Disrupting the No-Code World with Creatio’s Andie Dovgan

This is Techstrong tv. Hi everyone. We're back here on Techstrong tv.

You know, we're five days a week on Techstrong now, and really excited to be able to expand our coverage. As part of that, I want to introduce you to a first time guest here on Techstrong tv, as well as, I think it's the first time we featured this company on Techstrong tv. Say hi to Andy, do Dogan.

Yeah, that's, that's the right way. Okay. And Andy is the Chief Growth Officer at Reio.

Um, that's C-R-E-A-T-I-O. Hey Andy, welcome to Text Drug tv. It's great to have you on here.

Alan, thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much for inviting us. We are excited to share a story today. Absolutely.

You know, before we share the Creatio story, Andy, I'm gonna ask you to share the Andy story if it's okay with you. Um, why don't you give people a sense of, I, I mentioned you were a chief growth officer, but give people a sense of your journey. Of course.

Uh, I came to Z as, uh, 10 years ago from Europe, and I, uh, live in Boston. I adore the city. It's, uh, in my opinion, one of the best citizens in the world.

I travel a lot, so I've seen a lot of different continents and places. So I'm a big advocate of, of the city of Boston. Uh, I once done, uh, Chicago Marathon, that another city that is, uh, dear and near to my heart, and I have been with the company for, uh, for 10 years since the inception.

It's amazing. Yeah. We, we, we started 10 years ago and I've, I I've been honored to see, uh, the journey and also the realization that we're still in the very beginning of this journey makes me very excited.

So I can say to them creation person, and, uh, I live in the British creation rallies. Absolutely. You know, my, my oldest son, he's actually in law school up in Boston.

He lives up on the North End Mm-Hmm. And so we go up to Boston to visit off, and it is, it's a great city. I I a New Yorker, you know, we have this thing going on in Boston, but beyond the sports, uh, you know, kinda rivalries.

I enjoy going to Boston and the North End had some amazing restaurants. Great, great. Absolutely, Absolutely.

More than 100 if I heard. And actually, that was the first spot when I, uh, came to, to Boston. That was the first spot where I kind of rented my, um, my first, um, apartment, and I did right at RA Street and saw those 100 amazing Italian restaurants.

Absolutely. That, that's near where my son is, right? He's right near the Paul Revere Church, you know, and, and all of that right near there.

Anyway, you know, chief Growth Officer. Mm-Hmm. Relatively new term.

It's not unheard of. A lot of people have that title, but in different companies it means different things. And some companies it means you're running sales and other companies, it's marketing and other companies.

It's kind of akin to Chief Revenue Officer. So you're responsible for all revenue generating in other companies. It's almost a glorified social media kind of, you know, where you're, you're you're building the, the, the presence Yeah.

The brand in that. Tell us in at Creatio, what is Chief Growth Officer encompassed? Yeah, so I, uh, stay very close to all our key go to market initiatives and strategists.

My charter is Everson related to demand generation and pipeline creation, Everson related to brand development, including analyst relationships, pr like ever set as we do to, uh, to make this loud and big. Uh, I also work very close with the sales organization because we aligned very, very well. So I own, uh, sales enablement and couple of other functions so that we work as one team and we use all the knowledge and resources available to us.

I also prefer to stay very close to the research and development team because I think that if you do market development, it's super, super important that you deeply understand the technology and you deeply understand the value it brings to the table, and you stay very connected. And from my first days with, with Croatia, I was always fascinated and I, I was always spending more time with technology, uh, people as I was say, commercial people. And I think that this is a, a good way to do it.

Absolutely. I think you gotta stay close to them. Yeah.

So, Andy, let's talk about gray show. It's 10 years, 10 plus years now. Mm-Hmm.

What exactly does the company do? Yeah. Uh, look, we are located in the intersection of three technologies.

So we are a no-code platform focused on enterprises. It allows you to take visual designers and automate all sorts of different workflows and enterprise use cases for your organization. So on the top of this platform, we've built very powerful CRM apps and we disrupt, um, other traditional vendors in this space because our, uh, CRM apps are very configurable, agile, flexible, scalable, so you can achieve much more with, with, with them because they're empowered with no code.

And we also have a lot of different workflows pre built for industries. Let's take financial services, we can do customer onboarding, we can do, uh, loan management processes, we can do accounts opening, like all sorts of different vertical workflows. So think about Croatia is, uh, as an enterprise platform with bunch of Lego blocks that are served as ready to capabilities where a non-technical person can come in and assemble them into needed experiences in needed applications.

Uh, usually the German no-code is, uh, kind of mistaken to something that is very small, very departmental. So where you can take something that was like a small Excel file and turns that into an application, it's not the case for Croatia. So we have focused on solving business critical problems.

We're helping, uh, mid-size and large enterprises to automate world to world workflows. And we do that by kind of empowering non-technical people, people that understand the process, that understand the end result that they want to get from the, uh, automation to partner with technology teams, work together in tandem and really speed up, uh, this time to value what you are able to achieve with traditional enterprise software vendors, say in 12, 15 months, you can do with Croatia in three months. So that's kind of the major value differentiation, and we enable that through the no-code and AI capability.

Sure. com or any of the digital CXO, you know, for years long time. And I, I think you hit on something that I want to dig into a little bit.

I think initially the, the perception for and and more no code than low code was that it was great for simple tasks, right? Yeah. I want to automate or app make an app for not, not an enterprise wide, not a very sophisticated app, like a simple task.

I want to create a sign in for people come in the office or something like that, right? And, and the perception was is that the people who use these tools to make these simple apps are not professional developers. They're not full-time developers.

They're Yeah. You know, the term was citizen developer. Yeah.

Right? And, and I think a couple of years ago during covid, I even, we really saw the market caught a sort of split. You had some of these no-code guys who said, Hey, we don't, we don't, our product's not aimed at a citizen developer.

That's, that's a macro in Excel, right? Our product is aimed at people who develop, but they wanna develop faster. They want to make it easier, but they're developing enterprise scale real applications, right?

And, and to me, that's been the, the fork in the road that where we've seen this market kind of bifurcate. Mm-Hmm. And, and of course with AI now, man, you know, it's like putting gas, gasoline on the fire, right?

Boom. It's, uh, how does creatio, where do they fit in, into this roadmap? Yeah, I think, I think you, uh, you just summarized it perfectly.

I think in one axis we have, uh, low code and no code. So low code platforms, uh, usually came from rapid application development. This Yeah.

Right. And environment. And they're focused on making a already skilled technology persona more productive.

So you can take someone who is a junior developer and turn them into more senior developer with a help of this automation, or you can kind five x uh, their productivity by giving them a lot of kind of, uh, tools to be, to be more productive. And then on another side of this axis, you will have no-code. No-code addresses a different problem.

7 billion of knowledge workers, people that are not technical people, but that can contribute to automation initiatives. And why don't we make them contributors to the, uh, digital project. So this is kind of no code and definitely ratio is much closer in, uh, in this space.

And by, by far, we are a leader in this space. We've been recognized as the only leader by Forrester Wave for citizen development. So that's what we are, uh, passionate about.

And then you have another access, like simple apps or enterprise apps, and again, some low-code platforms are focused either on enterprise or SMB and similar to no-code. So we see that we solve big enterprise problems with the help of no-code and democratization of the technology. So that's how we, uh, identify our space.

And I think that, uh, to your point, Alan, as we move into the future, we will see more and more differentiation in those approaches. And, um, still kinda, we will be solving similar needs if we talk about enterprises, right? But I think that the way how we solve those needs will be a bit different.

And this is great stuff. Unfortunately, we probably took more time than we were planning right on, on discussing. But I wanna turn now if we can to our topic of discussion for today, which is you guys announced on, on the 26th.

On June 26th, uh, some new funding news. If you don't mind, why don't you share that with us? 2 billion, uh, values.

Wow. Congratulations. That's unicorn money, right?

It's unicorn, it's unicorn status, but also I think it's a recognition of, uh, overall belief in this market and belief in the, uh, creation as a leader, uh, in the enterprise, no-code market. So with, with this, we, the, um, route was led by TopFire Ventures with participation of group in our existing investors, uh, evolution Horizon. And we are really excited about, uh, the future.

So we, we are thrilled just to reinforce our strategy, reinforce everything that we do on the market. So it's a minority investment. So we're not changing company, not changing the strategy, leadership, and, uh, our vision, what we're doing is that we are reinforcing go to market, uh, investments.

We are reinforcing mostly our research and development investments in the space of no code and ai. I love it. First of all, congratulations to you and the whole team.

This isn't 2020 or 2019 anymore. You don't see numbers like that being thrown around. And back then it was, we would crazy you, you, as you probably know, right?

It was crazy valuations, crazy rounds. Things have come back a little bit more than normal, and this kind of round is an amazing, amazing round. Now, of course, the next question is, what have you done for me lately?

What does this mean for our audience out here? What is, how is this gonna help them in their work and in their, uh, you know, mission at work? What, what's creation gonna do with that money?

Look, uh, we're gonna, uh, focus on delivering more value to our customers and to our partners. So the big portion of this investment will go into research and development teams. I think that we, we see a tremendous potential and tremendous market momentum, and we want to invest in gen ai in copilot.

Croatia recently released our copilot that is focused on both AI assisted development, but also AI infused use cases for end user applications. And we want more of that. We see a tremendous opportunity to use a combination of gen AI and no code to further lower the barrier for non-technical people to go and contribute and build those applications and workflows.

So that will be a big portion of, uh, of our focus. Secondly, we have very partner-centric and partner friendly organizations. We do business with partners.

We make them a part of Croatia family. So we will further reinforce our, uh, channel partners. We'll expand it.

So we're gonna invest into our partners because only together we can make our customers extremely successful. And secondly, we're gonna grow or we're gonna grow our, uh, incredible global team. So we are a global organization.

We want to stay very close to our customers. We want to increase our presence and customer success in other areas of our business, just to really capitalize on the value of genuine care. This actually, a very important point I haven't mentioned yet, is that we have this very strong value of general care, and we, we do our business with a human face.

We always take our customer interest as a first priority. And I know that a lot of kind of marketing buzz is kind of circulated around that, but in Croatia is a very kind of deep in our DNA, very deep in our DNA so ever that we do, we do with, uh, a genuine charact of our customer community to partner the community. And we want with, no matter how big we become and how successful we become, it's super important that we keep and reinforce this key value of ratio.

A absolutely. You know, I, I can't know, I can't emphasize enough the potential for gen ai, especially in the no code world, right? Yeah.

This is, this is a game changer, right? Well, you can, and, and not just typing into a chat bot, but now, like, you know, with Open AI four oh, for instance, right? Or chat GPT-4.

Oh, well, it talks to you and you talk to it, man. A as a, I'm not a coder. I never, I I never helped myself out to be you Do me do.

Yeah. We been, I'm major in technology. Yeah, Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I was a lawyer. I flipped the law school.

Okay. But the idea of being able to talk to an AI about an app I, and how, what I wanted to do, how I wanted to function, and it could go kind of build that for me. Yeah.

Yeah. Alan, I believe promise To that crazy. It is.

It is. It is. It is.

Yeah. And I think that technology is become an incompetence. I think that it, and IT leaders will, will, uh, grow their kind of, um, presence in the, in, in the organizations, but like facilitators, like people that organize this process.

But we see more and more than with gen ai, with no code technology is becoming a competence similar to, say, presentation skills or any other skills that you might have. And now, uh, if businesses really want to go and create competitive, uh, differentiation based on the technology, they need to change the way how they think about it, and they need to spread this competence across all the organizations. Absolutely.

Man, Andy, that, that's just, this is exciting stuff for, we didn't mention this chef. For people who want to get more information about reia, what's the website? It's, uh, very simple.

com, and we are super happy to talk to anyone who has a workflow or a business application need, or you have a legacy technology. You have been investing in a technology that takes to just way too, too much time to go and configure way too much resources. You cannot hire that many, uh, developers to maintain it.

Uh, we, we see tremendous success of replacing traditional legacy software with no-code. And we, we, we see a lot of happy customers at transition, uh, from that. Yep.

Let me reinforce that. com. Yes, that's the website.

Yeah. So if you wanna find out more, head right on over to there. Um, Andy, I hope this won't be your last appearance on Techstrong, your first and last week.

I'd like to have you back on, keep us posted about what's happening. And again, congratulations to you and the whole team, and we're watching this. It's an exciting time.

This AI stuff is making a lot of exciting types, but specifically in your, in your neck of the world, right? No code, uh, stuff. The, the, the, at the tremendous time, right?

As you said, even though the company's 10 years old, it's almost like it's just getting interesting. So yes. Mm-Hmm.

Fantastic. Andy Dogan, chief Growth Officer, create show here on Tech Trunk tv. We're gonna take a break and we're gonna be back here in a moment.