About the Founder
This blog is written by Pradeep Kollipara, founder of LokalBoard and OVID Technologies. He has been building software platforms and digital products since 2013 across education, healthcare, and hyperlocal commerce.
The story behind the idea and the journey that led to LokalBoard.
My name is Pradeep Kollipara, and I have been building software products since 2013. And i have been programming since 2001.
Every platform begins with a story long before the product itself is built. LokalBoard is not just another idea that appeared overnight. It is the result of more than a decade of building, experimenting, succeeding in small ways, and failing in larger ones.
My journey with building products started in 2013. At the time, I was working full-time while spending evenings and weekends building my first venture in the online education space — an exam preparation and online test-taking platform for public, college, and competitive exams.
The platform was called IndianCBTS.com. For nearly four years, I worked on it outside my job hours. I loved the project deeply because it was the first product I had ever built end-to-end. Technically, it worked well and solved a real problem.
But almost no one knew it existed.
The number of users was often in single digits. It was sometimes embarrassing to talk about it publicly, yet I kept improving it because I believed the idea itself was good.
Looking back, the biggest reason the project failed was not the product — it was visibility.
During 2013–2016, India’s digital ecosystem had not yet matured. Smartphones were still spreading, affordable data was limited, and most students preferred offline coaching centers and tuition classes. As an individual founder, I lacked the money, network, and marketing knowledge required to reach thousands of users.
I had limited time, limited resources, and limited reach. The platform worked, but without discovery, even good products struggle to survive.
In 2018, I started my next venture as a registered company in Visakhapatnam. We built OVID HMS, a healthcare management platform designed for hospitals and clinics.
The product was technically strong and solved real operational problems. Yet scaling it to the level I initially envisioned proved difficult. Once again, I realized that building a product and building a market are very different challenges.
Our next experiment was VizagGrocers.com, where we handled everything — platform, inventory, and operations ourselves. During the COVID period, the platform performed well as demand for online grocery delivery surged.
But after the pandemic, competing with heavily funded platforms like BigBasket, Swiggy, and Zomato became extremely difficult. Large marketing budgets and brand visibility created barriers that smaller platforms struggled to overcome.
Across all these ventures, one pattern kept repeating. The challenge was often not the product — it was discovery.
Small businesses and independent founders struggle because people simply do not know they exist. Marketing is expensive, visibility is fragmented, and large platforms dominate attention.
That realization eventually led to LokalBoard — a digital public noticeboard for every locality.
A place where small businesses can announce what they offer, founders can share what they are building, and communities can discover local opportunities around them.
Instead of relying entirely on expensive advertising or large platforms, people can simply post locally and be discovered locally.
In many ways, LokalBoard is the platform I wish had existed back in 2013 when I launched my first venture — a place where builders and businesses could simply say:
“Here is what we are building.”
And be discovered.
This blog is written by Pradeep Kollipara, founder of LokalBoard and OVID Technologies. He has been building software platforms and digital products since 2013 across education, healthcare, and hyperlocal commerce.