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Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru

Founder
Mentha Technologies

Short Description

He is a Founder of Mentha Technologies.

Company Profile

Mentha Technologies is a new-age IT services and products company with focus on Mobile and Cloud computing Technologies.It is founded in Feb 2011 by four very senior IT Professionals with over 80+ person years of experience in Sales, Technology, Delivery and Quality. Company has technology specialization in Android, iOS (iPhone/iPAD) and cross platform tool PhoneGap on the mobile front, HTML/JavaScript/CSS on Web front  and  PHP & MySQL on Cloud front.   Company built considerable experience in  a) scanning technologies such as NFC (near field communication), QR/Bar code and OCR b) Photo/image processing c) Local or remote Database intensive apps  and  d) GPS based apps.

Difficulties Faced
a.You cannot gauge the acceptability of the product/solution in the market.   Many times you have to guesstimate this.b.In the mobile world,  the app that you build should be able to run on multiple mobile OS versions, multiple sizes of the mobiles, etc.    This is a real challenge.  There is really no short cut.c.In the online world, how does your app standout and be noticed.  This is a real challenge too.We do not have answers for everything....
Getting first Customer
Unless you have some credentials you will not get your first customer easily especially when mobile app area is relatively new and none of the Directors had prior experience.   To build credentials we had to do some internal projects on Android which gave us confidence that we can go approach for business.For this some cash burn is unavoidable.
Choosing People
We have a written test followed by an interview process.  We see candidates enthusiasm to learn rather than their academic marks performance, put in hardwork and more importantly if the candidate will stick on to us for some time.We give ample time for the employee to try and test different methods of solving a problem and we guide through the the entire process.That way we feel our employees learn from mistakes and adequate research rather than spoon fed.
Advice to young entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster with so many ups and downs.  Entrepreneurs need to have tenacity to stay the course. Many times what we have envisaged in the beginning did not turn out to be the right one; so one should change the business plans/strategies as one discovers the path along. Hence one should be flexible, open to change and adopt.