In a virtual interview with Deepthi Rao; Srikanth Venkatesh, CEO and founder of Tuxfrog tells about his passion for coding , his journey in establishing Tuxfrog in 2013 and his future ambitions.
Srikanth Venkatesh pursued his engineering in Computer science from RNSIT, Bengaluru and graduated in 2007. He joined Caritor (Now, NTTData) the same year. As was customary, freshers were trained for a month or two upon joining. This is where he met Ms. Ameena Mubeen, an excellent trainer who got him passionate about software development. He later worked on ERx, an enterprise prescription management software owned by McKesson, a US based firm. This was the time of java thick clients. Softwares were meant to be installed on Windows systems and unlike today, the concept of running a huge application in a browser was seen as unreliable. He worked on integrating Business Objects, a popular reporting tool to ERx. Many of the engineering concepts which he learnt back then have helped him shaped the code he writes today.
What inspired you to start your own company?
I used to work 9am to 9pm, socializing with friends on weekends. Life was fast. Too fast for my taste. I slowly started to feel that life was slipping away from my hands and often wondered if I should be devoting more time for religion and philosophy. I needed more time, first of all. So, I started to look for professions that would get me more time. I consulted Dr. K.S. Sreenath, my Mathematics professor at RNSIT to see if teaching would be good option for me. Having decided so, I applied for my masters as a way to get into teaching. I did my masters at SJBIT in Computer Networks, passed out in 2011/12. The same year, I was teaching Java to first year engineering students at PESIT, Bangalore. A teacher's life somehow has the perfect work-life balance and I always managed to make time for spirituality. During this time, an opportunity opened up at Vadodara, Gujarat; thanks to a good friend of mine who worked at PIET, an engineering college there. Being eager to explore Northern India, I took it up and spent a good many years teaching students there.
By 2013-2014, tablets were gaining popularity and many tablet-based solutions were successful in the market. I began to take notice of restaurant management solutions that were tablet based and started to work on a small proof-of-concept along with my friend for a tablet- based menu system. The idea at this stage was still very crude and I was surprised at the positive response I got from the fine-dining concepts that I showed my work to. After getting the proof of concept validated, I gradually realized that I would need a lot more time to develop the concept. I started working on it full time along with my ex-colleague who was doing his MBA at that time and I had the first version ready within a few years.
Can you explain what the restaurant management application does?
The restaurant management application basically has a beautiful User Interface for menu selection and would interface with the restaurant's point-of-sale system to get the orders going. However, this had a lot of problems - there were so many different point-of-sale systems that restaurants used and there was no standard Application Programming Interface (API) to integrate with. Another lesson learnt was that restaurants want choice with respect to tablets. Our solution was restricted to Android devices.
We iterated to build out a point-of-sale system from scratch, and in a cross platform language for ease of maintenance. At around this time (by the end of 2017), Google's Flutter was in demand. Flutter is a cross platform solution to application development; that meant we could write out a single application that can run on any device - be it mobile, tablet or desktop with any OS - Android / iOS or Windows.
We went back to the drawing board and started to chalk things out thoroughly. A lot more requirements were added, a lot more competitors' products were considered and a lot more features were needed to be needed if we were to release something like this into the global market. The existing solutions are not flexible enough for today's needs - the most important one being dynamic pricing management for menu items. This means that the restaurants need a way to advertise their high margin menu items over others and reflect the changing ingredient costs without much hassles. Most of the current solutions are not practical enough and the ones that are, are not affordable enough.
What is the current scenario of the application built?
We realized that a few of the components that make up Tuxfrog can be stand-alone products. Employee shift scheduling, digital signage, payroll and inventory management solutions stood out. These offshoots will probably make it into the market before Tuxfrog. Currently, we have a closed group of clients for domain understanding. We run our ideas by them often. Many thanks to Mr. Vishwavijeth, Sous Chef at Taj Tower, Mumbai for his continued support & insights. We are currently focused on getting the first stable release out by the end of 2021 and we would be deciding on how we would be taking it forward based on how well the product gets received.
What are your other interests apart from coding?
I did pick up a few habits in my own time during these years and one of them is a Youtube channel called ‘Vedic Discourses’. It is a discourse forum on the Vedas by eminent scholars. The goal of the channel is to make the words of our acharyas available to one and all. Hence these discourses are recorded and uploaded.
What are your future plans?
The goal is to get Tuxfrog noticed among the top menu management applications. The product needs to be robust and practical enough to be considered as a good alternative to the current applications in the market. There are quite a few challenges in getting there. The product needs to be positioned appropriately in terms of price & features offered. Another major challenge is in marketing it in different languages, if we are to have a global reach. Our further plans are going to greatly depend on how well our product gets initially received.
If everything goes as planned, I think I will be training students on programming a dozen years from now, teaching the very concepts I am learning today.
At the personal front, I will dedicate my learning to our ancient scriptures. Also, I intend to release applications for learning Sanskrit. Today, there is a great need to get our scriptures translated into English for the benefit of our curious youngsters. I would love to contribute in this regard.
