Build Club Spotlight #2: ✨👩‍💻BuildShip with Co-founder Harini Janakiraman

Welcome to the Build Club Spotlight Series, where we shine a light on some of the most promising Aussie AI startups!

In this installment, we're thrilled to share our conversation with Harini Janakiraman co-founder and CEO at BuildShip. Prepare to embark on a journey into the realm of low-code visual backend building and AI workflow creation. ✨

Talking Points

• Harini's story founding BuildShip📔

• Product Offerings - New Customer 💡 vs AI Engineer⛏️

• Growth of Buildship 🚀 - 50,000+ community

• Advice for aspiring AI Builders 💭

• Our Ask: Try Buildship, we'll run a workshop for you!

Let’s dive in!

What is your background and your story founding Buildship ?

Before founding BuildShip, I worked as an early-stage VC, partnering with hundreds of founders in 0 to 1 product journeys. Prior to that, I was VP of Engineering at BlackRock, where I led a large engineering team that scaled a data product on a platform managing trillions of dollars.

Currently, backend development can be unnecessarily complex. You either need to be an engineer who can deploy backends to cloud platforms and perform DevOps, or you can use one of the no-code and workflow automation tools if you're a non-technical builder. These tools are helpful for building initial MVPs, but often fall short in terms of flexibility, scalability, and extensibility beyond that stage. This leaves many people with great ideas but without the technical skills to bring them to life.

BuildShip is here to change that by combining the ease of nocode with the power of low-code and AI. Our goal is to empower the next wave of product builders and innovators to build without limits.

How would you describe your product offerings to a new customer and to an AI engineer?

BuildShip is a drag and drop style visual backend and AI workflow builder. BuildShip lets you go from plain English to step by step building and shipping a complete API or powerful backend for your product. BuildShip helps you go faster by giving you the speed of no-code but with flexibility of low-code. 

You can create powerful APIs, Scheduled tasks / CRON jobs to perform database CRUD operations, and combine any tools and AI models easily in your backend workflows and ship them scalably.

BuildShip offers 100s of pre-built nodes to popular platforms like Sendgrid, WhatsApp, Firebase, Supabase, Postgres, and AI models on OpenAI, Replicate, Hugging Face, etc. However, if any integration is missing you are not stuck! You can generate any node using AI. You can even use custom code with any NPM package. You can explore templates to get started fast.

BuildShip can be used to build on top of other no-code tools like FlutterFlow, Bubble, Bravo Studio, WeWeb, Toddle etc or apps built on frontend frameworks like Next, React.js, Astro, Vue.js etc

We also recently released an AI Assistant Builder on BuildShip which allows for the easy creation of OpenAI Assistant API, connected to your tools and databases to take any action - all without writing a single line of code.

And the best part, you can always dive into the code if you want to tweak anything and publish with one click!

How has the journey been so far - how has BuildShip evolved?

We are doing really well! Since our public launch in November 2023, BuildShip has grown rapidly, we have over 50,000 community of low-code/no-code builders. We have been releasing features at breakneck speed based on user feedback including an AI Assistant builder, templates for business usecases as well as integration to popular tools.

What advice would you give to aspiring AI builders?

The best advice that we have is to launch early and iterate fast. In the fast-paced world of AI, new tools can rapidly outdate existing models and technologies. Low-code tools will help you validate and test out your idea while helping you get to market fast. Focus of usecases solving problems for users and shipping often.

How can our audience help you build and grow BuildShip?

Since your audience caters to AI builders, there is a great synergy here as they are the target users BuildShip. We’d love to showcase BuildShip to AI builders community via workshops and generous coupons for users to try out our paid plans.

You can stay up to date with Buildship on their LinkedIn and X
 
Website: https://buildship.com/
Discord: https://buildship.com/discord

Or follow Harini’s LinkedIn here

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