Ashutosh Pathak for Google Workspace User Advocate Testimonials

Speaker: Ashutosh Pathak, CTO, Long Shot Innovations Private Limited

Hello everyone. I'm Ashutosh Pathak. I'm taking care of the tech part at Long Shot. So, two years back, me and my friend have started this company and basically we had the vision to connect all the chartered accountants, semi-qualified chartered accountants, finance graduates, post-graduates, MBA's and all, to come to this common platform where we will be like specializing only in particular domain of finance. Finance auditing, taxation and all. So what we do is we connect these service professionals with the entities looking for these professionals and graduates and post graduates. So, we get assignments, the assignment can be from as less as like 1 day and it can go to up to 12 months. So these assignments we get for the candidates all over India, and currently we have like 15,000 people on board. And our team size because we, we do a lot of automation and me coming from a finance background and then turned to a tech developer has been a journey all together- very interesting. And, we have kept the team size very small because we believe that every step we take forward, we have to like, make it like more in the way it can be automated, rather than just being like adding more people to the company, so that we can make a system driven company and not human driven company.

Ashutosh Pathak: So, what led to AppSheet? Because we were not having a tech founder in our team and we both come from a finance background. So, we started with a Google Form but then we thought that we need to have an application at one time- at one point of time, because we cannot be doing everything like communicating with people with WhatsApp and like closing the assignments. So- so since we were having pretty much hard time getting a tech co-founder, we tried to convince different developers where it was very difficult at that point of time. So, we were figuring out online like how we could do it, because either it has to be done by having some cost or we might have to learn and do that. Because it was a start-up, which was not kind of the initial stage, it was not earning much. So we cannot afford a fixed cost on a platform. So we started learning like what we can do, we went through the internet, what are the possible options? And then by- I don't know how it came to us like there was an option in the Google Sheet that there was something like AppSheet or something. I just opened it and, and then there it was like, it was very much what we were exactly looking at because, you know, coding is a kind of difficult to start. So we, I made this application in less than 15 days. I had some- you can say I know or I have copy paste and made some VBA Macros earlier. That was the level of competency I had. But, AppSheet is pretty much easy to handle. So, I started with this and in 15 days, we had an application and next 10 days we launched it on Google Play Store. So we, we launched somewhere in 2021 June with, on Google Play Store as a public app with the public account of AppSheet. And then now today we have more than 15,000 downloads. So, this is something like a person who is pretty much struggling to get the tech founder, tech co-founder for the start-up. They can at least start from scratch, because now we have the capability to afford a full-time developer and maybe in some time, we will have the team of developers as well. But without AppSheet it would have been not, it would have been very difficult to come to this stage. So, the problem was- the real problem we faced was no tech co-founder. And we are also- we were also not having any background of developing any apps. So AppSheet was the thing we, we started with.

Ashutosh Pathak: So what benefits and improvement the AppSheet brings is actually 100%. Everything is AppSheet on what we use right now. So, there are multiple apps connected. We even have made a HR app which is taking care of attendance every day that people log in between a specific timing and it automatically calculates the payroll and what will be the payout at the month end. So, considering the performance and stats, so everything is AppSheet! That has to be like- I can see the stats, start company sizes.. Like, it has become big enough that we can afford a team of developers now to create another application or like an application which can scale very much.