Honey Mittal is the Co-founder and CEO of Locofy.ai, a low-code startup that converts your designs to code. Before Locofy, he was CPO at Homage, FinAccel and Wego.

👋🏼  How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I'm one of two co-founders of Locofy.ai. I'm responsible for the overall strategy with a strong focus on the product and scaling the company with solid product and community-led growth.

This means more focus on product hooks and growth loops (than sales and marketing) to try and keep the cost of acquiring customers down to $0 or as low as possible.

I'm also responsible for the company's overall vision and day-to-day functioning.

🧐  What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

You're never really ready to be a CEO. Ultimately, it comes down to how passionately you feel about solving a problem, the learnings you've picked by being close to other CEOs/leaders in your past life, having a growth mindset, learning and unlearning fast, and having faith in yourself and your team.

🏆  What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

In 2016-2017, without any prior experience on web, my current co-founder and I built one of the world's fastest travel mobile sites! It was even faster than Google Flights, whose very tech (i.e. AMP and PWA) we leveraged in just 3 months with only 2-3 engineers.

The results and reactions gave us the confidence to never get typecast as "experts" of one technology/stack. This also made us realize the power of lean teams and 10x engineers. We've been applying that playbook ever since with whatever we have built!

🔍  What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?

The low-code and no-code trend for obvious reasons. It's less of "if" and more of "when" will the industry hit the tipping point in terms of adoption.

My best guess is that 2022–2023 will be the most exciting time as VC capital has kickstarted a wave of entrepreneurship and startups globally. On the other hand, the supply of engineers (good engineers even more than that) has stayed stagnant and will stay stagnant for the foreseeable future.

Low code and no code is the answer, so if you're reading this, check out Locofy.ai now :)

💼  What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

Don't do it unless you're patient. Low-code and no-code aren't similar to other industries where it's all about growing fast, raising and announcing big rounds of funding every few quarters and eventually getting into a race of who builds first.

Low-code and no-code is highly nuanced. Quality of code is better than who did it first, and the adoption and perfecting of the product take time. There are hundreds of examples of the best global SaaS and devtool brands - the first 0 to $1M ARR takes 3–4 years on average. The next 10x could come in year over year if you've laid the groundwork well.

The first 3-5 years can be a "slow" grind.

🗣  What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Locos! (The Locofy.ai team)

🎥  What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Masterchef Australia. I'm most relaxed when I watch it with my wife and our golden retriever!

🍨  What's your go-to ice cream flavor?

One of the two: Valrhona/fresh coconut — never together, though!