Entrepreneur Sachin Dev Duggal Engineer.AI Interview

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Co-Founder Sachin Dev Duggal Engineer.ai
Entrepreneur Interview
The co-founder of engineer.ai wants firms to
develop their own apps using his programme which
he says requires little or no tech skills.
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Having a fast, personalised app is key to a
companys online presence and marketing ability.
In 2017, the total amount of app downloads hit
197 billion which is expected to surge to 352
billion by 2021, according to Statista. Here,
co-founder Sachin Dev Duggal Engineer AI
explains how he wants to bring the cost of
creating an app down for businesses and make it
easier than ever to do so. Tell us more about
the company. Whats your background and what is
the companys vision? We founded Engineer.ai in
2016, and the Builder platform will be
launching in June this year. The company was
founded because we wanted to create a platform
that would enable anyone to make a software idea
into a reality without needing expertise
knowledge in development and coding. The
company was founded in partnership with my
university friend Saurabh Dhoot. Ive invested
in over 20 technology start-ups, founding Nivio,
one of the worlds first cloud computing
companies and Shoto, a photo software streaming
company that uses AI and analytics to bring
together photo experiences from a time and place
between selected audiences.
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Prior to this, I worked at Deutsche Bank at the
age of 17, making me the youngest employee at
the company. In 2009, Sachin Dev Duggal Engineer
AI was named a World Economic Forum Technology
Pioneer. I studied at Imperial College London,
where I met the now co-founder of Engineer.ai,
obtaining a degree in Business Engineering as
well as holding a degree in Entrepreneurial
Masters Programme from MIT.
With the Builder platform were aiming to bring
down the price of building an app whether
thats on mobile, web, e-commerce or Internet of
Things (IoT). The more people that build a
specific type of product, the cheaper it becomes
for everyone to build, as the marketplace is
being utilised more. Unlike anyone else, we take
the ultimate price risk. 90 per cent of the time
we will do better than we promise, but 100 per
cent of the time we will match what we say.
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With Builder, you create an application, buy the
update insurance from us and then buy all the
hosting for example cloud, micro-services or
whatever you need to keep the platform running
and thats the retention part otherwise most
people will build their initial idea and then
not stay.
If we started building things with people and we
didnt have a way to keep them then wed build
them, theyd leave and wed have to spend money
to get them back. If we get this right, the
audience is important if youre already in the
cloud and you use us to get it cheaper, better,
faster, then the likelihood is youre going to
spend sometime in the future to build. If were
bringing new customers on to make the decision
of where its built, where its hosted and the
micro-services available on it then why not have
the marketplace because ultimately were the
master buyer and we have seen Apples model
work. Its like the iPhone, Apple provides the
initial basis of the product (the software,
platform and basic needs) then the consumer can
build their own developments (through apps) from
there.
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How much initial investment did the company need
to start and where did it come from? What was
the money used for and how was the product
developed? Sachin Dev Duggal, we bootstrapped
the investment I sold my last company Nivio for
100 million and used some of that money and put
it into Engineer.ai and then built a parallel
business.
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Ultimately we need to build, ensure and host. We
build the hosting platform, we operate it and we
give users access to everything they need to
keep it running. Initially, we started with the
cloud and took what we learnt from Nivio and
Shoto to create what we have done today. Using
cloud helped with software development as it acts
as a retention tool we had to create something
that would keep customers here and then continue
to promote them to other people in the future. It
was really important for customers, but had the
double whammy effect so that we could build cash
flow rather than raising money directly. What
marketing did the company employ to maximise
exposure? I think what we can say is because we
were in private beta what we have done is
guerilla tactical we did a couple of events and
podcasts with very targeted display adds but
theyve been taking people to a filtering
process to see if they were a right fit for the
data.
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When we did a public beta in November we had
2,100 people that signed up to want to build an
app and some came with a credit card to sign up
and put down a deposit which was nothing we
expected. How important is an inspirational
figurehead to a scale-up company? I think when
youre selling a big product its all about the
person having the conversation so having a
senior team that can communicate a vision and
convincing people its do-able and bringing them
on board is super important. For us, whether
it was our original partnership with Amazon or
some of the ones we have now with the worlds
biggest systems integrater (SIs) they are all
as a result of walking them through things
that werent quite ready but painting a path to
demonstrate they will be ready. Then its the
same thing when hiring staff when you dont have
revenue or produce and youre still trying to
hire them youre promising them a better
tomorrow. I think having an inspirational and
aspirational leadership team is critical to
success. Because I think people like to get the
sense that theres a ground zero and they build
up from ground zero.
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What specific advice would you give to scale-up
companies looking to build their company to
exit? One of the most important things to
remember when building up a business is to keep
your eye on the goal, conserve cash and spend it
like its your money not a VCs money. The most
practical advice I can give is to keep a data
room running especially if youre at the scale-up
stage. Keep people updated and stay in contact.
Peoples goals are always changing, so there is
always the chance they may be interested at
another point in time. For scale-up businesses,
they must be authentic and this becomes apparent
when its contrived and youve got to balance
impact on your own business as well. If youre
going to do things for people that are just
circumstantial that will catch on really quickly.
You want to invest in ecosystem and the social
impact around the ecosystem and then when you
want something it becomes much easier. Talk
about the companys growth trajectory, from being
founded to establishing revenue, to covering
costs, to moving into profit. We have grown at
about 180 per cent for the last four years, we
have been profitable for just over two years,
with most months resulting in neutral cash flow
we spend own cash for building the product.
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We have also expanded from five people to 150
people in just four years. One senior manager or
two to eight C-team equivalent. We now have
offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Delhi,
Mumbai, London and will be opening a new one in
Tokyo very soon. Our customer growth has
increased from 0 to 3,500 across the product and
a lot of it has been around taking the view of
building a real business. The key to our success
was mapping out way points that we needed to get
to before we got to our ultimate goal, which is
this platform. We always have to make sure its
up to date and like insurance and make sure that
they can buy all the services needed to keep
that idea working from our marketplace. But we
didnt start with building, we started with
cloud ops and retention but needed minimal
investment to make it profitable in cash
flow. Source https//www.growthbusiness.co.uk/en
trepreneur-interview- sachin-dev-duggal-co-founde
r-of-engineer-ai-2554358/