A year ago, Praveen Mishra, the co-founder of Tohands, thought making a ‘smart’ calculator would be a stupid idea and nobody would want it. But when he saw a woman running a small store in Sarjapura, Bengaluru, struggling to keep track of all the transactions, Mishra realised the importance of a ‘smart’ calculator that also records the data.
“When I met the lady, I found that she used to calculate the final amount on the calculator and write it on the paper and then at the end of the day she will again calculate the final amount using a calculator,” Mishra told indianexpress.com in a video interview.
“Calculators have a basic use case but we can do a lot of things on top of the calculation part, which is where we think the smart calculator will be a really good tool for the shopkeepers,” said Mishra explaining the idea behind turning a humble calculator into ‘connected’ one.
Mishra, who is from Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, started Tohands in 2017 along with Satyam Sahu and Shanmuga Vadival. All three co-founders handle different domains of the business, with Mishra looking at the product side of things, Sahu taking care of the app and software and Vadival in charge of hardware.
Backbone of small businesses
Mishra observed that small business owners are neither comfortable using the digital khata cash book mobile apps nor do they have the resources to invest in expensive billing machines. What they prefer is a simple calculator to perform the regular computations that are involved in everyday life. “The backbone of small businesses in India is still a calculator, whether you go from a jewellery store to a Kirana store,” he said.
This was when Mishra, 21, decided to reimagine the calculator but the challenge was how to make it better. After all, calculators have already proven to be devices that are a fast and convenient way to do calculations in minutes, all at the push of a few buttons.
The first version of the ‘smart’ calculator Mishra developed was a Raspberry Pi-powered prototype of a device, featuring a keyboard and two buttons—one for credit and another for debit. Mishra then went to a few shopkeepers and showed the prototype device to gauge their interest in the smart calculator. Initially, they managed to take seven pre-orders of the device but Mishra and team soon started work on version two of the calculator.
The second version was a much more polished product and featured the calculation functionality as well as the credit and debit feature but the screen was small and the device used a membrane keyboard. It was after only the startup got selected at T-hub, an incubation centre for IT startups at Raidurgam in Hyderabad, Mishra and team got motivated to take another shot at hardware and level up the design to make a smart calculator a reality. The third version of the smart calculator, which is now available for pre-order on the company’s website, is more user-friendly and can do a lot more than the first and second versions combined.
Mishra is selling the calculator for Rs 3000.