Productbox is leveraging its tested frameworks & tech to bring your napkin ideas to life.
Meet Sav Pushparajah, Founder of Productbox — an Australian low-code agency that’s turning draft ideas into market ready products.
We caught up with Sav to learn more about Productbox, the challenges and highlights over the past year, and their new product, Hugo. Excerpts from our chat below :
What is Productbox, and what led to the inception of it?
Before founding Productbox, I was the Head of Product for a software company that built identity and fraud solutions. I was super frustrated that I couldn’t test out ideas quick enough, so I started investigating ways I could design and build something fast myself.
I have always been curious about low-code technologies, so I tried 10 different platforms including bubble.io and Webflow and I was blown away. I took a bet and hired 2 smart Gold Coasters with the aim of being the “skunkworks” team for founders, small business owners, and intrapreneurs within large organisations.
How have you found being a solo founder?
I loved it at the beginning, but as an organisation grows and time progresses, it becomes harder. I am lucky enough to know a few people who have been on the founder journey, so I call them when I doubt myself or need advice.I know this is going to be a long journey, so I hope to find a cofounder with a sales and/or marketing background in the near future.
What makes Productbox different from other product innovation & design companies in the market? What would you say is your strength?
Customers love that we can take their napkin idea or problem, research it, think through it, and bring it to life with a high degree of autonomy, much like a “skunkworks” team! Our strength is in bringing together tested frameworks (e.g. Outcome Driven Innovation), technologies (no-code), and of course, great people to improve the odds of success.
What have been some of the more challenging aspects of running your business? And how have you overcome them?
Bootstrapping the business has been really hard. When you are running a services business and growing staff, the monthly wages bill gets larger and larger. I learned the hard way and had to pay a few months out of our own savings, but we learnt quickly.
From the outset we have always had a culture that encourages open feedback and ownership. We set up ESOPs 18 months in as we wanted staff to have an owners’ mindset. We meet every fortnight, put every problem on the table, agree on desired outcomes, and leave it to the owners to solve and communicate.
If you had let us in on some of your major achievements over the past year, what would those be?
We landed 3 clients who were serial founders and had built companies worth $100m+
We also became an overseas worker sponsor organisation. We have already sponsored one person, with another in the works! Being born in Sri Lanka and immigrating here at the age of 8, this was important to me.
We’ve also delivered some amazing outcomes, including a nanny marketplace, where manual human effort was reduced by 70-90% and bookings increased 3x.
What’s on the horizon for Productbox?
We have built a product called Hugo to help freelancers and small agencies deliver great outcomes for their clients, without the admin. We are using it internally at the moment and are confident it will provide value to clients, freelancers and agencies. We have learnt a lot in our first 18 months and in order to reach more founders and businesses, we believe that we need to focus on enabling the 100m tech and design related freelancers to deliver brilliant work.
What does success look like for you? What would you say is your north star?
Our north star is to bring digital ideas to life simply and successfully. Success for us is helping millions of founders, small businesses and enterprises across the globe launch successful digital products.
If you are a startup, small business or enterprise that needs help bringing a digital product to market, reach out to Productbox here.
If you are freelancer or agency who wants to join the private beta of Hugo, register here.
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By Nikita Lamba
