Rami Al-Bakri. Partner, Underdawgs

Speaker: Rami Al-Bakri, Underdawgs, Partner

Rami Al-Bakri: My name is Rami Al-Bakri and I specialize in building products and companies for myself and others. What does that mean? Well, a company is just a system of tools and processes with a great product or service at the center of it. And at this point in my career I can help out and cover all areas of that. My core training was within product and design. I've been a product leader, a number of the most exciting startups in the world. Those include Bumble, Tandem, Dopay and EXi to name a few. In my my career, I've seen all types of businesses, so every stage, my idea through the seed and growth stage, regulated and unregulated and finally bootstrapped and heavily funded. I'm also a three time entrepreneur myself, so I know exactly how you feel and I'm here to remove whatever stress I can from you as my clients.

Rami Al-Bakri: Launching new companies and products is really tough and risky. It takes an incredible amount of energy and time to stand up version 1.0 and that's even when you're trying to practice things like the lean startup methodology and convince yourself you're doing it with discipline. Before Underdawgs I'd launched two technology startups, and both started as evening and weekends and were meant to launch in a few weeks, frustratingly reality bit and product development took closer to a year to deliver the thing that we thought we needed to truly test the proposition and both forced me to go full time to finally launch them. This has cost me hundreds of thousands of pounds personally in development costs and lost income and you could say what took you so long? Why so slow? The bottom line is custom code. It always takes much, much longer than you and your team anticipate. And the really sad truth is that version 1.0 of your product is barely the start. You still need to wrap that into a commercial system and that system needs to cover testing that people really care, retaining those initial customers that you land, getting new customers via marketing efforts and earning revenue and generating referrals. This is all really difficult. And as I said, it's taken me years on my previous ideas. Years to fully test an idea is too long and too risky. That was kind of my aha moment on this. I realized that I actually might never achieve my life goals as these bets were just taking far too long to test. I felt pretty lost at the time, I was, you know, deflated because I didn't have an obvious answer. And then one day I was speaking to a really good friend of mine who's also an entrepreneur and he was demoing a product that had been building or him and his team had been building and it was amazing, it was lovely and then we sort of went into the inevitable discussions of, you know, what tech stack are you using and he told me he'd done the whole thing in Bubble.io which was a leading low code tool and that he'd done it in a few weeks, on his own and that was it. My mind was blown and I'd finally seen the answer to kind of my anxiety and my problem, which was, how to launch drastically quicker and I'd now seen evidence that there was a way you could launch your MVP 10 times faster than what I had previously seen, what most people understood. And that's not an exaggeration, I mean, genuinely 10 times faster and that could even be an understatement. So I knew this was absolutely what I had to focus now for my own ventures and that this could be the kind of key discovery for me to achieve my goals in life. And importantly, that I could really help others achieve their own dreams and bring their own, you know, ideas to life with the same toolset and approach. But equally understanding that no, and low code tooling has graduated from 'interesting' to 'absolutely compelling', it's still not enough, you still need an amazing team because it's not easy building great software, even if it's not custom code. You need a team who have experience of launching multiple ventures and products themselves, who deeply understand the playbook for doing so, and a team who's deeply technical across the entire gamut of product and company building and who instinctively know which framework to use how to apply them authentically and for good reason and ultimately know that they know what, how to identify the real problems behind what you're trying to do and how to test and prove them. And I guess most fundamentally, a team that can drastically minimize client risk in all its forms. So that's why I started Underdawgs to bring our clients and incredibly experienced, highly technical team who will bring your dreams to life 10 times faster than previously possible using the best tools and frameworks out there. And we do it in a way that drastically reduces all types of your risk

Rami Al-Bakri: There's four main types of client that we tend to work with. The first, pretty obvious technology entrepreneurs, of any stage. So even if you're still at idea stage, get in touch, there is absolutely no too early here. More traditional SMEs. We personally love these kind of less glamorous businesses. They're not leaning into sort of a particular technology of the day. It's just a solid business that generates revenue. You guys have often done the hardest part. You've proved you have a real business and have monetised it. But you know, at this point you might be looking to step up your use of technology in some areas of the business or building a brand new product to compliment what you already have or even kind of broaden out your reach. Or maybe you've just got an insight on that industry and you really want to kind of go for it, go for something huge. Whatever it is, we can help SMEs drastically by improving the system -isation or the core product. Whatever you need. Third, is corporate ventures and intrepreneurs. So there's often a large company that has a good idea and wants to sort of test that idea out without risking anything to do with the parent company all and also to validate it quickly and cost effectively. So similar to a tech entrepreneur obviously technology will sit at the heart of this new proposition and again, that's our bread and butter. We will stand your venture up for you fully systemise it, add that commercial wrapper if you need and and get you the answers that you're looking for. And then the fourth and final kind of category of client that we work with is just still large companies but the internal tooling. So within the core business we can help companies that are looking to improve their internal processes by adding software and automation. Again, whatever you need in that respect, we can help out with. So yeah, if you're one of those four get in touch, let's have a conversation.