The following interview is a conversation we had with Honey Mittal, CEO of Locofy.ai, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $3 Million Raised to Build the Future of Frontend Development
Honey Mittal
Thanks for having me, Brett. Super excited to talk to you.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Honey Mittal
Yeah. So, my name is Honey Mittal. I’m one of the two co-founders of Locofy.ai. Locofy.ai, like you said, is a design to code conversion platform. But essentially what we do is we try and take away the grunt work from front end engineers in particular, and app developers, and also make it easier for startups and individuals to basically move faster and build great products. Faster and cheaper.
Brett
Very cool. And from a personal background perspective, what were you doing before this?
Honey Mittal
Yeah, so I’ve basically been based in Singapore. I come from India, but I’ve been in Singapore for half my life. And I’ve spent the last decade or so as a chief product officer of three startups, all based in Singapore, but in different industries like travel. So I was started off in Vigo.com, which is a travel marketplace, then moved on to FinXL, which is a buy now, pay later service for Indonesia, and then Homeage, which is an online healthcare platform, especially for the aging population of Singapore and the region. And my Co-Founder was essentially the head of engineering at two of these three startups with me. And were lucky enough to build one of Asia’s first Editors Choice apps and then another Editor’s Choice app and then build one of the world’s fastest progressive web apps. So a lot of the experiences of building cross platform products was kind of the motivation behind starting Locofy.ai.
Honey Mittal
And we also realized how difficult it is to get engineers today and retain engineers. And a lot of startups kind of never move forward or never can get their product market fit, or can never even sometimes bring their ideas to life. And that’s where we kind of saw an opportunity based on our experience, to make it easier for people to make apps and websites and products and make them faster.
Brett
Nice. Very cool. And two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a Founder, what CEO have you studied the most and learned the most from would you say?
Honey Mittal
Apart from the obvious, I would say the three CEOs that I worked closely with. So the first one is also now my mentor and one of our first angel investors. And a big motivation kind of to go ahead and do it myself was Ross Wage. He’s the Co-Founder of Wego.com. Yeah, I mean, I think I’ve learned a lot from the three CEO Co-founders, and I’ve directly reported to, and I’ve learned three different sort of lessons from them. Ross is just about building a great culture and being very focused on product and just being empathetic as a leader. From the other two Co-Founder CEOs from FinXL and Homeage, I’ve basically learned just being ruthless in execution and also being great at storytelling and just basically the motivation behind why you build what you build, because building a startup is not easy. You want to wake up every day not forgetting the why.
Honey Mittal
And I think that’s where working closely with these three Co-founders CEOs for me, I think had the most impact, of course, other than the obvious that the whole world kind of reads about.
Brett
Yeah, I get disappointed a bit when founders come on and they say, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It’s like, yeah, obviously we’re all following them and there’s lessons to be learned from them, but who are the non obvious ones? So I appreciate you having some unique examples there.
Honey Mittal
Yeah, I think all founders, quite frankly, I hang out with a lot of Co-founders and founders, I invest in some of them as an advisor. I think there’s something to be learned from every Founder out there.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. And what about books? What book would you say has had the greatest impact on you as a Founder?
Honey Mittal
I’ve read most of the common sort of the zero to one and all those books, but this book Hard thing about hard things was definitely very impactful because it was very raw and kind of covered just how difficult it can be at different stages of a company. And as a leader, as a Co-Founder, the kind of decisions you will have to make. It has really helped me prepare. While I got to see a lot of this in action in the last ten years working in startups, I think that this book, which has gave me a bit of framework as well to think about and also to prepare my other Co-Founder for some of the tough things that lie ahead of us.
Brett
Yeah, I love that book as well, and I like just the premise of it that Ben Horowitz talks about how when he was running his company, going through all of those hard times, he would go to these books and try to read and learn. And they were written by management consultants, McKinsey folks, and they weren’t people who’d actually lived through these problems and these challenges that exist for founders and they weren’t actionable and they weren’t really real and authentic. So that was why he wrote this book, was here’s what it’s really like to be a Founder as you deal with a company that’s going through all of these ups and downs and the crazy stuff that happens. So I agree, I think that’s one of the best books that exists for founders.
Honey Mittal
Absolutely. I think especially one of the things that really had an impact on me was really understanding when you go from being a ten people company to a 50 people company, the people that came in the early sort of zero to one stage may not necessarily be the ones who can take you from there on. So it’s really helped me prepare because I care about people quite a bit and so does my Co-Founder. So it really helps us train the people that we bring in the early days and see if we can change that to some extent and if not, at least be empathetic about it and be open and transparent about it. So that’s something I saw in a few of the startups I’ve worked in. But actually having read about it really gave us some perspective on how we can kind of be prepared and also try and not just let it be one of those reasons where early people just have to be let go or be led.
Honey Mittal
We believe differently. We want to kind of train them as much as possible to be the right sort of leaders for future as well. Amazing.
Brett
I love that. And now to talk about a bit more about what you’re building there, and I know you touched on what the product does a bit and how the platform works and all of that, but take me back to the origin story and what was going through your mind when you decided, this is the company that I want to build. Because I’m sure, like many other entrepreneurs, you’re considering many different options. So what was it about this problem that made you say, all right, I’m going all in and I’m going to build this company up?
Honey Mittal
Yeah, so I think about twelve years ago or so, I started building my own products and my own companies and of course it was a very different time when there were very few people who were crazy enough to kind of think about building their own things, especially in Southeast Asia. Right. I’m based in Singapore until I think 2014 or 15, I think there were only a handful of VCs, handful of founders, startups to look up to. But that’s where I sort of decided to join a startup and really learn how to build companies and not just products. And for me, the origin story really goes back to my experiences in Vigo, the first startup I joined and also meeting Soheig, who’s my Co-Founder and chief technology officer today. I was an engineer and I kind of always believed that I’m a good engineer, but not a great engineer because I had too many ideas.
Honey Mittal
I got really involved in designs, and on the business side, on the user side, it was only after I met Sohib that I really understood what a good engineer can be, what a ten x engineer really looks like. And after kind of building that relationship with him, and really building good products together with Sohab at two different companies, it was very clear to me that we are going to build something together. And sohave and I were kind of like when we joined Homemade, especially, both of us were very clear that we’re going to do something after homeage. And we wanted to kind of learn how to be founders and be prepared to kind of start our own company as well. But during the pandemic, of course, being in a healthcare company, were working day in and day out was deeply fulfilling. But at the same time, were kind of like working harder than we’d ever work.
Honey Mittal
And one of the projects were doing had a redesign, a complete redesign, 500 plus screens on our mobile app. And were doing it with a small team of three engineers. And that’s where I think we started talking more about not just about starting our own company, but the kind of problems we want to solve. And we quickly ruled out anything to do with Marketplaces because we spent ten years building Marketplaces, and we wanted to go slightly more to deeper engineering problems. And we started also feeling this global pain of not being able to find developers and also understanding that developer costs have increased tremendously. People used to rely on developers offshoring india and Southeast Asia. That’s kind of not the case anymore. An engineer who would get paid $2,000 a month and would be seen as a cheap option not the case anymore. Indian startups have been kind of hiring people in Silicon Valley now because it’s getting harder and harder to get engineers in Asia.
Honey Mittal
So combining all of that, we just realized that there’s a big opportunity in terms of building solutions for engineering itself, for software engineers, and also combining it with our own passion and our own strengths of building great products. We built not just two Editors Choice apps, but two of the earliest editor stoice apps in Southeast Asia, where we had to struggle with obviously cheap devices and cheap sort of really bad network as well, mobile bandwidth as well. And having done that, we realized that especially going from idea to launch, when we broke it down into the different sort of workflows, we realized that going from design to code is an area that good engineers do not really like to do, but it still ends up taking 60% to 70% of the time. And that’s where my Co-Founder, sohave, basically brought this idea that, look, I’ve done it on different frameworks now.
Honey Mittal
Apps, mobile, you name it. And one thing I see common in terms of the pain and also in terms of a possible solution is going from design to code. And that’s where kind of the journey started last year. We weren’t really sure about it. We started doing research. We saw a lot of different services out there, didn’t really like any service because we’re building for ourselves. And our litmus test was, would we build our past three products using any of these services? And the answer was a clear no. And that’s where we decided to kind of go for it ourselves and build it. And now it’s been almost a year and we’ve been in free beta.
Brett
Nice. And looking through the logos on your website, you’ve landed some major logos and there’s some big companies that are using it, or developers from big companies using it. Can you talk us through what that go to market Motion has looked like and how you’ve been able to acquire this many users in such a short period of time?
Honey Mittal
Yeah, it’s a learning experience, quite frankly. Right. We’re building for the toughest audience there is. Developers. We know it because we’ve been building ourselves and we’ve not been very kind with our words when we come across a mediocre product. And the other thing is also not just are we building for engineers, we are also building for a group that doesn’t respond to the traditional sort of channels of marketing. The upside, though, being that we’re basically building a global product from day one itself. So when we started, we knew one thing for a fact we have to build a great product. If engineers do not like the code that our platform produces, it doesn’t matter how good our marketing is, it just won’t work. On the flip side, if you build a great product, engineers talk to other engineers and engineers trust when other engineers recommend products to them.
Honey Mittal
So we just started with that in mind, launched our first product. But before launching our first product, we built a simple one pager website and kind of sent it to all the people we knew about. And that went viral. And that kind of gave us a lot more confidence that this is a pain point we’re solving for a pain point that people actually care about. We don’t really have to explain much about the problem or convince people about the problem itself. It really comes out to building a great product itself. From there onwards, we basically just went with a product hunt launch in July after having iterated for about six months, and having that kind of blew things up for us. So before Product Hunt, I think were mostly relying on the figma community itself, because we existed as a plugin within the figma community.
Honey Mittal
And figma community obviously super tight. They talk to each other about the different sort of innovations out there, especially their plugins within itself. But from there on, we basically launched a product hunt. We were lucky to get Product of the Day, product of the Week, product of the Month, and four more in the Developer Tools and Design tool categories, all number one. And from there on, not just did we basically open up to developers from around the world, we also started getting a lot of these developers posting about us on social media. So we started really discovering the world of developer communities on Reddit, Twitter, Hacker, News, Hacker, Noon, still so much that we are learning, but we started waking up on a daily basis and finding out that maybe a designer in Brazil with 100,000 followers on YouTube had started posting about the tool.
Honey Mittal
Someone on TikTok posted about us and got like 150,000 views within 2 hours of posting. And that kind of gave us some early insights into how we can grow this company in the future as well. But that just basically fueled the growth. And now we have users in 190 countries still in free beta. I think that really helps solving a problem that people really connect with. It’s a pretty big pain point. But also we decided to kind of go with a free open beta from day one itself so that we collect feedback from users rather than put up a paywall which prevents us from improving the product. So yeah, that’s been pretty much the journey so far and we’re still figuring out how do we really crack our ideal customer profile? Is it early stage startups? Is it individual engineers? Is it teams? Are we talking about late stage or early stage?
Honey Mittal
A lot of it remains to be seen. But what has happened is that because we don’t have a paywall and because people have been recommending the product pretty much everywhere you see, we basically started seeing users come in from pretty much any company, startup or enterprise. Students obviously have been loving the product that we’ve built and they talk about us quite a bit and that’s why you’ll see a lot of the top universities, institutes also using our products as well at this point of time.
Brett
And I think a lot of founders with products like this dream of kind of going viral on product hunt and having that work out well. But it seems like for most companies it doesn’t work out that well as it has for you. What were some of the lessons that you learned as you made that push or maybe it could be interesting to other founders listening in.
Honey Mittal
Yeah, so when went in with product hunt, our goal was not to rank. Our goal was just basically to get really good feedback from engineers. We went in with little expectations, although we did put in a lot of effort. I think what really worked for us first and foremost, like beyond all the growth hacks, I think the biggest thing that worked well for us is that the problem statement itself, what we are solving for is not really something where we have to convince people that this is a problem the moment they hear something like a design to code. It’s a no brainer. I think the question in people’s mind is does it actually work? Rather than is this a problem that I need a solution for? And that’s a very fair question. And that’s what obviously most of our effort goes towards making sure we provide people with the right solution.
Honey Mittal
But I think that really helped because Product Hunt is essentially a group of early adopters, designers, engineers and founders. And that’s literally the profile that we are looking for and people who connect with the problem that we’re solving. But I think other than that, what we did, I think decently well was we didn’t just rush into a product and launch, we kept the product in free beta and we iterated for about six to seven months. And by then we had already started building a community of fans and followers. So we did get their support when we launched on Product Hunt. And I think we essentially also the person that you talked to, probably from Locofy.ai, was our head of growth. I think he reached out to pretty much everyone, right? Which is something every Founder does. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything, but because the problem we are solving is not just something that designers or engineers relate to, especially founders relate to it.
Honey Mittal
I think everyone we reached out to really connected with the problem really decided to not just support us in terms of votes, but actually give the product a try as well. We were very surprised to see that number of upwards we got was actually lesser than the number of users we acquired. A lot of companies say that we got 1000 upwards, but only 300 people actually tried the product. For us it was, I think, 1200 plus upwards, I think, on day one. And that kind of kept on going, but we had roughly twice the number of people try the product itself. So, yeah, I mean I would just say like, there’s enough playbooks out there for what to do on Product Hunt, but first and foremost, solve a problem that the Product Hunt community really cares for. And it’s pretty easy to go and find it out, get in touch with people and see what kind of products have done well.
Brett
That’s one thing I see many founders struggle with is the idea of articulating the problem that they solve. A lot of companies that I speak to and just a lot of the websites I go on, it’s all about features and capabilities and the solution and they fail to really articulate to the user. Here’s the problem that we can solve and here’s how it’s going to make your life better. So you guys have just done an amazing job at making that problem clear.
Honey Mittal
Yeah, I think that’s something as engineers were not really naturally good at. But that’s where having worked in startups and kind of learning it the hard way has really helped. I know some companies that are trying to do what we are doing and their landing page changes every two to three months. And I can understand why because we are basically tackling a 500 billion dollar problem. You could say it’s a low code platform, you could say it’s a modern way of building front end, but that doesn’t necessarily tell people the problem and the solution that we are kind of going for. The website that you see today from Locify, we basically built it more than a year ago. We haven’t changed the message over there at all. I think we got it right, quite frankly. And that really helped us because it’s super clear. We help you go from design to code rather than something more broad based like local platform going for the fancy words.
Honey Mittal
We basically went straight away for the problem that we are solving and something that people truly understand.
Brett
Very cool. And when it comes to market category, I think that’s probably a more relevant conversation when you start selling more enterprise deals and making a bigger push into enterprise. But what are your general thoughts on the market category that you’re going to fall into? Are you going to be designs to code platform and is that a totally new category that’s never existed or are you going to really go in and try to transform and disrupt existing categories or consolidate existing market categories?
Honey Mittal
Yeah, I think we definitely fall on the low code platforms going for design to code. I think there’s three to four other players that have started solving the same problem in the last three to four years. I wouldn’t say we are creating a new category completely. This category has had a few players that have tried it and failed. Actually. If you ask true front end engineers, you’ll be told that this was even tried ten years ago. But I think the timing hasn’t been as good as we are in right now. The shortage of engineers was never as crazy. The demand was never really as crazy as well. Whether we sell to enterprises or young startups remains to be seen. But we very much intend to go do the product led sort of growth motion, go bottom up, go directly to engineers and then let them bring in their teams eventually enterprise deals.
Brett
So obviously startup funding is booming right now for DevTools. And you’ve touched on a bit there about articulating the problem so clearly and really communicating that message to engineers. Is there anything else that you’ve done that really has allowed you to rise above all of that noise and get developers and engineers using this product?
Honey Mittal
Yes, I think for us, I would say approach towards really helping developers has been really helpful in getting to the kind of traction we’ve received so far. So while design to code itself is a category in itself, a lot of the design to code platforms either require people to completely abandon the existing design tools that designers use. So, for example, asking a Figma designer to stop using Figma and move to another tool just so that they can automate code is a complete no. But a couple of companies have bet on that side. I’ve just had too many designers in my team to know that asking designers to kind of quit their favorite design tools is the reason why they would leave. Same for engineers. Asking a react engineer to move to, let’s say, a polymer, was one of the biggest mistakes I may have made in my career in the last ten years.
Honey Mittal
So we just knew that passionate designers and engineers love their existing stacks and tools, and we knew we had to kind of fit in rather than force people out or constrain them in any way. And I think that’s why when we decided to build a plugin that fits within Figma, were very clear that serious designers and engineers will find it very easy to try the product out rather than have to make a big decision to abandon their tech stack or their tools. So for us, I think that’s the bet that we made. We want to kind of fit in and adapt and convert their existing designs without any restrictions, make them fully responsive, and give them the kind of code that their own engineers would write, but at the same time, allow them to take that code and do whatever they want with it rather than restrict them.
Honey Mittal
I think that’s where our bet has been very much about adaptability, and that’s what makes it easy for us to be tried by anyone. But at the same time, I think, like I said earlier, we are basically automating code, so it will take us quite a bit of time to get to a place where majority of the engineers out there will take exactly what the tool produces and fly with it.
Brett
And the last question here for you, if we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision for the company? What do you hope it looks like by then?
Honey Mittal
Yeah, by then. I think in the short run, it’s all about capturing the design to code market being the best design to code company on the planet and the platform on the planet. Our longer term vision is more about going from ideas to life, ideas to production. So design to code is going to be our entry to the market, but we want to expand more into the post, sort of front end code and maybe more into the design side of things as well. Make sure that designers and engineers can collaborate and build products together and essentially look at everything around design systems, around design libraries, pretty much any framework out there. And look into API integrations, UI testing, editable integrations, anything to make the lives of designers and engineers easy and move into that direction from the design to code, front end, code generation. So in the long run, we would ideally want to be in a place where people can go from ideas to launch and iterate as quickly as possible.
Honey Mittal
A lot of it remains to be seen which direction do we want to go into, but right now we’re very much focused on the early part of it, which is building the best design code platform out there.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Well, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today. But before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Honey Mittal
Yeah. I mean, Locofy.ai has everything you need. We have a slack channel. Would love to chat with you over there. Our entire founding team talks to the community over there, but we are very active on our Twitter and LinkedIn as well. And we have a YouTube channel. All of it can be found on local finder and feel free to reach out to me as well, directly one of the social platforms as well.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building and really share your vision. This is all super exciting and wish you the best of luck in executing and turning it all into a reality.
Honey Mittal
Thanks so much for that, Brett. Thanks for having me on the podcast.
Brett
All right, let’s keep in touch you.
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