The man behind Yellow App, which helps you navigate through the nation’s ever-crowding restaurant offerings, is Anish Shrestha, a young entrepreneur and app developer who spearheads the IT startup Yellow Nepal. Besides Yellow App, which was one of the three winners of last year’s Google Business Group’s inspiring startup stories contest, Shrestha and his team have also developed and launched two more fun and interactive apps—Instameme and Dublr. In an interview with The Post’s Gaurav Pote, Shrestha talks about his work, Nepali IT startups and first dinner-date suggestions. Excerpts:

You must be swamped with work at the moment. How do you enjoy working so much?

I’ve chosen to do what I love. That’s the reason perhaps that I work all the time, but time never seems to pass too slowly. What I mean is, I find everything else less interesting than my work.

How did you come up with Yellow App?

Necessity is the mother of all inventions. It was difficult for me to find good restaurants nearby, and dining out at the same old eateries was getting a bit boring. So, we, at Yellow Nepal took it upon ourselves to try and solve this problem. The result was an app that could sort out this hassle.  Now, it has become a versatile app that assists users to search for restaurants and generates intelligent recommendations and restaurant reviews from a database of over 3,500 restaurants in all of Nepal’s major cities.

We hear you have used a special algorithm of some kind in the app…

We had to put in a lot of hours getting some tricky logic that goes into the app that recommends restaurants to the users on the basis of their past

preferences and dining habits; it also makes suggestions based on a given context, particular preference or time. It’s not special or magical in any sense, but once we were done, the app worked just the way it was supposed to.

Could you tell us about what Google Business Group (GBG) competitions are like and what experiences you gained from them?

Winning the GBG inspiring startup stories contest was one of the most favourable things that happened to us. Yellow App got global publicity, and we received interesting international offers and some great opportunities to learn from people abroad. For a follow up, I also attended the biggest Google’s developers’ conference, Google IO 2015 in San Francisco, which further broadened my horizons and gave me a fresh perspective into the startup culture in Silicon Valley.

First Yellow App, then Dublr. What’s next?

We are constantly trying to design services that can touch people’s lives in one way or another. We have lots to prove and many exciting things are already in the pipeline.

So what exactly does Dublr do?

The idea of working on products that cater to global users rather than only locals came to me during my stay in Silicon Valley. It took me a long time to realise this, but by remaining local, we are just limiting our own potential. After returning home, we started working on Instameme, an easy meme-generator app.

Dublr was another project we started after that. It’s a cool way to dub your voice over popular videos of your choice. You can use this app to create interesting content and share it with friends. All you have to do is follow some easy steps: upload a favourite video, crop it and dub your voice over it. There result is really amazing and it has already received good feedback from many users.

How, in your opinion, does the app-development process in Nepal differ from the same abroad?

The app-development process in Nepal is not that different from what others have been doing. It’s just that we haven’t been able to keep pace with them when it comes to rolling out scores of apps that trend in the market, global or local. We certainly didn’t get a head start in the app industry. Our developers had to first learn the basics and then the markets and trends; they had to get their hands dirty by toiling for hours, but I think we’re way past the early stages, and Nepalis should now be producing apps that trend globally. All Nepal-based app developers need to focus on our strengths and pursue our common dream of going viral in Asia and the world.

Does the future look bright for IT startups here?

As far as technical prowess goes, we are both skilled and competent in many ways, and we are just the right place to get outsourced work. First we are not getting as much outsourced work as we should be; and when it comes to innovating and making revenue-generating IT products, we still have a lot of catching up to do. Then, there is the matter of our market size, which is not large enough to present promising opportunities for fresh startups—that’s also why the Nepali startups can’t generate adequate capital. That said, we’ve all worked hard to get here. With a little more persistence and effort, we’ll hopefully have many IT startups companies, with a wide range of products to showcase to the world.

What kind of food do you usually prefer when eating out?

I wouldn’t call myself a big-time foodie, but I’ve surely managed to gain on a few extra pounds, as I tend to eat out a lot. My friends and I gather and hop coffee shops, almost daily, in the city.

It has become a ritual now. Besides, I have to go out for dinners at least twice every week, and when I do, I usually prefer to eat Japanese, Vietnamese or Italian; but I find almost everything palatable.

Which eateries would you suggest our readers for their first dinner date?

First dates are always tricky, if you know what I mean. Some places I can recommend off the top of my head right now are the Attic Bar, Coffee Pasal, The Old House, Embassy, and Places.