DesignDodo: Simplifying And Customizing The Era Of Designing

DesignDodo is the first SaaS model for graphic Design in India, founded in July 2015 by Rahul Sinha, Keerti Chowdhry.

It is a platform that offers an online editor, hundreds of graphics and simple drag & drop tools that makes designing easy for everyone.

The company makes it easy for the customers to design things without installing hardcore design softwares or going specially to a designer. The startup puts together a great inventory of graphics, the select best fonts, and a simple intuitive interface.

Moreover, the company has recently entered into the printing space so they allow the users to even print their designs and get them delivered.

Chitrakshi Suneja Interacts With Keerti Chowdhry, Co-Founder, DesignDodo And Spoke To Her

Idea Generation

The idea came to Rahul Sinha, our CEO, when he was running his design studio last year. He often attended startup meet & greet events in New Delhi. He realized that almost all of his fellow entrepreneurs felt the need to have a strong social media presence but struggled to create good designs to share, email or print.

“For someone who doesn’t have an in-house designer, there are really very few options out there. And none of them have Indian content that we can use”, a friend had said to him.

Rahul always felt uneasy when his founder friends would ask him for ‘discounts’ or ‘cheap but good’ designs. Knowing how difficult entrepreneurship could be, he wondered if there was an easier way to help these people. If only there was a way to automate design, take away the long human hours and reduce its cost, so that it could fit the pockets of most people.

This is how he thought of an online design platform where people can be their own designers and create things in real time. He turned to his friend Keerti Chowdhry who had just finished her masters from IIT Bombay and this is how DesignDodo came into existence.

Special Key Features

At DesignDodo, we keep our target audience always in mind and make sure our services cater to their pain points. Most startup founders, digital marketers and self employed people want to share well designed social media posts for every special occasion on the Indian calendar.

In India, every day is a reason to celebrate and we make sure that DesignDodo has 'desi' content to suit the requirements of our users. We're also aiming to bring intelligent design systems in our platform that would make designing even more streamlined and automated.

Not to exclude graphic designers themselves in our platform, we are soon about to launch our 'Contributor' portal where designers can add their own designs to our inventory and make money every time someone uses it.

Differentiation Factors

We're first of our kind in India.

The Australian giant Canva is also in the Design SaaS space, but we think DesignDodo is differentiated by who we're catering to and how we're growing. 

“The personas we are making this product for and the cultural scenario we are making it in have hugely influenced the way DesignDodo has shaped up. Our key differentiator is our vision,” says Keerti.

“We surveyed our test users and found the need to incorporate printing facilities into the platform as many people’s problems were not solved by designing alone. They further struggled to connect to good printers and send the designs with correct file extension and correct color mode. With DesignDodo, printing is merely a button away. Furthermore, most users also needed to share Indian content on every special day of the Indian calendar which made us go back to our drawing board and to create ‘desi’ content.

“Our aim is to make ourselves an end to end design solution in the most seamless way possible. The pain points of our target audience mould our path and this journey is exclusively and uniquely our own”, says Rahul on how DesignDodo and Canva are dissimilar.

Funding And Monetization Details

DesignDodo has raised angel funding from investors at Jaarvis and is now a part of the Jaarvis Accelerator program.

DesignDodo is a freemium platform- meaning, while part of our services are free and shall forever be so, we have some premium content that can be used through monthly subscriptions. Also, offering printing services let's us have a sound monetizing system in place.

Challenges Faced

At its very concept, DesignDodo is the perfect amalgamation of design and technology; of aesthetics and logic; of visuals and code. Putting together a team that understands both and maintaining this balance was quite challenging.

Market Size And Opportunity

The market size in India itself is $4 Billion. Our end users are entrepreneurs, graphic designers, marketers, and self employed people. Every business professional needs an easy software meet their design/print requirement.

With the inclusion of printing & delivering customizable greeting cards, we’ll be reaching out to wider audiences of internet users.