Building a Project Management app to help keep you on track | Planbuk

Planbuk is a start-up created by Advanced Mechanical Engineering graduate Suraj Santhosh Kumar. 

Suraj graduated in 2022 and he is a Mechanical Engineer on the Graduate scheme at Smurfit Kappa. He also operates his start-up business Planbuk from the UoB Elevate start-up incubator in Birmingham city centre.

We caught up with Suraj to find out more about his business and find how it is giving users more control over their experience with tailored advertisements.

Suraj: What do you want to do with life? Over the course of many years, I've pursued the answer to this question, although the answers kept changing as I grew older, the core of it remained to be wanting to help people. Having had very little help growing up, I had to help myself in most instances which taught me that the best way to help someone is to teach them how to help themselves. As the saying goes, 'Give a man a fish and he'll be content for a day, teach a man how to fish and he'll be content for life!'.

I have been working on an idea of having a project management app for individuals that also doubles as a learning platform that entails mini lessons that people can go through, contemplate and get an actionable task list that can be used to enable active learning.

In my opinion, the best way to really learn is to apply it to life and practice rather than the passive act of reading or consuming information. 

Planbuk combines these aspects of learning and doing and helps people stick to develop themselves and excel at life. At Planbuk, we empower your life skills, help you achieve your goals with our innovative task management app! 

The university has been really helpful and B-Enterprising has been an excellent stepping stone to learn how to professionally go about being an entrepreneur.

Thanks to the UoB Elevate incubator programme, I have been fortunate enough to meet a lot of business owners and learn from them and discuss my ideas with them. It was also amazing to have one on one support sessions with (coach) Ana Madan, having left each session with new found directives and recourses. I have found B-Enterprising to be an excellent support system that any budding entrepreneur would find valuable and incredibly supportive.

More recently the university is also helping me to acquire much needed help in finding interns. It has been a challenge juggling a full time Mechanical Engineering job along side my start-up. However, I believe that great things require great sacrifices. Another challenging aspect is to keep my self motivated when there is no signs of gratification as building a business is one of the biggest delayed gratifying things out there.

What is the best part of running a business?

For me, the best part of running or creating my own business is that I get to speak to so many people and work alongside some of them and learn from them along the way. I have met some of the brightest minds and been lucky enough to speak to so many successful people who managed to create something out of nothing
I wish I knew that having capital is not a pre-requisite to work on building a business and that ideas can be developed even before requiring capital.

What's your biggest takeaway from starting a business?

Over the last few months I have looked back to see how much progress that I have made. I have learnt that it is vital to keep going back and keep showing up and keep taking steps no matter how small as it is a net sum game and everything adds up over a period of time and most times it makes us proud. It has been quite an interesting journey with a lot of learning along the way. 

The Planbuk website is now live! You can find out by www.planbuk.cc

We are currently starting development of our mobile application. We would be quite interested to speak with people who are interested either to join the team or to support the business. We are currently advertising for interns so if you would like to join as an intern please visit the B-Experienced Internships webpage.

With thanks to Suraj Santhosh Kumar
Introduced by Bob Lee