ReadMe which is the most prominent technology news website in Sri Lanka held its first meet up.
The meet up was dubbed ReadMe talk and held at the Orion City IT Park cafe. The startup segment saw Mahen Ratnayake and Mudith Uswatta, founders of Katha take the stage. Mahen introduced the audience to the Katha app, which is a social network where one create content with voice and get paid for it. Mudith also shared the challenges they faced in getting funding as a young startup and then actually building the app. The lesson from Mudith’s story was a valuable one for all entrepreneurs: budget double the time you think you will need to bring your idea to life.
Commenting on this twist, ReadMe co-founder Andrew Jebaraj said, “We didn’t want it to be just another meetup. We wanted it to be something special for everyone that came”. The event itself was organized into three segments: Startups, Technology and Business.
Another feature was Adnan Issadeen, software engineer at Cinergix who took the stage for the Technology segment. Adnan shared with the audience an inspiring story of how he defeated procrastination to finally build a side project and get users for it. So what is the secret? Simplify your application to its core features, then start building it and release whatever you have built to the world at the end of the month. If your application takes more than a month to develop, then it’s too complex.
ReadMe received positive feedback about the event and their unique approach to meetups. Commenting on this success, Enosh Praveen, co-founder of ReadMe has said, “We plan on improving our efforts and making this a bi-monthly event.” To join the next ReadMe Talk keep an eye on readme.lk/calendar4.
The final segment was the business segment which saw Indi Samarajiva, founder of Yamu take the stage. Indi gave everyone an insight on how startups raise money. He did this by giving a very transparent look at how Yamu operates.
Once Indi was done, the event did not come to an end. The core team that runs Uber in Sri Lanka took the stage as surprise speakers invited by ReadMe. Varun Mundkur, senior launcher at Uber took the stage alongside the Uber team. Varun introduced Uber to the audience and then answered the many questions the audience had about Uber. Varun concluded his session as the final speaker by giving everyone in the audience a free ride home using the Uber code: READMELK (which is still valid if you’re a new Uber user).
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