Sahaj Nalgirkar, the brain behind
GetSetGig moved to Mumbai in 2009 to pursue engineering, although he had bigger dreams in his mind. He has been learning music since he was 10 and wanted to make it as a music composer. While pursuing engineering studies, he collaborated with musicians around and tried to form a band. He then realised that there is a market gap in hiring of bands and musicians. The clients spend a lot of time in looking out for artists that fit in their event whereas the artist spend a lot of time in looking out for gigs than doing what they are good at. Just then the idea of GetSetGig was born.
GetSetGig is an online marketplace to hire live performing artists for any kind of event. They launched an online solution in February 2017 which enables hiring of artists within a day. Using this technology, not only it makes artist hiring easy for clients but it gives artists a dashboard where they can see the enquiries coming in for them so that they focus on their art and create something better.
Aditya Hanchinal, who was in the band that Sahaj started joined him as co-founder and they started doing market research and customer interviews trying to find the right solution for the problem that is to be solved in the market. Live entertainment is a vast industry and is very disorganised. They saw many companies coming into it and not making quite a mark, and that is why they wanted to take it slow and be smart about it. They launched GetSetGig with its services offline on 1st September, 2015 with 200 musicians. In the next 15 months, GetSetGig did 100 gigs and are now a 2000+ network of artists and not just musicians but DJs, Anchors(Emcees), stand-up comedians are on board too.
GetSetGig has done gigs all over India with various upcoming and new artists. They have covered all kind of genres in terms of performance. They have done instrumental setup, ghazal setup, Bollywood, English setup, jazz/blues and even regional. They have done gigs for corporate events, weddings, lounges, bars/cafes, malls and private parties. They have artists ranging from a budget of 5000 bucks to 5 Lacs. They can also manage you celebrity artists. With such a wide range of artists on their platform with an easy process of hiring, they want to take on the live entertainment industry and disrupt it altogether.
Sahaj takes responsibility of business development. He is a musician, composer, poet and a philosopher and is very passionate about art. Aditya, his college mate and band mate, is a keyboardist, composer and sound arranger who is very good in building relationships with artists. He handles the artist management part of the company. Skills and working of both are complementary to each other and hence they work like a well-oiled machine.
GetSetGig is a bootstrapped company. It was initially helped by Sahaj’s brother to get it off the ground. They did not have much of expense at first as they were a small company with focus on market research. When they started getting traction they used that to build the company further. They are not far from breaking even and probably they would raise funding to scale up fast but right now they are doing good on their own.
GetSetGig is totally a free platform for artists. They charge clients a small percentage as a service charge. In return, they take care of the gig end to end for the client. Once an artist is booked via GetSetGig, they take full responsibility of the artist, their performance and a carefree promise of the gig. They do this by assigning a gig manager for every gig. These gig managers are artists themselves and hence the clients know that their gig is in capable hands.
GetSetGig is now totally focused on how to make the process of hiring simpler and faster. They seem to have achieved the most of it but Sahaj believes that there is always a scope for improvisation. Raising funds have taken a back seat in term f priority as servicing the client and handling the incoming enquiries take 100% of the team’s time and effort. However, Aditya believes that they do not desperately require a funding but if they want to expand fast and gain an upper hand on the competitors, they might raise funds at the right time.
In the model that they are working, the founders say that the most important part in their company are the people they are working with. And they both do not hesitate much to invest in expanding the team and onboarding the right set of people. They haven’t spent much on marketing till now. Sales till now have been only driven by word of mouth and feet on street strategy. But they are planning on spending on marketing and getting more eyeballs on their website and help more and more people to hire right artists for their event.
GetSetGig is currently active in Mumbai and plans to expand to other happening cities and places in India. They plan to hire more artist managers and artists and create a positive community of artists to share and experience art together. GetSetGig wants to be the first step of every artist and the last step before they achieve their fame.
