ICT Enterprises
Pain relief for web developers
Novatap understood the pain points in web development, and decided to develop a pain-killer. “Website development remains a field that requires a lot of knowledge and patience,” said the company’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mr Kshitiz Shankar (left in picture above). “dockPHP is an attempt to help developers and designers reduce the development time by employing a visual programming strategy.”
When he was a computer engineering student, Mr Shankar was active in the freelance website development industry, and was thus familiar with the problems faced by web developers on a daily basis.
“HTML creation is no longer a pain point in web development especially since we can just copy paste the different components from the Bootstrap framework and use them. The problem comes in when you have to style those components to match your needs.”
This prompted him to develop a tool that could ease the workload of website developers and designers using the latest web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.”This is where dockPHP comes in. We facilitate the same functions as DivShot and JetStrap but with an extensive layer of CSS automation, thus making dockPHP a pain-killer application,” he said. “dockPHP is doing for web 2.0 what Vemeer/FrontPage did for Internet 1.0 in the 1990s.”
The tool is targeted mainly at developer houses that deal with website development as their core process. Other potential customers include designers, start-ups, small and medium enterprises and novice users who want to get started with website development. “The key value that dockPHP brings to them is that it helps them in increasing their efficiency and at the same time in reducing their costs.”
According to Mr Shankar, dockPHP can help increase developer productivity by up to 75 per cent by reducing time spent on repetitive tasks. The tool automates a major part of the front-end development process – from creating HTML to adding custom styling without having to worry about any cross-browser issues. It enables users to add CSS3 features such as Gradients, Web Fonts and Transforms easily. Build on top of Bootstrap, it also allows developers to quickly extend any of the in-built styling and build responsive websites. Given the nature of the tool and the visual programming strategy involved, it also serves as a learning platform for non-technical personnel in a team to quickly grasp web development concepts.
The ultimate goal of dockPHP is to become a one-stop solution for the complete website development process and thus eliminate the need for the wide range of tools that are currently required in the process, said Mr Shankar. Eventually, the aim is for dockPHP to not only help a user with HTML/CSS or the front-end development, but also to focus on Javascript as well as server-side plugins, making it a first-of-its-kind product.
On the marketing front, Novatap’s core focus from here on will be to create greater awareness of the product, said Mr Shankar. “Since dockPHP is a cloud-based tool, demographics is not an issue for us. We always planned to go global from day one.”
The company also recently won the SeedStars Singapore competition and was selected as the “Best Startup in Singapore”. Next up, it will be heading for the SeedStars World Finals in Geneva in February 2014. “Competitions like these also help us to get picked up by the media and improve our marketing base.”
How to build “ingeniously simple” tools, develop a marketing strategy and grow the business – these were some of the useful lessons that Mr Kshitiz Shankar picked up during a month-long mentoring programme conducted by Red Gate in the United Kingdom.
Novatap scored the opportunity when it won a new mentorship competition run by Red Gate and the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) earlier this year. In October, members of its team flew out to Red Gate’s Cambridge headquarters where they received individually-tailored mentoring from the team that grew Red Gate from a start-up to an international software firm.
“Working alongside a bootstrapped company that became one of the biggest software firms in the UK was an exceptionally brilliant experience,” said Mr Shankar. “Our primary goal for the trip was to learn as much as possible from the different teams at Red Gate and how they handled their marketing, product development and customer acquisition processes. Given that Red Gate’s customers are primarily developers, it was a perfect match for us.”
With its product dockPHP now in beta free release, marketing was one of the areas that Novatap wanted to focus on during the mentoring programme. From the various Red Gate product teams, it learned how to develop a marketing strategy, and also how to scale its offering with proper deployment and release management of its product. With the upcoming announcement of its pricing plan, the mentoring stint also provided a good opportunity for Novatap to get feedback and suggestions by brainstorming and discussing pricing-related issues with the people from Red Gate.
“From a business point of view, this was an excellent opportunity for us to get to know more industry experts, professionals and entrepreneurs and expand our network. Red Gate helped us connect to the right people whose guidance really helped us understand industry trends, gather useful information, solve our technical as well as business problems and set milestones for our product.”