Startup helps navigate regulatory maze with Q&A website

Brickbats plenty and bouquets seldom. That is the usual public response about government helpdesks almost everywhere. In a vast and diverse place like India, such reactions are often not without justification either.

But one startup based in Trivandrum wants to change that perception and become a platform where people can untangle the red tape that often looks too daunting to the layman. Thousif Mohammed hit upon the idea when he was working with Ernst & Young and later with PriceWaterhouseCooper where his duties included liaising with government departments in different parts of the country.

“What I discovered was that there were several officers who spent hours toiling away but they seldom were visible to the public nor did they have time to answer every query that comes to their department,” said Mohammed, who is a TKM Engineering College product and an MBA graduate from IIM Raipur.

He launched Tesz Technologies as an information platform three years back to help both the officials and the people who needed information on regulations.

Initially, he started this as an experiment by posting information that he gathered from different government agencies. Then he formatted it like a question and answer forum with common queries that he saw coming to offices he visited.

The site started getting attention, and soon around 500 visitors were coming to the site every day. This was enough for the then-32-year-old to quit his job and launch his startup in 2020. “Looking back, I realise how naive I was,” he says with a hearty laugh. “I thought 500 visitors a day was huge.”

The young entrepreneur thanks his wife for fully backing his idea, which helped him overcome the scepticism of others around him. “Not sure if I would be that brave now,” he adds.

Fortune favours the brave, goes the adage. Tesz Technologies got a lucky break when the Indian government's Digilocker platform – the digitisation online service provided by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology – responded to his queries and agreed to provide answers to questions about their operations that were coming to Tesz website. This boosted the site’s credibility, and soon the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) also backed his firm.

Despite a promising start, a baptism by fire was around the corner as India went into a lockdown by March 2020, throwing almost everything into disarray. As economic and social activities came to a halt, Tesz saw a drop in site visitors, and Mohammed, who was bootstrapping the venture, was down to his last dollar by the end of 2021.

“I then decided to go back to employment as cash flow was down to a trickle and thought I would run it as a part-time project as the visitors to the site had ballooned to 100,000 a month. Then came a stroke of luck. KSUM informed me that the 7 lakh rupees (around 8,500 US dollars) grant has been sanctioned and released the first tranche of 2 lakh rupees. But in my exuberance, I burned through that amount in two months and struggled again as the rest came months later.”

He said that struggle made him evaluate his business model and taught him how to run a tight ship. Ideas were also forming in his mind to monetise the site through online advertisements. The Alleppey-native then decided to shift to Trivandrum and that opened up more chances.

During that time, he had located many experts and consultancies who were giving information about government regulations and coaxed them to provide answers to people posting questions about varied subjects like motoring regulations and land department rules.

He says as experts and consultants discovered engagement with the platform boosted their visibility, they were eager to answer questions posted on the site. The startup founder also personally canvassed government departments and officials to engage with the public who sought information about their regulations.

Tesz Technologies also started giving awards to departments which performed well in this e-governance activity and provided them with an analysis about the cost-effectiveness of online engagement, illustrating the expenses they would have encountered if it were physical engagement by the officials.

When he started sending reports about their contribution and performance, helpdesk employees were happy and eager to engage with the firm.

Now the site holds around 25,000 queries which have been answered on the site and it covers a spectrum of issues. A majority of them cover areas like land regulations, identity and tax documents, vehicle regulations and rules regarding loans and subsidies. Anyone can post a query after logging on to the site and the user will be alerted when the answer arrives.

Experts and consultants in different fields provide help to most of the questions but some are answered directly by government departments. This is not confined to government departments in Kerala as some official bodies from other southern states, such as Karnataka’s Sakala Mission, also have started engaging with users of the platform.

Mohammed says some responses surprised him too, such as when the Ukrainian government responded to queries about the education opportunities there, but the site has not been able to regain touch with them after the war broke out.

Consultancy companies based in Dubai were professional in their answers and they even had an online system that enabled Tesz to update the status of their engagement with the site, says Mohammed.

He says unlike social media handles that some government agencies operate, Tesz’s audience are people who are looking to engage with the content and not just scrolling along as is the norm in other popular sites like Facebook. The Tesz founder also thinks this would provide a better platform for government departments to target specific groups with their ads about official programmes.

The startup founder says automation has lessened his work, but as the one-man army behind the project, he still has to manually moderate some questions for clarity. So far, he has only engaged a part-time help who takes care of the development of the site, but now Mohammed says he plans to hire more staff to expand the reach of the platform even further. In the last financial year, the site managed to generate around 12 lakh rupees mainly through ads, and the young entrepreneur is confident that the site’s revenue will reach 50 lakh rupees next year.

He says his vision is to make this platform a social media for government agencies and experts on regulatory affairs to engage with their audience, which is now slowly expanding among Indians residing in other countries like the US and Canada. Even non-Indians residing in countries like UAE have started using this site, says Mohammed.

My aim now is to make Tesz Technologies a global Q&A platform to address queries about government measures, says the 35-year-old.

Scorching Kerala provides a hot opportunity

The summer has not even started in Kerala, and the mercury has already soared into the 40s in parts of the state. It looks like this summer is going to be a scorcher. Reports also indicate that the northern parts of Kerala received less rain in the preceding months. Dr MG Manoj of CUSAT Radar Research Centre says that the reduced rainfall and rising sea water temperature are contributing to the summer heat. Kerala’s topography and geography make it a perfect laboratory to study climate change and startups looking to tap into this area need to look no further for impact studies. According to Your Story, Indian climate tech startups raised 2.2 billion US dollars in 2022. Hopefully, Kerala will see more firms offering products and services to mitigate the effects of climate change on different businesses.

As we swelter under the summer heat, it’s critical to consider the impact of climate change on food production. Dr G Byju, director of the Central Tuber Crops Research Institute, says that local tubers like cassava and sweet potato are climate-resilient crops with great potential in the coming years. The institute has just signed an agreement with the Digital University of Kerala to leverage its digital expertise in researching and developing sustainable resource management and disaster risk reduction. The university will also establish a research centre at the institute to nurture such studies.

Musical chair continues at the Silicon Valley

It’s a season of revolving doors in Silicon Valley right now. Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left in 2018, is reportedly planning to launch a rival AI company. He believes that OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, has become “a closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft”. Meanwhile, former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey has released a new social media platform called Bluesky, which will be like Twitter but more decentralised. Dorsey is also getting louder in his criticisms of the dramas at Twitter under Musk's management. In other news, the creators of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who left after Mark Zuckerberg started tweaking the platform, are back in the news. They have launched a social media app called Artifact, which they say will allow users to click a button to show more or less from a given topic, giving them better control. Finally, Zoom recently fired its president, George Tomb, a former VP at Google who was hired only a few months ago, leaving another chair vacant.

This Singaporean firms wants tiny tots to stay connected

Singapore-based startup myFirst has raised 2.2 million US dollars to proceed with its social media apps for kids aged three to 12. The firm, which already sells gadgets like smartwatches and cameras for kids, says its platform will help children “stay connected socially without the usual ills of social media”, according to Tech in Asia. The company plans to use the funds to expand its business in the US and Asia. The idea received a very positive response from media and attendees at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, says the firm. Parents will control who their children connect with, and the company says it will allow “freedom of expression within a controlled environment”. Very Singaporean, eh?

Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

We admit, flying paper planes is a favourite hobby of ours. But any notion that we were experts at it were dashed by Dillon Ruble and Garrett Jensen who recently set a world record by a paper aircraft, sending a sheet of paper 88.318 metres, or almost 290 feet. Oh, did we say both of them are engineers at Boeing? The aircraft maker has posted some footages from the event and says Ruble and Jensen “studied origami and aerodynamics for months, putting in 400 to 500 hours of creating different prototypes to try to design a plane that could fly higher and longer”. Nice job if you can get it.