When it comes to business development, Gonzalo Moreno Benegas is Slingr's main man. He brings his years in the IT consulting and implementation world to come up with creative solutions to our clients' most complex quandaries. He’s also the fearless leader of our Buenos Aires bureau.
In our conversation with Gonzalo, he shared his career journey, broke down some of the main misconceptions about low-code, and pulled out his crystal ball to predict the future of the low-code space.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How did you end up at Slingr?
I’m an industrial engineer by trade, but my career has mostly been in business management. After some time working for a few different consulting companies in Argentina, I ended up leading implementation projects for SAP in a big oil and gas company.
That experience was very relevant for Slingr, as they were about to start a project that involved putting together some developers for SAP. I already knew Diego, Slingr’s CTO, from back in the old days. Over a few dinners, he convinced me to jump onboard the Slingr train – and I haven’t looked back since!
What advice would you give people who are interested in working in business development?
For the BizDev curious, I’d recommend reminding them that we’re all humans – except for the aliens among us, but they’re probably not interested in low-code.
Be as empathetic as possible! Always try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, even if they don’t quite fit.
It’s also super important to always continue learning. The learning curve for business development is never ending because at its core your goal is to learn about human behavior. Good luck making sense of that!
You should also be willing to do things differently and take some risks once in a while. The world is changing, and you’ve got to adapt to it. Embrace the change.
What are some of the misconceptions you hear about low-code?
There are still a ton of urban legends about low-code. Watch out for the fake news!
The number one misunderstanding is the idea that low-code is no good for anything complex. That it’s fine for simple, small solutions – but that its tables are not robust enough to manage large amounts of data, high information flow, etcetera.
What people sometimes fail to understand is that low-code has come a long way over the years. Just look at big companies, which are increasingly buying up low-code platforms to incorporate it into their tech stack.
The harsh reality is that every single company needs to start exploring low-code. Especially the world’s behemoth, ‘too-big-to-fail’ companies. Because trust me: they’ll fail without low-code.
What are some use-cases of Slingr that you find most interesting?
We all know that the healthcare industry is in need of some significant disruption. I’ve been really impressed by what the team has been able to do for our clients in that space. We’ve adapted platforms and added features to make them HIPAA compliant, for example.
We have also been able to make workhorse platforms fit the needs of our clients by integrating things like scheduling, invoicing, and payment tools. In one case, our client liked our work so much that they actually whitelabeled their platform and started selling it! It’s so rewarding when we can add value like that.
My favorite product is probably Slingr HQ: the internal system that drives every single thing we do. HQ and maybe coffee are the two things that Slingr could not live without. It’s got everything we need, from recruitment to invoicing to CRM and everything in between.
HQ is great because it shows that we walk the walk. We’re actually using our platform all day, every day. That allows us to continuously improve because we’re always testing. So if something like our payment system doesn’t work, our employees come outside my office with pitchforks and let me know! That kind of accountability is great – and super rare in the industry.
What does the future of low-code look like to you?
World domination! At some point, low-code will have to be a part of every single company’s stack. At the very least, it will be an innovation layer. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see many companies develop completely customized solutions right through low-code platforms.
On the Slingr side, we hope to continue establishing our platform and services as a leader in the low-code space. We are excited to grow with clients who we can relate to and whose culture is similar to ours. And we want to create a company that has sustainable growth. We want to build a business that people love working in and feel passionate about. There’s nothing worse than just punching in and punching out and hating your life! We want everybody at Slingr to know that by working together, we take Slingr to the moon.
