This was a time when I was building an ERP for forest department where they can't just digitise their internal process but also collaborate with local communities and partners and run a local marketplace on their hosted website (Here I will just talk about why startup is centred around nature-tourism, if you want to read about why I was working on this and get more bored, go to Founder's story and you'll have my respect😁). Yes, it was too much and yes, nobody cared as I wasn't a big school techie or even with a software development experience for god's sake😂.

However, before witnessing this nightmare, I visited Kerala with a friend and our plan was to travel Varkala and Vagamon. We were travelling pillion on an enfield from Varkala to Vagamon and as was long run, we had a layover planned at a random village home-stay in Angamoozhy which was cheap and mid-way with good ratings. Well, we struck a gem there, place was located near Gavi forest which is beautiful with some eco-sites around hosting small adventure activities and this was all right under the nose of a national giant, "Periyar Tiger Reserve". I have been to both place and god this place was way beautiful, BUT, what I noticed was most of people came here and visited eco-sites around were locals from nearby cities who knew this place and obviously were repeat visitors. So, first thing in my mind was why aren't many outside(mostly one-time visitors, like me) here? Information was online so why didn't it popup when I was planning my trip. I had been to Thekkady before too, it didn't pop-up back then too! I travelled around in that region it has a great infra with well managed eco-sites, some hotels so what was missing?

Well I didn't get it back then as obvious reason that popped up is it not being on radar of travel agents so nothing can be done maybe.

Fast forward to that dead-end of my ERP where I was depressed and place popped up in my mind, those small businesses in regions like Gavi Forest and Angamoozhy village and more than that, many less known beautiful forest reserves and nearby villages Himalayas stand no chance and their people have to rely on some popular influencer to find them someday making the place an overnight success(or maybe over-crowded if it was in a movie like with Pangong-Tso)? Well maybe not if there was a place where they can somehow unite and showcase themselves, but again how, and who will care enough to help them as government has made eco-sites which shows they are trying but something is not working.

This was, something as helpless as I was with my startup, BUT, there it was, my goal from where I started, "To help communities and organisations associated with forests". These were those people and-and the transaction system, a code that made my ERP unique, was actually more useful for a marketplace or an OTA.

So now all I needed was a way to turn it into a reservation system, have some search engine and bam you get an OTA ready to go right? Nope, I forgot a lesson, coding is not same as coming up with a logic and here, I was going to need a lot of them and when you are making them from scratch, just like an idea, sometimes they get in at a right time and most of the times they arrive late leaving me updating hell of a code for it to work. This was the reason I wasn't able to achieve short term goals I set during my incubation period at IIT Mandi Catalyst where I got selected right when pivoting. Furthermore, during this time, I conducted a survey to strengthen my theory which brought few more perspectives to it and led to an additional feature of "association based search engine" which helps with more relevant search results and it is important as one of the major issues according to survey was safety, and relevant search will avoid our visitors getting stuck in awkward and unreliable locations around their target travel points. So here I am, little late, little sorry but a lot more prepared of what it is to come next, a long awaited go-live.

ForestRP has now a prototype ready for its OTA and Partner App for ticketing system and I am moving fast completing it to go-live with a beta.

This wasn't brief eh!