A brief history
This was a time when I was building an ERP targetting forest managing organisations to digitise their internal process and collaborate with local communities and partners and run a point of sale(POS) for reservations & transactions management on their hosted website. But problem was, it was supposed to be too big a system software to be trusted on an early stage startup by a very formal departments along with possibly being too costly for mostly financially strained organisations who I want to help.
Back then, I visited Kerala where I happened to visit this random village home-stay in Angamoozhy which was cheap & mid-way to my local journey with good ratings. Well, we struck a gem there, place was located near Gavi forest which is beautiful with some eco-sites like Adavi, around hosting small adventure activities, few good homestays and this was all right under the nose of a national giant, "Periyar Tiger Reserve". What I noticed was this place was treated more like a picnic spot or weekend gateway for locals from nearby but hardly any outside tourists here? Information was online so why didn't it popup when I was planning my trip or when I visited Thekkady few years earlier! And this has been case with many great natural sites that can get help from tourism so what was missing?
This felt, something in need of an alternative just like my startup, BUT, there it was, my goal from where I started, "To help communities and organisations associated with forests" and my code for ERP with POS, was actually more useful for a central marketplace or an OTA with connected cheaper or free "Tourism Management, Reservation & Ticketing System" for partner vendors/organisations which in return, can help addressing this very problem.
So I decided to pivot which was also the time (& reason) ForestRP got incubated at IIT Mandi Catalyst Batch 17 & almost concluded a prototype by the end of incubation period and have now completed the production ready system ready for initial traction.
ForestRP has now a playstore listed JungleGenie® OTA and Partner App and moving fast for more and more functionalities and platforms to reach the end goal to create an interlinked ecosystem of communities and organisations associated with forests.
This wasn't brief eh!