We start 2022 with an exciting interview with Aman Mitthal, a Developer Advocate at Draftbit. Aman has been working remotely with Draftbit for the past year and has shared his unique experience of working remotely with an America-based tech company.

Prior to that, Aman worked as a backend developer for companies in Delhi, where he mastered the ability to develop solutions to modern problems.

Firstly, as our readers would like to know a bit about your background, can you tell us a bit about yourself and where you come from?

My background starts with my degree in Computer Science Engineering, basically a Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science. I graduated in 2015 and have been working in the IT industry since 2016.

Since then I have been a contractor for a long time. I’ve also worked as a technical writer and somehow ended up as an Advocate Developer earlier this year.

Can you tell us more about the product and what it’s all about?

Draftbit is a visual tool for creating mobile applications. The ideology or philosophy behind it is that Draftbit tries to cover both aspects of creating mobile applications like the no-code side and the low-code side. That’s why we call it Pro-Code.

You can run Draftbit in your web browser; You get a visual interface to build the application screens. You get all the components to connect, e.g. B. the essential basic components, the navigation presentation and the backend agnostics.

You can bring your backend if you want. For example AWS, Super Base or others like Airtable. They all share this data-sharing paradigm for the REST API, and Draftbit uses the REST API as the core of integrating data into your applications.

It’s more like creating mobile applications for your business, especially as a founder or developer using Draftbit.

They say that Draftbit uses an underlying technology that is open source. It is based on React Native, an open-source mobile application framework.

With Draftbit, you don’t have to worry about setting up code or using Javascript or other complex applications. Instead, Draftbit makes it easy for you to create a stunning mobile app for your business.

Who is your target market and how do you acquire your customers?

Our target market are most of the people who want to create mobile applications, who don’t know code or don’t want to code, or people with time constraints. They want to develop applications for their company and bring them to market as quickly as possible.

What industry do your customers come from?

Most of our customers are founders of their company OR executives working either for agencies or freelancers OR contract developers who want to build applications for their customers.

We supply a wide range of industries and can work with any customer.

What was the one constant feedback or critical feedback you received from customers that helped you redesign the product?

We have a robust online community of Draftbit users. So this is our main interface to talk to our community members who are either using or want to use our product.

There are different areas to get feedback. Most of the time our customers want to integrate their existing product or design and that is the most common feedback.

For example, one of the areas is the integration of data, because without data your application is nothing.

People often come to us with half of their APIs, or they use their backend service that creates a rough database. So we try to integrate or support as many services as possible.

How has the pandemic affected Draftbit?

Draftbit has changed a bit over the past few years. We have redesigned the old products and now focus on new products.

The focus has now shifted to picking a niche market rather than chasing the whole lot. In the last few months we have also grown as a team and see that it keeps getting bigger and better.

What three skills do you think are necessary to be successful in your field?

As a developer advocate, it’s important to communicate well with your team.

Especially when you work remotely I believe in over communication. And that’s one of the reasons I think I survived this remote adventure I’m on. So it would be helpful if you communicate with your team members.

When you work under a domain, you need to ask questions and get answers.

Second, it’s important to be self-motivated to work in this remote culture. Self-motivation isn’t just a kind of love of technology or love of the people you work with, but also a broader approach, especially towards your product community.

They are the ones who will use your product and talk about it beyond the horizon of the internet.

Finally, I think a developer advocate needs to understand customers’ pain points and their strengths and capabilities. Then we need to learn from our experience and develop a product that takes the end user’s experience into account.

Given that you have a lot of screen time and have been working remotely for the past few years, how do you generate new ideas?

My lifelong hobby has been reading books. I read a lot, but now I pay more attention to what I read. Reading helps me a lot, especially when I need to generate new ideas.

At the time, I had a book blog where I published posts and shared my ideas.

To conclude, any books that you would recommend to our readers?

Yes, definitely, one book that helped and inspired me early in my career was Ryan Holiday’s Obstacle is the Way. It has helped shape my mentality and changed the way I see obstacles. So go ahead and read it.