Bijak (Krishiacharya Technologies)Bijak
Putting a trust-based, cash-heavy trade into an app — in eleven languages.
The tension
Mandi trade runs on relationships and cash. The app had to earn the trust of traders who’d never used one — while money moved through nearly every screen.
- Role
- Engineering Lead · Jul 2020 — Oct 2024
- What I owned
- Involved from day one — led the move from native to Flutter, set the architecture and release process, and led a team of 8 engineers shipping alongside product, design and marketing.
- Platforms
- Android · iOS
- Links
- Website Google Play
- downloads, incl. Just Fresh
- 600K+
- languages
- 11
- mandis with daily prices
- 2,000+
Context
Bijak is a B2B agri-trade platform for India’s mandi traders. Buyers and suppliers use it to find 30,000+ verified traders, check daily prices from 2,000+ mandis, and trade with services like advance payments, a payment guarantee and the Bijak Limit credit facility — plus digital bookkeeping for every transaction.
I was involved from the beginning — leading the app’s migration from native Android to Flutter, growing into Engineering Lead of a team of 8, and later also owning the Just Fresh apps.
Engineering nuance
1. Migrating to Flutter without slowing the business down
Constraint. We were moving from a native app to Flutter while the business kept asking for features. The rewrite couldn’t become a freeze.
Decision. Flutter 3 with GetX and MVVM — at the time, GetX was the natural choice for building fast: state, routing and dependency injection in one lightweight package, with very little boilerplate. One way of doing things across the app (and later across Just Fresh).
Trade-off. GetX is opinionated and less “pure” than some alternatives, but it let a team of 8 migrate and keep shipping at the same time — which mattered more than architectural elegance.
2. Language is a trust feature
Constraint. Many traders were first-time smartphone users. An English-first app would have been an app they didn’t trust.
Decision. Make localisation first-class: 11 languages, with a language picker up front and layouts that hold up when strings get long.
Trade-off. Every feature costs more to ship and test — but adoption depends on it.
3. Measure every funnel, automate every release
Constraint. Marketing, product and operations all needed answers — which campaigns brought traders in, where they dropped off — and releases couldn’t be a bottleneck.
Decision. Segment, MoEngage and Branch.io for analytics, engagement and attribution; Codemagic CI/CD to automate builds, tests and store releases.
Trade-off. More tooling to maintain, but decisions moved from opinion to data, and shipping became routine.
4. AI where it removes manual work
Behind the app, I trained TensorFlow models and introduced Gen AI tooling to cut human intervention in internal processes — quiet automation that saved the operations team time.
Leadership
- Led a team of 8 engineers, coordinating with design, product and marketing on a predictable cadence.
- Ran code reviews and mentored developers on architecture and Flutter practice.
- Built B2B and D2C products on a shared foundation.
Outcome
- 600K+ downloads across Bijak’s apps, including Just Fresh.
- A Flutter foundation that carried over to the Just Fresh apps.
