Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: But the no-code hypothesis was correct.

Jeff Kuo: The hypothesis is pretty much correct, and up to now, it still seems quite correct. But the no-code part is hard to do technically. Not just that, it’s very hard to teach non-technical people to learn how to do this. It is a lot harder than I expected.

Also, the reluctance of technical people to learn this is also unexpected. Technical people write Java, Python, PHP, and they think that they could do this with their technical expertise and these no-code products devalue their expertise.

They think the sales and marketing department and non-technical guys would not need their expertise. It kind of puts them in a weird position, so they used to say, “Oh, this is hard. This needs about six months to a year of our time.”

Suddenly, this no-code tool pops up and the sales department would say, “Hey, look at what we did, and this is pretty much what we want, and we did it within two weeks.”

So, it becomes politically hard for IT departments to adopt because it makes them look bad in certain ways. In actual implementations, we very often see IT departments trying to pick on these no-code systems, and they say then that there may be something wrong with the security or the backend data structure or that it doesn’t share data appropriately.

Initially, they’re usually more reluctant to adopt these things. They don’t like these things as much as I expected. I was thinking that they would be excited about the tool and how they could use it.

Sramana Mitra: When you went to market trying to bring this product to IT departments, this was your experience, and this is the pushback that you received, right?

Jeff Kuo: Kind of. In the beginning, there were many sales leads from other user departments than we expected. We got a lot of requests to demo the product for building customized CRM systems. Then they’d say, “Oh, okay. This is pretty good. Let me get an okay from our IT department.” So we keep getting these kind of stories and experiences that their marketing department wants to use this, and all they need is an okay from the IT department.

Sramana Mitra: Then the IT department will come and give a pushback that, oh, there must be some problem with security. There must be some problem with something.

Jeff Kuo: Yeah. Because in a lot of cases, they’ve asked the IT department to help them before they do it themselves and try to a look for a solution outside. Usually, they’d ask the IT department first, and they’d say, “We don’t have the time and the resources to do this. Let’s do this next year.” They get a lot of this.

Sramana Mitra: So, what we’re double clicking down on is the validation of an idea, right? You had an idea. You had two components to that idea. One was the semantic web and this database based on the semantic web. And then the second idea is this no code product.

And in validating those, you quickly figured out that the semantic database idea you wanted to set aside and lead with the no-code idea. Then, you went ahead and led with the no-code idea. You were seeing adoption, at least interest in adoption in the non-IT departments, and then pushback from the IT departments.

Now, one question that comes to my mind in what you’re describing is, how did the non-IT departments find out about your product? Did you approach these non-IT departments, or did they find you? If so, how did they find you?

Jeff Kuo: Okay, that’s a good question. We’ve worked in multiple phases in the journey of our company. So, as I mentioned, in the first phase, we were a service partner of another product. Then, after the financial crisis, we transitioned into doing projects with Ragic because we’ve worked in the industry for a few years. We have a few clients and enterprises that we work with. So we started by doing projects with Ragic for about three years.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic
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