Genesis: NonStop io Technologies
It was the end of a rather cold February of 2015. I was about to conclude my life-altering volunteering experience at Lok Biradari Prakalp, Hemalkasa. At Lok Biradari, we had concluded working on the phase1 of an ambitious experiment (Akshar) of building a mobile App for the multi-lingual education bridge created at Lok Biradari school. Just when I had started thinking of the probable set of activities I’d be working on after reaching Pune, I received a curious message from an old friend asking about Akshar! We got talking, and he said that he had started a services startup, and had envisioned scaling it up to a mature software services provider in years to come. Surprisingly he invited me to co-found this startup!
Though I had something similar in mind, I was pleasantly taken aback to receive an offer like this from someone. At the same time, with whatever knowledge I had about entrepreneurship, I was aware that a budding services startup needs to follow at least two things in parallel:
1. Envisioning/building robust/innovative/useful systems
2. Successfully market the work and build a network (of clients) to secure a healthy pipeline of work
A pretty reasonable inner voice convinced me that I could handle the first part efficiently, and my friend was pretty famous for his intellect and oratory through our college and IBM days (where we had studied and worked together correspondingly).
We decided to get together and stick around with each other for at least the next 2–3 years with an intention to build this budding services startup named ‘NonStop io Technologies’.
Today our association as ‘NonStop io Technologies’ is 1400+ days old. NonStop io has had quite an eventful journey. A statistic says that ‘Within three years, 92% of startups fail’, i.e. only 8% of startups are effectively able to survive in the first 1000 days since their inception. In 1400+ days, NonStop went through the roughest of patches and had the best of days. In all fairness, we’ve decided to call NonStop io a successful experiment, and in turn, have built a Software Engineering Center of Excellence (CoE) in our own sense.
Personally speaking, I would have never explored the very many things, had I not been part of this journey. I realized first-hand how tricky things get when you really ‘Do’ them. As a person who had always maintained that being called ‘Taciturn’ is an achievement, I have come to appreciate the importance of speech in this journey. I learned (sometimes the hard way) to keep exploring new tech. stacks and tech. philosophies, building efficient tech. teams, contributing to sensible business-discussions, effective tech-vision execution, identifying reasonable (and unreasonable) clients, and last but not the least to take advance payment for your services 😛
This journey has helped me keep my exploratory knack intact. As NonStop rallies through its 4th year, I hope that as a team NonStop continues to provide value to its clients.
UI/UX 101: Awesome Chaps IT Studio
As NonStop was building systems for the clients, we felt an inherent need to have someone in the team who could contribute towards the aesthetics and user experience aspects of the applications. At the same time, yet another entrepreneur-to-be was working on his dream of building a UI/UX studio of his own. He happened to be right by my side! Right from the school days, this guy was interested in the designing aspect of the software. During his under-graduation, he was responsible for designing multiple websites for his college, had conducted UI seminars, and was already a freelancer by the time he graduated. In 2017, together we came up with ‘Awesome Chaps IT Studio’, a creative venture to cater to the UI/UX aspects of software. In 500ish days of its existence, this CoE has been able to successfully deliver on all the expectations so far. Of course the challenges and learnings are abounding, however, the enthusiasm wins here every day!
Enter “Sentience IQ”
With a fairly solid experience in designing and engineering software applications, now the goal has panned out to build sentient systems. Today, making effective use of the data being generated by the application is what drives the businesses forward. Building systems that make use of the data generated internally to make themselves observable and introduce ‘intelligence’ in them is the need of present, if not the future. In the past 4ish years, we’ve not explored the data science aspect of software as much as I’d have liked to. At NonStop we’ve had internships running over a couple of summers to experiment with data science and its applications. We have developed a few PoCs to dabble around data science and its use-cases.
With an intention of building and providing services in data-analytics, business intelligence, and data-product engineering we dare yet again to lay the foundation to a third Center Of Excellence in form of ‘Sentience IQ’: A Data Science Studio.
We’re sure to make mistakes; but moreover, we’re sure to learn from them and envision creating many big success stories in time to come…that is the hope at the least 🙂
Looking forward to yet another exploratory year in form of 2019!
More updates to follow…
Peace ✌️
