HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I’m a computer science engineer by education. After finishing my Master of Computer Science at UIowa, I joined Cerner Corp. as a Software Engineer. I worked under a fantastic manager who navigated me away from pitfalls and made me push what I thought were my limits. Next, after about two years at Cerner, I returned to India to join Navayuga Group – a diversified business conglomerate. Here, I wore numerous hats – implementing ERP solutions, preparing cases & presentations for bankers, coordinating with Finance & Procurement Teams for acquiring equipment from China.
After another two years at the corporate office of Navayuga, I moved to Navayuga Infotech. Soon, I started taking up the responsibility wherever I saw a vacuum in the company. I learned the nuances of doing business, building teams, acquiring business through the years. Ultimately, I started to build Quixy as a side project in 2016. In 2019, I felt that it was finally ready to be a business.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
Our startup is called "Quixy."
Today process automation stands around 20% for organizations. We remove the hurdles for organizations to automate the rest of the 80% by providing a user-friendly, easy-to-use, no-code platform that helps automate processes for any industry and any function and build complex custom enterprise software faster, with higher quality and lower cost; all without writing a single line of code.
What is the origin story?
Through the years of B2B software project executions, I saw a familiar pattern in all software projects that Business users did not have the necessary skills or tools to build the software themselves. Therefore, for solutions, they were dependent on IT, which could find solutions, but one, they were already swamped with the IT needs of other users, and second, because they weren’t the ones dealing with the problem, their solutions didn’t quite meet the actual requirements. Very rarely, there would be a situation where the customer is delighted at the end of a software project. This pattern bothered me immensely, and I saw that this situation was not unique and was prevalent in the software world.
This became the foundation idea for Quixy – providing customer delight by providing a platform for business users to build software themselves (without relying on others) and build the software at a break-neck speed possible through No-code.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
Quixy is a very tightly knit team where every member enjoys each other's successes and cares for every other member in times of despair. Every single member of the team very strongly believes in the mission of making work simple for organizations by removing hurdles for broader and deeper digitalization as we have gone through the pain of efficiency loss due to low digitalization.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
I’d be growing forests, food forests, and also full-fledged forests. I’m fascinated by the working of nature and its diversity; I believe growing forests would give a great insight into nature (or at least a part of it). I’d also be working on community improvement projects - primarily focused on reducing the infrastructure divide in society.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
Key metrics that define our success are
- No of daily/weekly/monthly active users
- No of daily/weekly/monthly transactions
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- The time is taken from onboarding to deployment of the first solution
- Net Revenue Retention (NRR) Rate
But most essentially, the success of our customers in achieving the value that they desire is a measure of our success.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
We have customers in over 20 countries and 15 different industry verticals automating some of their key processes, demonstrating that Quixy is a global product, very adaptive & agile to all environments, and highly scalable in terms of complexity. This has also been reflected as Quixy has been consistently recognized as a leader in No-Code, Digital Process Automation, Business Process Management, among other categories in G2 Grids, and also ranked #1 in those categories in G2 momentum reports.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
Artificial Intelligence in combination with Cloud and AR/VR are the technologies that I am most excited about because of the massive changes they can bring in “Making work simple”, which is what we do at Quixy. But I’m also worried about how unregulated or misconfigured AI can ruin the harmony of societies by invading privacy, encoding bias, and making big become bigger.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
I'm a regular reader of Hackernoon, and the opportunity to be a part of the vast community here through start-up-of-the-year pulled me in. I like how your platform gives space to all kinds of technologies and business trends. You also provide informational tips to your readers regarding tech, making Hackernoon a fantastic source for tech stories.
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
Believe in yourself stronger. Read more books. Talk to more people.
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
The country borders of the world are getting thinner, but the divide among the societies within a country is getting bigger. This is in the total opposite direction of what happened in the earlier five years.