4AXIS – Finding cash in art
One of the hottest start-ups isn’t located in Silicon Valley—it’s in Colombo – Kollupitiya, to be exact.
It started with four friends – all between 22 and 23 years banding together as they all thought that nothing beats working for yourself. Even when you love your job and think that it’s rewarding, the satisfaction you get when you are your own boss is a completely different feeling.
The four men – Dumindu Kanankage, Minsara Madhawa, Kapilan Karunananthan and Anuruddha De Alwis – were batch mates at the University of Moratuwa. In the third year of university – 2012 they started the company, aptly named, 4Axis. The Business Times managed to chat with two of them as others were out of town.
“I always dreamt to create a company of my own,” Mr. Kanankage said settling down to a discussion with the Business Times on the sidelines of the opening of their brand new office early this month.
While it may seem appealing venturing into a new market, especially if you are a start-up, it can be tricky, and let’s face it, pretty risky too—you are putting in more hours than at a 9-5 job elsewhere, and there will be moments where you may be sacrificing a lot more than just your time. Even then, it is absolutely worth it, noted Mr. Madhawa, joining in. “We tried different products such as a location-based service etc which really didn’t take off,” Mr. Kanankage added.
He said that they underpaid themselves for one year and hired one person. Their initial office was a small house. The company also did a few mobile applications for different clients and managed to hire another person. And this was the time smart phones were in their initial stages and the Apple phones and Apple App Store was getting momentum. For the four musketeers, this was an opportunity.
Being passionate about developing creative applications, the company in 2013 January published something called the Drawing Desk Application in the Apple pasture.
It is really a simple app which does drawing, doodling and painting for children, teenagers and adults. On the first day itself, the application experienced 3000 downloads mostly from the US. “That is a big number,” Mr. Madhawa said. Apparently it still is. Now mostly they are being downloaded in the US and other European countries.
After the initial spark of interest from their US customers, the four friends stopped everything else they were doing and concentrated on this application.
Now on their seventh year, the company has so far released several versions. “We are still perfecting it,” Mr. Madhawa said. The competition in this market is high, he noted and there is a lot of potential for this app.
The app is now also on Google play and has over 2 million downloads.
4Axis now has the revenue running over US $ 1 million. Currently with 24 staff members, they aim to recruit a few more members during this month. They advise that this sector – in drawing applications – is a really good sector for Sri Lankan start-ups.
The friends know the potential of Drawing Desk and now they aim to create their own platform for this app. “With this we aim to bring in domain specific solutions and go deep into the technologies,” Mr. Kanankage said.
They also noticed that the past few months during the COVID-19 pandemic, the usage of their app has risen to 25,000 downloads per day.
Interestingly wall art is amply displayed in their state-of-the-art office. “I guess deep down I always knew creative sphere is my dream that I wanted to get into,” Mr. Madhawa smiled.
As we take their leave, the staff is gathering around the living area playing games. “We used to always do this even in our initial days. We used to play a simple game every week and everyone loved it,” Mr. Madhawa said.