Interview with Koushik Debroy and Ashish Singh | TheCodeWork
I hope this can inspire you to become a successful entrepreneur too! Why is it important to hear the story of a successful entrepreneur?
Having the vision to become an entrepreneur is great. Making it happen is another story!
In that frame, We had the pleasure to interview Koushik Debroy and Ashish Singh, founders of TheCodeWork. TheCodeWork is started as an MVP-First Software Development Company, aimed at helping entrepreneurs, early-stage startups, and SMEs to quickly build products and validate the idea in the Market.
1. What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e what’s your source of motivation?
Well, we always wanted to do something on our own and wanted to create an impact. Creating an MVP-Development Company for startups was a decision we took based on our own experience with how fragmented the industry is. For every aspiring entrepreneur and startup, we aim to be the driving factor to create a quality product with the right set of steps in validating the idea in its early stages.
2. Why should people choose your product/services?
When we started as an MVP-first Software Development company, there were other players in the market, but none of them were providing expertise on the process involved and that’s something we started working towards. Our deep understanding of MVPs and making sure their startup moves from ideation to production with minimum time and money is what our customers love.
3. What’s your competitive advantage and why can’t it be copied?
Our competitive advantage is our expertise in this specific field of work. We know how to help an early-stage idea, entrepreneur, or company to help them validate their idea without spending a lot of money and time with the help of both engineering and product thinking. Our competitive shield is the team and the thought process it goes behind creating every MVP for different startups.
4. What risks are you facing?
Keeping up with a vastly growing industry that’s changing every second is challenging. NoCode as an industry is growing drastically and can become a potential risk factor for us to navigate in the coming years.
5. Have you considered any alliance/partnership?
Yes. We have introduced the Partner Program, and Referral Program to increase our reach to people who want to start their business but lack the right path. We are also coming up with our one-stop “Startup Ecosystem” where we have/are partnering with some industry VC groups, Angel networks, Marketing, and Legal teams to carry out a smooth and successful experience for any entrepreneur or idea from ideation to growth collectively bringing everything under one roof.
6. What are your cash flow projections? When will you break even? How much will you need in investments?
We have been bootstrapped and have been running on profit since the inception of the company and plan to continue our exponential growth focusing on the revenue for the next milestone.
7. What comes first for you money or emotions?
It would be very difficult to answer, however, we try to put all the things on the table and make a rational decision that could neither hurt our emotions nor create any setback for our company’s growth. Having said that, growing the team sustainably has been our priority as well.
8. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Strengths are the communications when taking any decisions, evaluating pros and cons, research and data-backed opinions are something that’s been there from the beginning. But our biggest strength is our team and we have been able to grow because of them only. Speaking of the weakness, there are many, for sure, but we constantly identify these things, discuss them and improve them for the better. We are also brutally honest on the feedback of an MVP analysis and give every opinion without sugarcoating it.
9. Tell me about an accomplishment you are most proud of.
We always wanted to start something on our own from our college days, and the attitude remained the same about not giving up on it. We are also happy to be bootstrapped and the opportunities we created to increase our revenues 2x every year.
10. How do you handle the pressure?
It’s not rare to have a ton of things on the plate that could create work pressure but, reprioritizing the objectives helps us keep our focus on the work, and eventually it’s no longer a pressure.
11. If you sold your company today, what would be the tone of the conversation? What would you want to gain? What would you want to avoid losing?
Our focus is aligned right now to continue to grow.
12. What advice would you give to someone starting out?
If you ask this question to anyone, they would say the same thing, “Never give up” so that’s the one we personally followed but driven with DATA. Our advice for anyone starting today is to leave behind the founder’s bias and come up with a game plan by validating the model first. An MVP approach paves the right path towards identifying challenges and resonance with your target audience.
13. What’s the next exciting thing TheCodeWork™ is coming up with?
As we mentioned, we are coming up with the “Startup Ecosystem”, a model which benefits everyone within the umbrella and brings every resource for the entrepreneur to succeed. We are also actively working on a lot of innovation projects internally under TheCodeWork™ Labs including projects from AI/ML, NoCode, AR, Blockchain, etc.
