Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In what mode were you using Ragic? In the no-code mode or in the semantic database mode? And who was the client? Was that the IT department that was the client?

Jeff Kuo: No, we were working directly for the users. We’re basically like a database or application developing company. We’re were just using Ragic as a tool to develop them.

Sramana Mitra: So, you were not selling the tool; you were selling the applications built with the tool.

Jeff Kuo: Yes. Then, when we hand the database over, we try to teach them how to use Ragic to do the maintenance because if you’re a service company, you’ll know that maintenance is a lot of work. Having a tool like this for them to add a few fields and change the configuration kind of helps. That also went on for about three years.

In the beginning, the tough thing was that it’s very hard to teach a non-technical person how to use a no-code system to build a sophisticated database system. Because what we were targeting is to have a system that can build something like an ERP system, not just a Google form for people to fill out some data. We want it to be a fully functional database system. So there were a lot of things that we need to teach the customers how to use Ragic to model their data into a working database system.

So, it’s kind of a pretty long journey to add a lot of documentations, videos, tutorials to teach our users how to do that.

Sramana Mitra: So we are talking about a period where you’re not using Ragic as a product. You use Ragic as a tool to build the solutions that you were actually selling to your clients, but then for maintenance, you had to also teach your clients to use Ragic as a product. And that’s where it became complicated.

Jeff Kuo: Yeah. That’s the stage when we realized that we’d designed them and thought they’re pretty easy to use. We use it all the time. However, when they’re trying to learn, it’s just not that easy to learn. So that’s kind of when we started to started journey on how to make the learning curve for Ragic not so steep and how to make it more easily learnable for our customers.

That journey also helped us to kind of refine the learning process for Ragic so that it’s possible for a person whom we have never met and who saw Ragic online to register for an account, learn Ragic, and know how to build a database system using Ragic. We wanted them to be be so happy with Ragic that they would say, “Oh, I could get our company to pay for this system and start their team on using the system.”

Sramana Mitra: So, you were successful in building that level of usability to get Ragic to a more usable state by these non-technical users?

Jeff Kuo: Yeah.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you?

Jeff Kuo: I think after we stopped doing Interwoven, and then that’s another about three years.

Sramana Mitra: So what year are we at right now? 2012?

Jeff Kuo: Yeah, 2012. I think it’s around 2012 to 2014.

Sramana Mitra: Now, when this was happening, is this when you started receiving the pushback from the IT department?

Jeff Kuo: Of course, they still needed an okay from the IT department. But that was kind of expected, but I think the pushback from the IT department was more surprising after 2014-2015 when we started selling them as a no-code platform.

Sramana Mitra: And that’s when you learn from the market that the IT department did not like a no-code platform.

Jeff Kuo: We can say that they don’t really like it. Not all IT departments, but just some.

Sramana Mitra: And how did you process that market feedback? What was your strategy in response to that pushback?

Jeff Kuo: I think we mostly don’t really focus on trying to sell this to the IT department directly, but we mainly focus on selling them to the users that need them so much, because they are the people who’re searching for this product. IT departments are not really searching for a no-code product. But other people from project management, HR, sales and marketing teams are searching for solutions to solve their daily problems. They are non-technical people and all the tools that they can use are either a packaged software or a no-code software.

Sramana Mitra: But if they still need approval from the IT department to bring this in to procure this software, then how do you get around that problem?

Jeff Kuo: Actually, we don’t get around the problem. The users get around the problem because when they try to adopt them, they just kind of secretly start using them. When they’re using them in a small scale, they don’t really need to tell the IT department. But when they scale up and are putting more and more sensitive data into the system, they will need to tell the IT departments.

Sramana Mitra: So, in 2015, you have non IT departments and users finding your no-code product online for building applications, and figuring out how to get around the IT department and still continuing to use your product as something that they want to build applications on. This is the situation in 2015.

Jeff Kuo: Yes. In a very small scale.

Sramana Mitra: Is this all happening only in Taiwanese customers?

Jeff Kuo: Actually no. Initially, we did most of our marketing online. So, the self-help kind of adoptions come from overseas. We almost have no no-code customers in these kind of self-help, no-code customers in Taiwan. One of the reasons we attributed to that is the price for hiring a developer is much higher in the US than in Taiwan, so most of them in the beginning were from the US. The benefit of using a no-code system is much more significant in the US. Now, you’re from the US. You know how expensive and how hard it is to hire a developer to do these kind of things.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic
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