There is a story behind every creation, one that leads to the shaping of something brilliant, something that makes your life easier. What now appear as little icons on your mobile phone — what we casually term as apps — were once ideas that came from wanting to make life easier, and bring people closer.

The people behind the making of these apps have interesting stories to narrate, anecdotes to quote.
Manish Chandra’s story begins from the point he started tripping over his wife’s shopping bags in their closet. He looked around and realised that more than half the closet was filled with items that still had tags on them or that she hadn’t worn in years. Manish, who is settled in the US, did a study and found that women in America put over $300 billion worth of fashion in their closets every year. With high resolution displays and cameras on mobile phones like iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, he decided it was time to create a mobile solution to this problem. He created Poshmark, an app that would let you list an item for sale, right from your closet.
“You simply take a picture on your mobile phone of the item you want to sell, write a short description, set the price and within 60 seconds, it’s available in your Poshmark closet for women to purchase. Once your item sells, we send you a pre-addressed shipping label, all you have to do is pack the item up and send it out and we take care of everything else. Once the buyer receives the package, you receive your payment,” says Manish. Poshmark was launched in December 2011. A year and a half later, there are millions of women on the app, buying and selling fashion items, uploading one million dollars worth of inventory into the marketplace every day.

Manish also feels it brings these women closer. “The personal connection that comes from literally walking a mile in each other’s shoes is like nothing we’ve ever seen in a social network. It breaks down so many barriers when you can invite your network into your home through your closet.” Poshmark is only in the US as of now, but Manish, who is from India, hopes to have women from every country open a closet on Poshmark.
Pankaj Chaddah and Deepinder Goyal too have a story to narrate, on what led them to finding their company Zomato, that helps you find new places to eat and drink. Pankaj says, “While Deepinder and I were working at Bain & Company in Delhi, we noticed a lot of our colleagues queuing up in the office cafeteria to have a look through the stack of menu cards to order lunch or a late dinner. This set of menus was rarely updated and was never representative of the entire set of options. That’s when the idea struck us, ‘What if these menus were available online?’ That was how Zomato and then Foodiebay were born. Deepinder and I then went on to build this database and soon we had gone live with menus for 1,200 restaurants in Delhi NCR in July 2008, which expanded to 2,000 restaurants by the end of that year.” Currently, they have over 15 million users per month between their website and mobile apps.
When smartphones became the rage, many of the users stopped using the website, and switched to the mobile apps. “Our mobile apps, across all platforms, not only provide as much easy information as the website but are also location-aware, which helps the user make more efficient choices based on the options around him,” adds Pankaj. “I feel the growth of the mobile space is the key driver in this growth and the fact that most of the apps are consumer-friendly adds to the charm.”
The charm is so great that developing these apps seems to be a passion of sorts for many engineering graduates. It must have been the same charm that prompted a few youngsters to bring to the market an app called ‘Iris’, a day after the popular ‘Siri’ was launched by Apple in the US. “We were all working in different MNCs back then, and wanted to create a product together, it was a much more challenging endeavour,” says Narayan Babu, one of the founders of Dexetra, the company that made ‘Iris’ and ‘Friday’. While ‘Iris’ works as a personal assistant app that fetches information from different facets, and interacts with the user in a human voice, ‘Friday’ is a personal tracker that keeps a log of what you do every day.
“When we first learnt of smartphones, we were all bowled over by how powerful it could be. But then it should not be merely a mimic of the desktop. Smartphones should have an independent existence, that’s what led to the founding of Dexetra,” says Narayan. But what kind of an app is popular at any particular point in time is not predictable, he adds. “The landscape is changing so quickly that what was popular a year ago — like say the game ‘Angry Birds’ — is not so popular anymore. Games generally take up a big chunk of the traffic. The one factor that would always attract people is the speed with which things get done.”
Knowing how short-lived the craze for an app could be, John Paul, an alumnus of IIM-Bangalore, wanted to create one that had a long-term shelf value. When he brainstormed with his team of five at Plackal — the company he founded — such an idea came out. To create an app that would help women conceive, a perennial issue for a large number. They called it LoveCycles. “Developed in consultation with leading gynaecologists, LoveCycles can be used as a tool to aid conception or contraception. It is available for free as well as paid download across Android, Windows Phone, iOS and BlackBerry.” In less than a year, the app has already clocked two million downloads worldwide. “Korea, Germany, Italy, Russia and the US are where we see the highest downloads and usage.”
But the story of apps does not end with their usability and shelf lives. Like the ‘cool factor’ that comes with these apps, their developers too seem to get a kick out of making them. Something like what the rock bands got out of creating music that got a whole generation banging their heads. As Pankaj Chaddah puts it, “Creating something which everyone uses always gives you a kick.”