI entrepreneurs who jumped quickly to ride this wave.
