Anuroop: "We're now confidently speaking of going to market"

July 30, 2012

CogKnit is a Semantic Web company based out of Bangalore. Their first product is in the education space and is called Nimit.

Here's Anuroop [co-founder @ CogKnit] speaking about his vision at the Unreasonable Institute:

Multunus was hired to build Nimit's front end - to consume the web service API’s exposed by its back end.

I had a chat with Anuroop to share his thoughts on their experience working with us. Here's a transcript of our chat.

Vaidy: Hi Everyone, This is Anuroop. I'm Vaidy. I'm the founder of Multunus. Anuroop is one of our clients. We're geographically very close. Our offices are one floor apart :).  They're actually on the first floor and we're on the second.

We've been working together for about 5 months. I asked Anuroop whether he could actually share his experience working with Multunus over the last 5 months.

Anuroop: Lemme sum it up this way. If I were to just sum up in one line what has been the greatest value addition that Multunus has made to us:Given that our background - we're a product development company who've been in existence for the last 3 years. We started active product development in the last one and a half years. We're essentially back-end people with deep expertise in Web 3.0.

We do not have front end expertise. Given our experiments that we did, we evaluated a few vendors. And we went with Multunus.

Business Value

The greatest value add that this team has done for the product and us is that they've brought us to a point where we're now confidently speaking of going to market. So, for a product company - that is very very big milestone. I think that's really where the greatest achievement - you guys have helped us to a stage where we can now speak about "going to market".

Anuroop Iyengar: "We're now confidently speaking of going to market"

Architecture

The technology components, the features of the product and what it is supposed to do has been fairly complex. So the requirement was that we have a codebase which can work seamlessly across multiple platforms. Given mobile computing, how much mind space it has taken in the space of end consumers - we wanted a codebase and a platform which can be technology agnostic - which can work on Windows, which can work on Android, which can work on iOS.

In terms of the choice of the technology solution that your architects have made - that's been phenomenal.

What is has done is that we were able to make the right technology choices for some pretty critical issues. So now we're looking at a codebase - though HTML5 is still evolving - I think it still has a maturity curve - we're looking at a situation wherein we have a codebase which can work across these platforms.

Continuous Delivery]

Once certain thing that stands out which was not really a part of the contract :) - is the addition that your architect has made in setting up the CD [Continuous Delivery] pipeline.

We're a platform as a service company. So we will keep improving features, adding new features - so it becomes imperative that such a kind of infrastructure exists.

Given the nature of a startup where things are chaotic - it helped that today we have a fairly functional Continuous Delivery pipeline. Thank you for that.

It took lot of work between the two teams to get this up - and we're there.

Design Thinking

Commenting on your team's ability, I think the team has capability for design thinking. And the ability to convert some of those - being the product owner, I was the guy who was giving the design thoughts. They were able to convert those design thoughts into actual specifications and implement them. Which was I would say, pretty good.

Quality

And robust delivery. Whatever is promised, will work at the end of the week - it works. So, I think that's what a customer needs.

Vaidy: Thank you Anuroop. I think that was very useful. And we've been working with Cogknit - Anuroop is one of the founders at CogKnit. We've been working with CogKnit in the Extreme Programming mode for about 5 months now.

Its been a fantastic experience for us as well - to try and get the maximum value out of the process. We've learnt a lot as well in terms of how to improve.

Hopefully we're gonna be working together in the future as well. Thank you.

Anuroop: Yup. Thanks.