We provide helpers on demand in India (Bangalore right now). Think of it as a combination of Uber and TaskRabbit for ad-hoc jobs.
How to read this
Don't copy the product. Copy the pattern.
Notice the constraint, the stack pick, the narrow launch, and what they kept building after the first version went live. That's the real playbook.
What's your personal background? What motivated you to start your own company?
I have been a techie, advertising entrepreneur and a product management professional with about twenty years of experience. I like to solve problems and build products. I found this to be a problem I faced often, that is not being able to find a helper when I needed, on ad-hoc basis. Did not find a formal platform for this, discussed it with my co-founder Shiv and started the venture to solve this problem.
What no code tool did you use to build Beegle and what purpose did each play in the final product?
We used Bubble. As of now our whole application is based on Bubble. That includes Android, iOS apps and our backend workflow management system.
What were the initial costs to get Beegle off the ground?
Because of using Bubble as the platform for building applications, our majority of cost had been in operations. We spent about 20K USD in first six months of our operations.
What was the process of building your product from idea to launching?
We initially explored getting it built with an external tech company. But then explored no-code tools as those would give us more flexibility and control over our experiments. It has been an iterative process since then. We built a very basic application in the beginning with lot of manual intervention to provide services. Then kept on building it up with feedbacks.
How do you attract customers?
As of now we have a model of putting teams in individual gated communities. In that model we basically focus on marketing within those communities. So, it is mostly via emailer/notices or the traditional posters/flyers within those gated communities. In the beginning we started with Google Ads though.
What are the biggest challenges you've overcome building Beegle?
Our business is heavy on operations and biggest challenge has been to understand behaviour and psyche of our helper communities, work around those and find solutions so that we can meet our customers' expectations. Other challenge has been how to make it all happen within nocode framework.
How much money is Beegle making per month?
We are fairly early stage company and are actually losing money at the moment because of high cost of operations. However, as we scale and optimise our operations, we are confident of making it well profitable.
What's your advice for non-technical people who want to start a company?
With the advancement in no-code tools even non-technical people should be able to start an online business. They should not get deterred by their lack of technical knowledge unless the offering that they want to make itself is a technical product. So if you have an idea, go ahead and build a small MVP with help of one of the tools and validate your idea and market fit without having to spend a lot of time and money in the validation.
What are your future plans for Beegle?
We are looking to raise funds and build our service portfolio as well as geographical reach. We would continue with no-code for now till we reach an even bigger scale.
How do you think the rise of no code tools will impact entrepreneurship?
No-code tools will surely help a lot of entrepreneurs to build their applications quickly by reducing the cost and time of experiments.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Currently the way no-code tools are built, they are all independent and have their own proprietary methods of tools. I think it would be good if some central and open standards are made, like HTML and other such protocols and formats. This would help entrepreneurs not get bound to one particular no-code tool. It will also give a sense of safety to entrepreneurs that they can move over to another tool in case things do not work out with one.
And hopefully it would help in getting a person to develop your applications, quicker.
It would also be nice to see no-code industry evolve to be able to build much stronger deep tech products. As of now only simple applications can be made, but creating more technical products (like recommendation engines, games) are much harder due to limited capabilities of the tools to handle complex algorithms etc.
