Democratizing software development and entrepreneurship

Builder.ai presents an instant prototyping tool that helps anyone take the first step in designing an app and making their business idea a reality in as little as 10 minutes. Founder and CEO Sachin Dev Duggal talks about how they go about doing it.

Can you explain briefly what Builder.ai is and how it came into existence?

The premise behind Builder was to make software development accessible to anyone, anywhere. It stemmed from the belief that everyone should be able to unlock their true potential, to make their vision come to life irrespective of what they know, what they have and what they are afraid of. The industry did not support this stance though. Traditionally, building software proved to be risky and inefficient, mostly managed by a cottage industry of small web shops and generalist developers. A lack of process and poor communication with clients results in an astounding 78% of projects ending in failure. This high rate of failure means many ideas don’t get started at all. Entrepreneurial clients often struggle to navigate the software and technology required, plus the capital necessary. They end up fearing the failure of their idea, their business and their ability to maintain their livelihood. They worry their ideas won’t be relevant for the market. This cycle of fear followed by inertia leads to wasted human potential on an epic scale. I decided this reality was unacceptable and sought to offer a solution.

How does your app prototyping feature work?

The feature Builder Now is an instant prototyping tool that helps anyone take their first step in designing an app and making their business idea a reality in as little as 10 minutes. Builder Now lets people explore ideas and show how they can work, before investing time and money into development. It’s fast, free, and trims out hours of specification writing and meetings, by letting you try rather than talk about user journeys. Before Builder Now, those with an idea for an app would have to identify a development team, wait to be assigned a product expert and a design team, sort out the user flow and create designs from scratch—before even getting started. Whether someone already owns a business or an employee of a company wanting to launch a new project, or an aspiring entrepreneur – Builder Now takes all these barriers away.

Builder Now keeps a user focused on solving the ‘what we need’, and ‘why we need it’ questions rather than the ‘how do I code’, by visualising the app from an idea in as little as 10 minutes. The experience is designed to provide confidence to take the next step with an idea. Builder’s goal of making the creation of tailor-made software accessible to everyone drove the decision to launch Builder Now as a free product. After refining their app idea with Builder Now, they can click through to price, build, deploy and maintain their new app all within the Builder platform.

How much AI-ML do you use? Does it make it continuously better?

We’re proud to share that every product within the Builder platform is now powered by AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning), with varying levels of contributions. Overall, the contribution of AI and ML continue to increase as we productionise more use cases and grow the team. Quantitatively, this contribution amounts to at least 35-40% of the technological innovations in the Builder platform, which we project will double in the next two years. This growth is being led by a team comprised of data scientists and engineers recruited from top UK and global universities with advanced degrees (PhD, MSc) in quantitative disciplines such as computer science, mathematics, physics and engineering.

There is talk of democratisation of tech where anyone can build bots and design their own online apps. How do you take this forward?

Builder.ai aims to democratise software development in a way that it is accessible to anyone, anywhere. It stemmed from the belief that everyone should be able to unlock their true potential, to make their vision come to life irrespective of what they know, what they have and what they are afraid of. So, Builder.ai is a platform that helps you build, run and scale just about anything you can think of. Our human-assisted AI builds your tailor-made software using the collective knowledge of what’s been built before. It’s an assembly line. You pick reusable features that can then be customised by specialists around the globe. It’s as easy as ordering a pizza. We also offer aftercare, so your software never goes out of date; and cloud capacity from all the big providers (in fact, we saved our customers $4.5m last year).

How can SMBs benefit from this?

No matter what the nature of a business, succeeding means staying ahead of the competition at all times. And in this increasingly digital age where an average person spends over 3 hours on their mobile phones each day, true business potential lies on digital media. Customers now prefer to communicate with businesses via online and digital channels – whether it’s through an app or a website. However, while businesses recognise this, traditionally a lack of skills or technical knowledge has been a barrier. At Builder, we want to make it as easy and as cost effective as possible for these businesses to amplify their digital presence.