The Indian Startup

We interviewed Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra about their startup creADivity

Please explain what your company does in a few simple words

creADivity is an online platform for creatives and clients to come together for building advertising and design solutions for the industry. With more than 550 freelance creatives (mainly design talent, marketing freelancers and students, and agency professionals) available on the platform, we are able to generate designs to satisfy real life business needs such as advertisements in print and digital forms, OOH designs, logos, calendars, web UIs etc. for our clients

Could you tell me a bit more about each of the founding team members’ background and their role in the startup?

Sitashwa: has experience in CRM Consulting and technology. He has been working with creatives for the past 5 years and has created quite a few commercial and non-commercial ventures over the best part of his adult life

Manik:  is the quintessential business development guy! He also has experience in technology development and creating and managing a digital platform.

How did your previous experiences help you during the first 10 months of running CreADivity?

Previous experience has been helpful in creating processes in creADivity. Both of us have worked for large MNCs and that helps us envision what a large company might look like and processes that would be required to sustain it. A lot of that experience is going to be useful when creADivity begins to grow big.

What made you guys take the plunge for this idea?

We have been passionate about the idea for a long time now. There have been 2 main reasons – a. Joy and challenge of creating something from scratch, b. Knowing that something like creADivity could really add value to businesses

What does your business model look like now compared to when you started?

Oh, there have been a lot of changes. When we started we were just thinking about contests and were under the impression that delivery would take care of itself, but over time we realized the challenges and quality related issues. So we have brought-in things like creADivity Champions and independent Account Managers on the platform. It keeps evolving!

When did you decide for yourself that you will one day start a business, any particular trigger?

Manik: Selling has been in the blood   Have always enjoyed creating things from scratch and talking about them. creADivity became inspiring when I realised that I could make it something very big.

Sitashwa: Creating teams and products has been a passion for a long time now. Have been very enthusiastic about creADivity right from the beginning.

Do you have any particular role models that you follow and why them?

Manik: Sachin Tendulkar – for me the idolising starts and stops there! The guy has been phenomenal, amazing strength of mind, great amount of passion and dedication & he has kept is foot firmly grounded.

Sitashwa: I don’t have any role models as such but I keep learning from the people I meet. It could be someone with vast business experience, it could also be someone from the street – all have a lot to offer!

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Thinking what new features should the new creADivity platform have, what people to meet for advice, what customers to talk to

Did you have any interesting bootstrapping experiences, you would like to share?

One needs a lot of help when bootstrapping! We got lucky a number of times when people came forward and gave us work or partnered with us to get some work done for a low cost.

How did you get involved with TiE and how has their support helped you to succeed?

We participated in TiE Entrepreneurial Acceleration Program (EAP) -  a venture competition in which 48 ventures participated. We were among the 3 winners and received networking, mentoring and investment related contacts and advice from TiE. We got be partners of TiE at the TiE Summit 2008.

What marketing channel did you find most effective to draw people to your website?

Till date, eMail marketing has worked well for us but we do realize that its early days and to scale up to the levels that we intend to do, lot many more marketing investments needs to be made. However, being in the online space we will be depending more on social marketing and online marketing techniques than the traditional marketing.

Did you have to seek outside funding yet? If yes, which channel did you find the most useful: banks, Angels, friends?

Angels! But can’t share much details as of now

Could you give us a brief overview of the next steps planned for CreADivity over the coming 6 months?

Having received an angel investment, we are undergoing lots of changes. The platform is getting revamped, the brand is going to change, an office is being set-up and new people are being hired.

What was THE single most important thing that you have learnt from your experience that you would want to pass on to fellow entrepreneurs?

Too early to throw out advices but one extremely important thing that we have learnt is to keep eyes and ears open to any individual or idea because you never know how when and where it might work for you.

Any tools/ resources that you found useful and that you can recommend for our startup tools section?

Checkout VC and incubator websites for documents on creating effective business plan pitches and executive summaries.

Sites like Alexa track traffic and are useful for new internet businesses.

Links to Guy Kawasaki’s videos could be very useful.

Thanks very much for your time guys and best of luck with your future plans.

My own 2 Paise

creADivity is a service that brings together companies searching for good Designers and Freelance designers hunting for projects. I can only speak from the perspective of the customer: I am currently considering using creADivity for my own logo design, simply because their service helps in solving a problem that many startups, like my own, face. That is there are many great designers out there, but firstly I have to spend considerable amount of time finding them and secondly most of them are rediculously expensive. creADivity works to solve these issues.

Of course, their system still has a few flaws here and there, but one great thing that Manik and Sitashwa are doing is to personally get in touch with every customer that shows interest in their website. That way they get to speak to people like myself and understand our needs and problems. They are very open to listen to critical feedback and will make sure they find a solution around whatever problem you face. This is a great example of the importance of staying close to your customers and letting your business model evolve with their feedback, especially in the initial phases.

What do you think? Has anyone else had any experiences with Graphic Design projects in general that they can share?