Mahen Ratnayake was born in Sri Lanka. During his young adulthood he became weary of constantly reading SMS messages and texts. There was nothing personal about them. He wanted to talk to his friends at a distance the same way he talked to them in person, but he was too busy for phone calls. That’s where he got the idea for his new social media app, Katha.

Katha works much like other social media apps but uses short voice messages instead of texts! This way, even if you were busy you could leave a message with your friends that felt more personal than a simple text message. It also had an unexpected side effect. By not supporting video, Katha social influencers did not have to worry about looking presentable or getting the perfect shot when posting. This gave influencers in Sri Lanka a great break from full-on social media while still connecting with their fans.

After developing Katha, he continued to refine it, eventually launching his new version of the app called ShortKast. He states that ShortKast improves on Katha in almost every way by using the failures of Katha as chances to improve on his ideas, rather than as mistakes.

There’s something inspiring about seeing how a young adult created a moderately successful social media platform, and instead of settling on moderate success he took a chance to improve upon his mistakes.

I find that is a very important lesson for us all to learn. Far too many people think that failure is final. Ratnayake is the first entrepreneur I have written about in this blog that underlines how important working through failure is.

I also respect how he took a pain point and made it into a viable app. We hear about it a lot in class, but seeing how something as simple as wanting to hear your friend’s voice can develop into a whole business is quite inspiring.

There’s no doubt that Ratnayake’s grit, understanding, and vision should be an inspiration to us all.