A realtor and a techie walked into a co-working space
One of them had spent 15 years running hostels on register books. The other had spent 25 years building inventory systems for companies that process lakhs of invoices a day. It took them about one conversation to see it was the same problem.
Srinivas Reddy Gangasani
Co-founder and CEO. The problem side.
- First PG in 2009, while still an IT consultant
- Quit to build and run hostels full time
- Five buildings, about 500 beds, today
- Kamer's first user, on his own buildings
Srinivas opened his first PG in 2009, while he was still an IT consultant. Hostels then meant Ameerpet, SR Nagar and Dilsukhnagar, mostly for students, with rents in the low thousands. Then the IT corridor grew around Kukatpally, Gachibowli and Madhapur, and buildings that had been flats turned into hostels. He says the business changed by two hundred percent in those years. The way it was managed did not change at all. It was still a register.
The moment he points to came on a construction site. A guest had booked a bed with him. The manager, not knowing, gave the same bed to someone else. Both guests arrived, and by the time Srinivas heard about it the damage was done. He remembers asking himself why nothing existed to prevent that, and then asking why he shouldn't build it.
He is blunt about what a register costs. A hundred pages, six months, written by whoever was at the desk, kept by whoever had the book. A guest who paid five thousand as an advance a year earlier would find three or four thousand written down. Some who had paid in full showed as partial. Money went missing not through theft but because nobody was tracking it.
He tested the app on his own buildings first, then handed it to cousins who run hostels. They came back with a list. They wanted changes, a makeover, features he hadn't thought of. The team made the changes and went back. Then it went to the cousins' neighbours, and that is how it was refined.
Siva went to the US in 2002 and stayed almost fifteen years, building inventory, billing, order and sales systems for very large companies, the kind that handle lakhs of invoices. When he came back to India he was working on other ventures out of a co-working space. Srinivas and Sunil were a couple of desks away, working on something called Kamer, and struggling. Technology was eating their time. They knew the business and knew exactly what they wanted. They needed someone to build it. The three formed a partnership.
Friends asked whether a hostel app was a step down from enterprise work. His answer was that Apple's inventory system and a PG owner's bed inventory are the same problem at different scale. One of them had software.
What he values most about the change is distance. In a large company there were two hundred engineers between him and the customer. Here, the customer calls him. He hears the problem, fixes it, and hands it back. He describes that as a satisfaction he never had before.
The hardest part, he says, is making product decisions with a hostel owner. Srinivas owns five hostels and knows what matters. Siva knows what it costs to build. They argue, and Srinivas usually wins. After working with him, Siva came to see that the things Srinivas fights for are the real problems, the ones you cannot see from behind a computer.
Siva Nalavenkata
Co-founder and Head of Technology. The build side.
- 25 years on enterprise inventory and billing systems, 15 of them in the US
- Came back to India, met Srinivas and Sunil in a co-working space
- Still takes support calls himself
- Lost the argument about bed B3, and is glad he did
Sunil Prasanth Boddu
Co-founder and Head of Operations.
- Started Kamer with Srinivas before Siva joined
- Runs onboarding, support and free data migration
- Author of the rule that shapes every feature
Sunil set the rule that shapes every feature. Kamer should not have to go to a hostel and onboard anyone. An owner should find the app in the store, add a building, add the beds, and be running the same day. Siva credits him for it and explains why it holds: owners already have enough complexity in their day, and they will not adopt something that adds more.
It works. After the first week or two, most owners onboard their neighbours and their managers without a call from Kamer. And when someone wants their old registers moved into the app, Sunil's team goes to the building and does it, free.
Nine months, one fight, twenty thousand beds
Four rules, learned the hard way
No web dashboard
Siva says the same thing every owner told him: nobody wants a web dashboard. Everything goes on the phone, because owners run hostels from the road, not from a desk.
No onboarding call required
If an owner who uses Paytm every day cannot set up Kamer alone, that's a bug in Kamer, not in the owner.
No reading your data
Owners ask us their occupancy. We can't tell them. Guest data is encrypted and only the owner holds the key. That is a feature.
No features from behind a desk
A problem looks different from in front of a computer than it does in front of a customer. So the owners decide what counts as a problem. Then it gets built.
They still pick up the phone.
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