How We Built a Low-Code Development Platform Generating a Downloadable Angular Code
By: Dan Stein
Tags: Founder Interviews, Startup Life, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Startup

Interview with Vladimir Lugovsky, CEO & Co-Founder of UI Bakery

Interview with Vladimir Lugovsky, CEO & Co-Founder of UI Bakery

Tell us about UI Bakery. What do you do?

My name is Vladimir Lugovsky. In 2015, I co-founded Akveo, a tech company where we’ve already brought several products to life. We started from creating Open Source frameworks that have eventually gained popularity in the developers’ community. Now, we’re working on UI Bakery, a low-code platform for creating web apps.

We have a truly great team of professionals on board, so I believe my main job is to let them them do their job and not disturb while ensuring a creative atmosphere in the team. I also take part in strategic decision making, and I try to help wherever I can. Besides, I’m in charge of business development, so I’m responsible for discussing contracts with major clients while trying to open new opportunities for the product.

What is your startup’s origin story?

The idea of UI Bakery appeared after we’d released our other Open Source products: Nebular (a web UI library), UI Kitten (a React Native UI library), and ngx-admin (an admin dashboard template). The success of ngx-admin made us think about building software like UI Bakery.

At that time, we were regularly getting the requests from the ngx-admin users to add app branding opportunities to ngx-admin.

Firstly, we developed a machine-learning algorithm that generated colors based on a company’s logo. However, this functionality wasn’t exactly what the users wanted.

So we got down to validating ideas to find our product-market fit. We concluded that the users needed to personalize and customize dashboards and applications they build. We needed to give our potential clients an opportunity to create their future web app pages and components faster, easily brand apps, etc. with no involvement of designers and developers.

After a long research, a number of surveys, and interviews with potential clients, UI Bakery is finally live. In September 2019, shortly after beta-release, we launched the first version of UI Bakery on Product Hunt where we became a product of the day.

Had you been involved in the industry before this startup? What is your background?

I’ve been working in IT for 10+ years already. I got a computer science degree in the Belarusian University of Informatics and Radioelectronics. During my third year at the university, I started a part-time job as a junior software engineer in a large software development company. I worked there for 3 years, and became a senior developer, however I understood that I wanted to build something on my own… I left the company after I’d found a first client that provided me with a full-time workload. Freelancing allowed me to double my income at that time, however 1 year later I got bored since I wanted to grow as an entrepreneur, not as a developer. So I offered my friend to join me, and we started a software company from scratch.

What’s unique about your company? What are the key differentiators between you and other players?

I would name some of them, starting from the most competitive one:

UI Bakery is the only low-code development platform that generates Angular code, and allows you to export your application as a code. We do not lock you in within UI Bakery. You can just take your web app code, edit it, and use the code as you wish.

UI Bakery has Nebular, a very popular Open Source UI library with a range of ready UI components under the hood. Nebular, in its turn, is based on Eva, a customizable Design System. Thanks to these powerful Open Source tools under the hood, UI Bakery provides you with rich app customization and branding opportunities.

UI Bakery has a constantly growing library of free ready-made dashboards and app templates for you to use, and what’s important — we’re developing new templates based on our users’ requests they leave in the UI Bakery community.

Take us through a day in your life. What does the typical day look like?

My day usually starts from checking my email box and Slack shortly after I wake up. Since we have offices in different timezones, there could be some requests requiring immediate actions. Then I prefer to read some morning news. Afterwards, I do other morning stuff like breakfast and shower.

I usually start my work at 10am. But during the COVID-19 quarantine, I could do that at 9:30 since I didn’t need to drive to the office. Morning is the most productive time, so I usually use the time before lunch (till 12:30pm) to do tasks that involve creativity like answering these questions 🙂I also have 3–5 meetings during the day on average, and I try to limit them to 15–30 minutes.

Our team has a tradition to make an afternoon coffee break at 4pm daily. That’s the time for us to chat about random stuff and have fun. I usually spend evening time dealing with some routine stuff like reading contracts, creating proposals, calculating metrics, etc.

I prefer leaving some time in the evening for myself to read news, play music, or go for an evening run.

What has been the most challenging part of growing your company?

The most challenging part is to grow alongside your company. As the business expands, you need to evolve as a manager to make right decisions, and your team members need to extend their expertise as well. But the nature of the people is to avoid changes. We sometimes believe that what worked for the team of 5 would work for the team of 30. This is not true, as the goals of such teams are very different. So it’s important to never stop learning, thinking about what you and your company needs to improve, and find the resources to invest there.

What has been your best marketing channel? What are some channels you are looking to explore next?

In terms of our marketing activities aimed at getting more customers, we always start from defining the target audience, then dividing it into segments, and testing the channels where these user segments may be found. As for now, these are the marketing channels allowing us to reach our target audience:

Google organic search and the traffic we get from there. We improve our position in search results using a content strategy.

Paid advertising, mostly in Google.

Product landing pages.

Participation in tech events like conferences, YouTube shows, podcasts. We also host our own webinars for developers and non-techies.

Guest posting. By the way, we are always open for collaboration with new writers eager to contribute to the UI Bakery blog.

The ongoing work with niche communities.

Development and launch of supplementary tools that help to promote the UI Bakery platform.

What apps do you use that you would recommend to others?

I’d recommend using:

Slack — to communicate with each other. It’s a fast and very convenient way of dealing with all the work stuff.

Confluence — as a knowledge base and a collaboration software for the team.

Amplitude — as a product intelligence platform.

Trello — to organize and prioritize tasks to boost the team’s productivity.

HubSpot — as a powerful marketing, sales, CRM software.

Do you have a book, podcast, or Youtube channel you would recommend to other Entrepreneurs?

I personally don’t follow any particular podcasts or Youtube channels. I usually find interesting stuff on Twitter and Reddit.

I can probably highlight the Webflow CEO @callmevlad on Twitter. I like what he and his team does. As for books, I’m not a big fan of business literature, I read fiction mostly. I believe it’s important for a person to evolve in different areas. The latest book I read was “Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

If you could go back in time to the day you founded your company, what advice would you give yourself?

Don’t think that you’re a genius. Go learn new things!

What’s something you’ve learned from building your business that someone else can learn from?

Do not focus on short-term benefits but invest in the long-term ones. I & my co-founder could have earned much more at the start if we paid ourselves what we were earning. However, we reinvested what we’d earned into building the products that moved us to a different level.