The Story of Locofy.ai: Building the Future of Design-to-Code Development
Great companies often emerge from founders solving their own painful problems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Honey Mittal revealed how a grueling development project during the pandemic sparked the idea for Locofy.ai, a platform that’s now transforming how developers handle design-to-code conversion.
From Healthcare Crisis to Development Innovation
While leading product and engineering at a healthcare startup during the pandemic, Honey and his co-founder faced a daunting challenge: redesigning their mobile app with over 500 screens using a team of just three engineers. This experience crystallized a problem they’d encountered throughout their careers.
“We were working day in and day out was deeply fulfilling. But at the same time, were kind of like working harder than we’d ever work,” Honey recalls. This intense period sparked discussions about not just starting a company, but addressing fundamental problems in software development.
Finding the Right Problem to Solve
Having spent a decade building marketplaces across Southeast Asia, the founders were determined to tackle deeper engineering challenges. “We quickly ruled out anything to do with Marketplaces because we spent ten years building Marketplaces, and we wanted to go slightly more to deeper engineering problems,” Honey explains.
Their experience building two of Southeast Asia’s earliest Editor’s Choice apps gave them unique insight into development bottlenecks. They discovered that design-to-code conversion consumed 60-70% of development time – time that skilled engineers didn’t enjoy spending.
The Global Engineering Shortage Catalyst
The timing couldn’t have been better. As Honey notes, “People used to rely on developers offshoring india and Southeast Asia. That’s kind of not the case anymore. An engineer who would get paid $2,000 a month and would be seen as a cheap option not the case anymore. Indian startups have been kind of hiring people in Silicon Valley now because it’s getting harder and harder to get engineers in Asia.”
This global shortage of developers added urgency to their mission. They realized that automating design-to-code conversion could help companies move faster while freeing engineers to focus on more challenging problems.
Building for Engineers, By Engineers
Before writing a single line of code, they conducted extensive research on existing solutions. Their litmus test was simple but powerful: “Would we build our past three products using any of these services?” As Honey recalls, “The answer was a clear no. And that’s where we decided to kind of go for it ourselves and build it.”
This engineer-first mindset shaped their entire approach. They knew they were “building for the toughest audience there is.” As Honey puts it, “We’ve been building ourselves and we’ve not been very kind with our words when we come across a mediocre product.”
From Beta to Global Adoption
Rather than rushing to monetize, they launched a free beta to gather feedback and improve the product. The strategy paid off – their platform went viral within developer communities, spreading to 190 countries through word-of-mouth.
The Future: Beyond Design-to-Code
While Locofy.ai has found success in design-to-code conversion, their vision extends much further. “Design to code is going to be our entry to the market, but we want to expand more into the post, sort of front end code and maybe more into the design side of things as well,” Honey explains.
The ultimate goal is ambitious: creating an end-to-end platform that helps teams “go from ideas to launch and iterate as quickly as possible.” This includes expanding into API integrations, UI testing, and everything needed to streamline the development process.
“In the long run, we would ideally want to be in a place where people can go from ideas to launch and iterate as quickly as possible,” Honey shares. It’s a vision born from their own experiences as developers and shaped by the evolving needs of the global development community.