A lightly edited transcript of my August 9, 2022 conversation with Alp Uguray on the Masters of Automation podcast. The audio is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and the show's website. Short on time? See the highlights post.
The transcript was produced with Whisper and lightly edited to fix product names, verbal ticks, and mistranscriptions.
Alp Uguray: Welcome to the Masters of Automation podcast. Today's episode, we have Todd. Todd Schiller is co-founder and CEO of PixieBrix, a company empowering everyone to customize their web and desktop applications for their own use. With their low-code platform, you can add a new button that triggers an automation, makes an API call, or changes the UI for the UX that your employees and customers need. Prior to founding PixieBrix, he built knowledge management and business analytics tools for the world's largest hedge funds and consumer companies. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Washington, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow. It's my pleasure to host him today and to discuss a bit about the low-code platform that enables you to change the UI of everything for a better UX.
Welcome, Todd. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Todd Schiller: Great. Thank you for having me today, Alp. Really looking forward to the discussion.
Alp: Likewise. Just to kick off the conversation: what made you get interested in the UX, UI, low-code, no-code space?
Todd: Yeah, it's kind of funny. I've never actually been formally interested in user interfaces and user experience — I didn't go to school to formally study it. In college, I did study computer science, but all my best friends happened to be business and finance majors, so I started getting pulled into that world a bit. I did some internships in finance, and that was actually my first exposure to the low-code, no-code space.
If you really think about it, the spreadsheet is the most successful citizen development tool of all time. In Microsoft Excel, you can start with static documents, you can add styling, you can add your text, and then you can start building out models with basic calculations. And then maybe some people haven't seen it before, but what people do in the financial world is they actually record macros, they write macros, they build out pretty much full-fledged applications in these spreadsheets that can run entire companies.
Going back to school, what I found fascinating was that programming was really a way to capture human knowledge, and finance was fun, and that was a way to test that knowledge and get feedback. After college, I went off to do my PhD in software engineering. There I was studying: how can programmers actually prove that their software will do what they think it does? It turns out there were tools for this, but you really needed to have a PhD to use them. My research was: how do you allow programmers at all skill levels — whether a junior developer or a senior developer — to really gain confidence in their systems?
Coming out of graduate school, I had a consulting shop building front office financial systems. There it was really about: how do you enable these kind of high-salaried, high-stress jobs to really be efficient, make good decisions, and really succeed at what they're trying to do? And across all my clients, I kept finding the same thing.
There's this joke that people throw around, that everything in life is sales. If you want to start a company, it actually is sales. If you want to get married, it's really about sales — selling yourself to your potential partner. If you want to be a partner in a law firm, it's about sales and bringing in business. When it comes to computers, the same is true for UI/UX. Everything is about user interfaces. If you want to build a game, it's about the user interface. A productivity app — it's about the user interface. A smart device for your home — like, I have a smart thermostat — it's about the UI/UX. To me, low-code, no-code is really about providing a user experience that empowers the broadest set of people possible to really accomplish what they want to accomplish.
Alp: That's very well said — particularly the democratizing of the information for everyone to be able to use it. As you mentioned, you need a PhD to be able to actually go in and edit the application. That gives a good understanding about how things got started for you. What about what led you to start PixieBrix from your consulting interactions in the financial space? You had a good understanding that the customers needed this information, this knowledge, and the ability to access it. In a way, with PixieBrix, you guys are democratizing that access and bringing that low-code to everyone.
Todd: Yeah, it's actually a really serendipitous set of events. I had met my co-founder, Mike Mirandi, at a previous business analytics startup where I was running engineering and he was running sales. The question behind that company was: could you actually replace McKinsey management consultants with artificial intelligence, or like a computer in a box?
We both ended up leaving that company, but we stayed in touch. During COVID, we were both living in New York City. We would take these socially distanced bike rides through Central Park, catch up, and toss around business ideas and things we had seen in previous work. A common topic of those chats was the massive amounts of inefficiency that we saw in some of our previous jobs. I had been in finance for a decade. He had been a consultant and in sales in a previous life.
One day, the discussion turned to browser extensions and add-ins. I was telling Mike about the browser extensions I use — I swear by them personally. Everything from privacy protection to — you know, during COVID, you live in different cities from your friends; how do you all start the Netflix video at the same time and then chat about what you're seeing on Tiger King or whatever else? And it turned out that in previous jobs — I had seen this in the hedge fund space and the consulting space — people were creating their own company-specific Excel add-ins and PowerPoint add-ins for their analysts. Over the years, I had actually built some of my own browser extensions and add-ins. What always occurred to me was that it required a ton of specialized knowledge, and I was always reinventing the wheel each time I did it. That meant a whole bunch of Googling and a lot of boilerplate code that wasn't that fun.
After this chat, it really got me thinking: a lot of this stuff is pretty repetitive on the creation side. What if I could throw together a simple demo of adding a button to LinkedIn, but then allowing Mike to change what that button said and what that button did using just some text configuration? Seeing his reaction to that — his reaction as a non-programmer — we knew we were onto something big.
We started building it out. As we were building, we started realizing it's really not just about browser extensions. Browser extensions are great just because people live in the browser these days. But really, it's for all applications — whether it's Microsoft Excel add-ins, Google Workspace add-ins, or any of the other technology you might use in your life. From your computer to your smart devices to the smartwatch you're wearing, on your phone, or even future technology like AR and VR.
From there, we started bootstrapping the company. I came on full-time when we landed our first enterprise account. He came on full-time when we landed our second large account. And then we were fortunate in July of 2021 to close a round of seed funding with New Enterprise Associates. Actually, by the time this podcast airs, we'll have announced that we've closed the Series A with them as well. We're incredibly excited to have Hilarie Koplow-McAdams joining our board. She really comes with a great depth of experience on both the go-to-market and developer-tool side, consumer, and low-code and no-code as well.
Alp: That's a very inspiring story. Now, how do you see PixieBrix scaling across the future-of-work ecosystem? I think that would be a very interesting aspect of it as well, because you guys are enabling any individual, any employee of any company, the ability to change the user interface for their own purpose — or enable a process owner, process manager, to modify the website that they find to be quite restrictive, and enable triggering RPA bots, triggering Stripe, triggering many different capabilities to make that UI work for them. Through that lens, how do you see PixieBrix — now with also the push of the funding coming in — changing the future of work?
Todd: Yeah, at PixieBrix, we fundamentally believe that the future of work is human-first. It's about putting the human in the center of it. A lot of times when I hear people talk about future of work, they're coming at it from a view of a particular SaaS app, like a CRM, or a particular business process or process management platform, or some automation platform, or a human resources platform, or something like that. And these end up — right, there's a lot of buzzwords, there's a lot of Gartner categories: intelligent document processing, robotic process automation, hyperautomation, all these things. But what it really comes down to is that each person actually has multiple areas of responsibility. They're participants in multiple processes, multiple different functions in the business. They have multiple different ways of interacting — app, email, messenger.
What we're really about is, we want to think about the individual. Who is Todd? Who is Alp? What are their needs, what are their goals, and how can technology — regardless of what that technology is — help them achieve that? And what are their preferences for how they leverage that technology? It's really all about enabling the individual, or enabling the business unit, to really create the perfect user experience for themselves.
For example, I know a lot of people like using chat interfaces to AI, or other things. I actually can't stand that. I prefer to have a different sort of interface — clicking, seeing multiple options, right? — instead of engaging in a conversation. It's really about being able to craft the perfect experience for yourself, regardless of what enabling technologies you're using under the hood.
Alp: And looking at the applications that the enterprises use, they're mostly legacy applications, and the websites are built at some point, and the developer left the job, so nobody has any clue about how to change it. It has a very powerful use case to modify and change those, in addition to the modern web applications that are out there. I've used PixieBrix to add a few productivity tools for myself as well — on LinkedIn, on publishing tools — in addition to making external API calls and editing a button that was annoying for me.
Todd: It's a great question, right? Because you mentioned legacy tools, but it also comes up with even modern applications. We live in this beautiful world right now where there's niche SaaS offerings for essentially every function. Regardless of what your job title is, there is probably a niche SaaS offering for you. That's great, because people can start catering software to you. But they might also be indie developers; they might be smaller companies that can't even keep up with the feature backlog, or have the breadth of different capabilities built into their software integrations.
Whether it's legacy software or even modern software, where we come in is: the individual really knows their job best, or the business unit knows what they're trying to accomplish best. How do we enable them to both integrate systems and change the interface — even if they don't have a programming background on their team? What's really great about it is that, because the human is in the loop, you don't need to be perfect. You don't need something that you write once and then it's going to go off and run on its own for two years, five years, ten years. You can really embrace that imperfection and really embrace that personalization, based on what that individual is, or what that business unit values, as part of the process.
As you mentioned, it's also about eliminating that frustration of being blocked on your internal system admins or the internal tools team — or sending an email out to an email address that maybe no one's even watching because that developer left the company long ago. It's really about empowering the users. And what's really interesting about empowering is, it's about giving those capabilities, but it's also about having a good safety net. Making it so that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to experiment. You're not accidentally sending out thousands of emails if you mess up a line of code, or you're not accidentally breaking compliance rules, etc. Really it's about combining that sort of safety net with also those incredible creator tools, for people to really express themselves and experiment.
Alp: That's very interesting. And I really like how you phrased it. When the modern applications are built thinking about the general perspective of the audience, they have the product feedback loop and the product-market fit for the general audience — the average of all perspectives. And when you think about the enterprise applications, that will come from top down, thinking about how people should do it, and then be much more documented, much more restrictive for people. I see PixieBrix coming as a very powerful tool addressing both of those. It's not only the average person — it's more about for everyone. That's why it makes it very human-centric. I really like that.
Tying that to a little bit of the adoption portion of it — I've seen that you guys have been working with the community a lot and building a very community-centric company. That ties to your product-market fit, as well as making everyone be part of this low-code platform's journey too. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how to drive the community adoption of the product?
Todd: Absolutely. That's a great question. It's really been a blessing to be able to work on a product that I use personally in my life every day, both for personal and work; that our community members use for both personal and work; and that's also used by thousands of enterprise users. There's a very interesting mix of use cases in what we enable.
Our approach is really about making both the product, the community, and everything around it both accessible and approachable. That means we're free for small teams. You only pay for enterprise features, things like compliance auditing. The browser extension is open source, so you can trust what you're running, and you can get transparency into the development process. We really try to make it so that there's a low floor to starting to use us, but a high ceiling to what's possible. And then really trying to create a welcoming community for people to get inspired, get help extremely quickly, and really showcase what they've created.
We've been building up this ecosystem around the product and the community. We have a community Slack, a forum, we run hackathons. It's really about: you can interact as an individual however you want to. We're not going to try to force you into a particular way of interacting. And we're just really celebrating the community and being inspired by their creativity. For example, in the last hackathon, one of the entries was someone who actually combined us with OpenAI to generate suggestions for tweets while they were using Twitter. It's really fantastic seeing that, because it inspires us, and it also inspires the other community members as well.
The other way that we take advantage of the community is, it's really a way and a check to make sure that we're actually solving real problems for real people. We're listening to the feedback to see: what use cases are people trying to do? Where are they getting stuck? Pretty much every engineer on our team, on any given week, is spending time on Zoom calls with people, actually seeing them use the tool and seeing where they're getting stuck, what's easy, what's not easy for them.
We're also trying to kind of crystallize things a bit. We're actually working on a certification program so that folks have a clear journey, if they want one, for learning PixieBrix — and also signaling their knowledge to their employers and their companies as well.
On the enterprise side, as part of that, it's really leveraging that community, but also realizing that the sales process is going to be — it's a really educational sales process. A lot of people don't even know what we're doing is technically possible. The first sales call is often: "hey, these things are actually possible. And by the way, this is actually a low-code/no-code tool, so your own people can do these things." As part of the sales process, our goal is to get their team building things as quickly as possible so that they recognize the kinds of value that their own citizen developers, or their own formal development teams within the company, can unlock.
But yeah — as you're also extremely involved in the automation community as well as the future-of-work community, I think being a multi-time UiPath MVP is also no small feat. I would love to hear more about what sticks out to you as being the pillars of building a great community.
Alp: I think one of the interesting parts of the RPA community for me was that, first, the academy was free and open. Anyone was able to easily learn UiPath at the time, and it was mainly for developers — only people who were building automation within that community. But as the platform scaled, we had business executives, data scientists, process-mining experts within the same group of people. And I think that brought the community to scale, and the network effects, because then we got to know how an RPA developer would think, how a business analyst would think — and that information transferred in between. That helped pretty much the community to continuously grow, but at the same time build things for the product.
When you think about it, I think this applies to PixieBrix as well. As people build more solutions — similar to the OpenAI solution that you gave an example of — then you will see what is the art of possible. And as people see that, communicate about it, hackathons, go to the events, conferences, the academy — it becomes a community of its own. I see similar things with PixieBrix. Kudos to that. It's one of the powerful elements of the community: that it needs to be open, it needs to be accessible, and it needs to be for everyone. Once that is reached, then the product — since it's also for the people, it's human-centric — ends up shaping to a place that is unbeatable.
Todd: Yeah, I love that — especially the point on really having that diversity of backgrounds in that community, because everyone's bringing on a different view of things. I really like that point.
Alp: Thank you. I wish we could spend another hour. It's always lovely to speak to you and discuss the future of work, discuss the low-code environment. I want to thank you once again for coming to the podcast episode. It was my pleasure to host you.
Todd: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for having me on. The pleasure is all mine.