Whatsurskill - A Portal Gives the Artists an Opportunity to Learn, Earn and Showcase Their Skill to the World

Founded in April 2015 by Rohit Kedia, Whatsurskill is a social networking platform exclusively dedicated for artists varying from background like Photography, Graphic designs, fine arts and content writing. Currently the startup is focussing in these four different areas and also plans to add other talents in its bucket down the line. The portal gives the artists an opportunity to learn; earn and showcase their skill to the world.

In short, the way our tagline depicts “Your Passion, Your Success” - says Rohit Kedia, Founder, Whatsurskill. In an exclusive interaction with BWdisrupt team, Rohit talked about his startup’s journey from inception to till now.

Genesis

This idea was originated in 2014. I still remember Nikhil, a best friend of mine and I was awake till 1AM to search for the best domain name to book and till that time we have searched over 500 names to find the perfect one. Then the real struggle was to get the web developer and simultaneously Ankit, my brother, started to work on strategies and sector to target. We outsourced our web development to a firm in Mumbai and Ankit designed all marketing and operational strategies to kick start from our small Kolkata office. Later on we have established our founding team with Om, Abhishek and Mohit who are really passionate about the idea and took respective positions to bring it to where we do stand now.

Unique key features

We are an online talent platform with the community of artists of over and above 35,000 registered users who are connected with us and always participate on our platform. We provide them an opportunity to earn through our platform by servicing our clients requirements and simultaneously our clients gets their creative required done through crowdsourcing, so basically it’s a win-win situation for both clients and artists.

Differentiation factors

Currently there is no single company who is focused towards promotions of Creativity and Art in India and catering multiple talents on single platform. We do have a vision to bring all possible talents on our platform and give an opportunity to them to showcase their talent to the world through our social networking platform. We also provide an end to end update to the artists on all the recent activities in and around their talent across the globe.

Another key difference will be that we will be focusing on online Employee engagement and promotion of talent within the organisation.

Funding status

Till date we have raised INR 30,00,000 from the HNIs and now we are looking forward to go for the Angel round of funding of which we will use for vertical expansion and marketing to make largest community of creative and artistic people globally.

Monetization model

We have started our exclusive Crowdsourcing services in the Graphic designing section where we cater Businesses and Startups to get their day to day creative requirements done through crowdsourcing. We are also looking to target and pitch in to corporate houses where we would get all the Creatives done for them on single platform under one roof.

We have also done a tie up with Uttarakhand Tourism Department where we are getting paid by Uttarakhand Board to promote the beauty of the State through photography.

Further, we are planning to organise Online Employee engagement activity for Corporates. Apart from this we are also starting “Service on demand” for photography and drawing where clients can put their requirements and photographers and artists who have similar artwork in their collection can pitch and get the work done. Advertisement will always be one of the major sources of revenues for us through our social networking platform. During our expansion phase we will include freelancing services and marketplace for sale of artwork also which will give immense opportunities to the community of artists associated with us.

Challenges faced

We started in a small garage office in 2014 in Kolkata with only 3 member team. One of the major challenges at that time was non tech founding member in the team, hence we have to outsource the website development to third party. This was not one of the best decisions which we took as the web developer to whom we outsourced the project shifted his focus after sometime to another client paying huge amount and put out project on hold. This made the delay in the launch date of the website by 2 months. Further, another challenge was the community of artists which we are focusing is very niche market and most of the painters/ artists still don’t understand online events and hence reaching out to them was another challenge.

Traction details

We have an overall 35,000+ registered users on our website and our best alexa ranking was 21,000. We have over 25 clients as of now and the best part is that we are getting repeated work from them and references to other clients by them. We are looking to expand our sales team to reach to more and more clients.

Advice for emerging startups

Idea is not the only thing to start a business, we always need a good team to execute it well. Hence, I would suggest to gather a group of good team before investing time and money in the idea. We are very much glad to have one of the best and hardworking founding team with Ankit, Om, Abhishek, Mohit, Nitin, Naina, Rakesh, Payel, and Kaushik who made this entrepreneurship journey a real smooth one.

Market size

It is evaluated by our competitor that the market size of designing industry itself is $24 billion.