How love for his musician brother got Ragunathan Pattabiraman started on his entrepreneurship journey!

This week, I take a break from writing about my own entrepreneurship journey. Instead, here is an inspiring journey of Ragunathan Pattabiraman, founder of kuyil.org, who quit his full time job to help his musician brother make apps for Carnatic music lovers! Ragu found his niche in Carnatic music and went on to develop 3 apps along with his brother. All together, the apps now have ~200,000 downloads, and all organically!

I sent some questions to Ragu via email and he kindly replied with in-depth answers talking about his family and journey. Sit back and get inspired!

Asim: What was your motivation to develop these Apps?

Ragu: My main motivation was to build something for my brother. He is a musician who studied carnatic music. He is also my favourite composer (You can listen to his old album here). I was working at a software company. We are all one joint family. Financially we were fine and there was no pressure on him to earn. I was very clear not to pressurize him so that he can pursue his music dream. I was limiting myself to help with his needs such as a keyboard, a good sound card, mic, etc. I tried protecting him from external pressures to earn money which may force him to drop his dream in music profession. He got married. Since then, my mother was often worrying about my brother's future now that he has a family of his own. My mother's worry was not new but this was the time I was also becoming concerned about his future. I started to think that it is my duty to guide him now that he had enough time to try whatever he was trying.

This was when we started a YouTube channel. My intention was to publish his music on a regular basis. I was hoping that this would be a good pressure on him to produce music as a routine. I also thought this would be a good platform for him to be discovered. Enthusiastically we created the name and the logo for this one man band. We even came up with a quick way to generate video by capturing music visualization. You can check out his first track here. But then for some reason he didn't produce any more music! I'm now unclear about why he did not pursue it further. I assumed that he was not motivated as he didn't believe in following a schedule for this creative work. Personal problems could also be another reason. Years later he mentioned the lack of infrastructure to produce music. I don't remember if we had a discussion on it or if we could have done anything about it at that time. I'm also not sure if he was as serious about that as I was. In short, it didn't take off. I became busy with my career and life, this was also when my children started going to school. But me and mother were still worried about my brother's financial future.

When everything seem to go smooth in life, there are some moments in life that will shake us to the core. These shocks make us rethink about our path. There was such a moment. I can't elaborate as it is quite personal. I realized I was too complacent about my brother's future (so does he) and it was time I do something concrete about it before it is too late.

This was the time I was also thinking of working on my own to generate revenue just to be able to run the family. I thought I could sustain my interest if I could contribute something positively to the causes I believe in. I was quite confident about the skills and discipline required to go on my own. I was okay financially. I had no liabilities. The Nest egg I had built was good enough to support the family for about 3 years.

This was the time I was also looking at your chess apps, Asim. I was quite impressed with your apps. While most chess apps I came across were just meant to play an engine, your apps were innovative. They seemed to understand the needs of the chess player. There is this Chess Book Study app that helps to study chess books with innovative use of the screen. Analyze This app is quite handy to review a position or a game. Of course, FollowChess was mind blowing. It was amazed to follow tournaments happening all over the world.

I thought, here is the guy who built something entirely his own niche; he built apps that he himself would need which nobody seemed to be doing; an avid chess player would definitely find these, so no need to spend much on marketing efforts; also big companies would not bother to build these niche apps. This business model was the biggest inspiration for me.

My brother was into carnatic music. He is also very good with audio engineering and programming. So I thought building tools for carnatic music students will be our niche. We saw there was no serious app to help with students.

Connecting the dots it was an easy decision. I thought everything fell in place. I believed I wasn't taking unnecessary risk.

Are you a programmer?

Yes I am. I loved computers even before seeing any in person! I became curious about computers through science fiction stories of my favourite Tamil writer Sujatha. In my 11th std, I first saw a computer in our school computer lab. It was a Wipro Genius. It ran MSDOS. It had 1MB RAM, no mouse, no hard disk (You may guess my age now). I was very fortunate to have a great computer teacher. He let us keep the keys to the computer lab! We used to spend even full nights at the lab.

When it comes to Kuyil Carnatic Apps, I'm a programmer, product manager / scrum master, UX designer, graphic designer, builder, marketer, etc. My brother would be the programmer, domain expert, audio engineer, blogger, etc.

How did you get started?

I first built an Android app to learn the ropes. This was before deciding on entrepreneurship. I wanted to build a simple app, yet decent and useful enough to publish. I built Quot, an app that presents quotations nicely. Here are some of the screenshots of the app:

As you can see, it is a very simple app. But it took me a lot of time to build. I was not familiar with Java or Android having worked on Microsoft technologies for 15 years. I used to wake up very early (3AM!) to work on it before going to office. I'm a quality freak, so I wanted to write beautiful code. I also spent a lot of time architecting the implementation to follow MVVM pattern as this was the time when data binding was not supported by Android. Followed TDD. Pomodoro Technique kept me focused. Of course, as I wanted to experience the whole cycle of app development, I published it and saw how the downloads work, getting feedback from users, etc.

Once I got a hang of it, it also became clear that it is very difficult for me to continue a day job and work on something more serious like audio apps. That's when I decided to quit and started pair programming with my brother. By then, we had a good idea what we wanted to build first. That would become Shruti Carnatic Tuner our most popular app.

Working with my brother was lot of fun for me. We had lot to learn from each other. Probably I learned much more from him than he from me. We did a lot of paper prototypes. Experimented with different design ideas. Of course, we threw away many ideas which were not practical. Here is a sample skeuomorphic paper prototype which we threw away.

Finally settled for something that is simple and straightforward. Technically this app was very challenging. My brother provided the domain expertise and the audio engineering side of things. Whenever we struggled on the android side of thing, there is of course stack overflow. We also took the help of my brother's teachers at his music college for professional verification every now and then.

Business-side is where we had to learn things on our own without much help. Initially we thought we will just show a small ad on the screen and ask a small fee for removing it. We found that ads for a niche app like ours is not good enough to generate revenue, and most people in India don't pay to get rid of the ads. After some trial and error we concluded freemium is what will work for us. We're also using subscription model for one of our apps.

My suggestion for those who want to get started: allow yourself room for a lot of trial and error. This philosophy should be a part of the architecture, features, business model, marketing, everything.

How long have you been working on them?

It's been 5 years we're at it. Each app took different duration. 3 months to 1 year. We spent a lot of time fine tuning and improving. We are still working on improving the apps. Audio apps come with their own challenges especially on android (with different devices having slightly different audio behaviour).

Is this your full-time gig? How much time do you spend working on them?

Yes, full time. As mentioned, I found it impossible to do it part time. May be due to complexity of our apps or the amount of collaboration it required. We usually work for 6 days a week. My experience is that working in bursts which is what I think startups are expected to do generally, is not good for long term; not good for quality or for our health. So we decided 8 hours work day. We ensured that our days are very productive thanks to Pair Programming and Pomodoro.

How did you build your website, logo etc?

We used Inkscape for logos (of course after paper prototyping). My brother taught me to use Inkscape. We designed and built all our logos and websites on our own. So far, we didn't have a need to outsource any of our work. As per my assumption before starting the journey, we had most of the skills that we require for this.

My brother already had his music blog BeautifulNote which we repurposed. He built it with Jekyll and Bootstrap. We used the same for Kuyil.

What resources/books helped you in this journey?

I loved Zen Pencils. I also went through a lot of usual suspects in the market for the budding entrepreneurs. They were very useful. As I read them, I could review my entrepreneurship plan in my mind with what they're saying. But Zen Pencils is the one still sticks with me. Of course, there were plenty of technical books that helped us. I usually get a good book on a subject once I wanted to go deeper. Books are good investment.

Apart from books, there were plenty of open source software without which we couldn't imagine building apps. Particularly helpful are Ubuntu, Inkscape, Gimp, Vim, Git, and the uncountable open source libraries. Of course, following the libraries closely on github, especially the ones we use, is quite necessary.

We also found online streaming of developer conferences useful. You can catch some at Android Developers. Last but not the least, Material Design made our life easier to design our apps. It came at a right time for us. Otherwise, we would have wasted lot of time with skeuomorphic ideas such as the one shown before.

Based on your current experience, what would be your message to your younger self?

Nothing much actually. I would probably inform my past self about the current revenue and how it all went :--)

On a serious note, while making a plan I think we have to write down the assumptions which form the basis of the plan. No matter how reliable the correctness of the assumption is, we shall make contingency plan for the fundamental assumptions to go wrong. This process would ensure us to be aware of the assumptions we're making while making a plan. It will also help us strive hard to verify our assumptions.

No matter how well we plan, sometimes things will go bad. So we shall be ready not to be shattered by those black swans. Probably it was then the time to go back to those quotations and to the drawing board.

How many total downloads do you have?

Total downloads can be seen at the app pages. (Asim: Around 200,000 downloads across all apps) All this is organic growth. We don't pay much attention to downloads. We're considering inorganic growth as the next step.

If you or any one you know have a similar story to share, please leave a comment with your/their email or email me at asim(a)appspiration.in.