Hey Kevin, thanks for taking the call and willing to answer some questions about your experience with Big House.
We've been working together for some months now and I wanted to see how your experience has been. If we can get started by just an introduction of yourself, what Humi does and what your role at the company is.
Absolutely. Hey, my name is Kevin. I'm one of the founders and currently CEO & President of Humi we build a B2B SaaS app. It helps Canadian companies do employment. They do HR and payroll benefits and all sorts of other awesome things within that sphere and we've been working together for how long has it been like a year about? Yeah, almost a year.
The experience has been just fantastic: super professional, delivers really well thought out product, helps switch us in certain directions that have been really advantageous down the road like helping us restructure our database, re-engineer the UI UX within the app.
All sorts of things that we didn’t explicitly ask for but made a material difference to the quality of the product. And so it's been a really great experience, and I highly recommend it.
Thanks. So can we talk a little bit about the product, Humi and SR&ED, Scientific Research and Experimental Development Tax Incentives - That's the problem that we're trying to solve. Can you talk about the problem and what you were trying to do with it?
Yes, absolutely. Effectively, the problem we're trying to solve was that in Canada there are important grants that are very material and that are born out of the information that existed within the system that we currently hosted our customers on and other systems and what we want to do is pull that information in and to make it useful to our customers so they could apply for and use it towards those grants.
So what we initially had asked to get help building was the application itself that pulled information from our core system and other systems that our customers work with and then processed it into a really useful piece of information that our customers could use to get their grants that they need.
Amazing. Do you know if there is existing software that analyzes or tracks these grants in general off the shelf software or what made you go custom?
To do what we wanted to do specifically, nothing existed. And nothing does exist in the market. We were the first to bring something like this to market, which was all sorts of exciting. And obviously, working with Noel made it so accessible to go and experiment and to be quicker to bring something to market than we otherwise would have had if we had built it internally.
The same piece of software would have probably been 3x to 4x the cost and 2x the time and development.
So Humi is itself a VC-backed technology company with some amazing investors, including Y Combinator.
Yeah, we keep up with Y Combinator. We've got rounds led by Tribe Capital and some of the best investors and other founders in the ecosystem. Ahmad from Mercury and he's driving BlackBull. We have a handful of other really awesome investors from the ecosystem.
So you definitely have a technology team in-house. What made you look for an external development team like Big House?
Yeah, so Big House let me run an experiment outside the bounds of our existing team without compromising security or the existing budget. It's one thing to have to staff up a full team to go build something to test out a thesis. It's another thing to be able to outsource that and do it at a fraction of the cost of building that team internally.
Amazing. I'm going to present the screen for a minute, that tool that we're building together. And in general, if you can just share your thoughts on the tool, what's important to you.
Yeah, it's beautiful, it's simple, it’s very usable. When we need additional functionality, we're able to get it in there but in a way that makes sense.
Often feature creep can kill apps and make them way bigger than they necessarily should be but in this case working with Big House does a great job of helping us clarify the requests and you're not just asking them to do stuff you're working alongside him to build really user-centric, very high quality products.
Thanks for that. What surprised you most about building with Bubble and no-code?
I think the quality of it. You just would never ever know as a user. It can be snappy, it can look really good, it can have interactions that make it seem as if you're using any other code base and language.
The thing I've always been amazed by was the sheer cost and the accessibility of building with it. And the fact that we can build so much in so little time, just working with one person is pretty incredible.
Prior to Big House, you worked with other software agencies. How do you compare the experience?
Truly professional, very responsive, very high standard of work that those things are all markers of high quality and it's been that way since day one it's tough to find. It’s something to really value.
Thanks, likewise and I appreciate when someone like you said that. Thank you. How do you see the tool evolving in the next 12 months?
Good question. I see it becoming much more commercial. A lot of the focus has been in functionality and building the core of what the app would be. And I think the next couple of months is much more focused on bringing users into the application and adjusting to the feedback that comes out of it.
Making sure we have really good onboarding, really good support pieces. We can figure out where people get stuck. We can identify what's really useful and make changes based on that. I would think that a lot of the changes in the near term will be on onboarding customers and designing for a larger scale. I think the PLG motions can be really important for this tool and it's something we haven't spent a ton of time focusing on. I'm sure that will be the next big thing.
Ok. What advice do you have for CEOs considering internal tools?
Make sure you communicate a ton with your CTO and technical leader.
One of the interesting parts of this type of relationship is that you don't need a technical team to build something that you can run an experiment around. But making sure you've got a good understanding with your Chief Technical Officer and understanding how success in working with Big House translates to potential success down the line and working with the rest of the org. Because there can be some feelings with respect to using a platform like Bubble over some traditional coding languages and structures.
But past that, in the past, when I'm putting these types of things that make sure the people in the product team understood what we were doing and why. Because anybody who's really excited about products should believe that getting good products out the door and in a customer's hands quicker, it's just going to be the best thing to do, almost no matter what.
I think communication with the person in your org who runs tech and product is the most important thing when considering this type of thing, especially if it's going to be outside of that domain.
I agree. You mentioned experimenting and you want to get things out fast which you also mentioned some people are very married to back-end front-end type frameworks and you can do more stuff with them but it's slower. Let me ask the very last question which I think you mentioned already. Would you hire Big House Technologies again?
Absolutely, in fact I might do this for a side hustle as we speak. So yes, I would absolutely hire Big House again.
Nice. Amazing. Thanks. So those are the end of my questions. Do you have any other thing that you would like to add or things that you would like to add before we end?
No, not really. Hopefully I pumped your tires enough for giving you some good clips you can use. But yeah, just it's great working with you.
Well, I'll stop recording and thank you very much.