Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Were US customers adopting your product in 2015?

Jeff Kuo: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How were they finding you? What did you do to get found?

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.

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.

Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the project? What was Ragic and your master’s thesis that you were trying to productize?

Jeff Kuo: I was studying semantic web and AI-related subjects. Back then, Semantic Web was quite popular. Ragic came out of Semantic Web to map information data in a graph-based model so that it can be shared between different organizations.

Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 1)

Businesses are finding unexpected benefits by incorporating Generative AI into their product roadmaps. Ragic has built a $5M ARR no-code platform in the market. A Generative AI front-end is adding unprecedented usability and adoption momentum. Fascinating!

Sramana Mitra: Alright, Jeff, let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Jeff Kuo: I was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. I mostly grew up here, but in my childhood, I lived for two years in the US in Michigan.

Building a Capital Efficient Second Venture: LiftLab CEO John Wallace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It’s interesting. Now, where to from here? You said that 2023 was great. You’ve been doubling every year. It’s almost venture scale growth without raising huge amounts of money, which is all fabulous. What are you trying to accomplish and how do you want to play this?

John Wallace: Next, it must be, first and foremost, more of the same. We don’t have to let go of the horse that got us here.

Building a Capital Efficient Second Venture: LiftLab CEO John Wallace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So, a fraction of their media spend is your business model. What kind of deal sizes are we talking and, and what do you need to sell? In the pandemic, I heard from a lot of people that they were able to close deals without having to meet people. Even very large deals. They were closing without having to meet people. So what was the model of actually selling these engagements?

John Wallace: Yes. The media plans that run through LiftLab are almost an order of magnitude from small to big. So, the prices just adjust to that.

Building a Capital Efficient Second Venture: LiftLab CEO John Wallace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to build out all the specs that you were getting from these customers?

John Wallace: We were experimenting only for about a year and a half. Then we spent probably another nine months building the modelling platform.