by Paul Joseph
February 2, 2012
Featured
For all you people out there, who can charm their way through, with a good sense of humour and a way better definition to ‘wit’, here’s a chance for you to get your words viral! Witcraft Marketing Private Limited, a startup by Apoorv Jain and Harsh Snehanshu, graduates from IIT Delhi, was launched in November 2010. They went on to launch their own web portal and named it thewittyshit.com . Being next door neighbours in college was destiny’s way of bringing about the launch of this venture that currently caters to 25,000 active users. With the key ingredient being ‘your wit’, thewittyshit.com gives you the perfect blend of a networking platform, branding contests, corporate clients, and an opportunity to get your one-liners merchandized and pitched across to ad-agencies to fetch you a humble share of your smartness in cash or kind. In an exclusive interview with YourStory.in, TheWittyShit (TWS) founders tell you how it all happened for them and how you could also make it happen! Hello guys… Tell us a little about yourself. Apoorv Jain : I was pursuing B-tech in Civil Engineering at IIT Delhi. Harsh and I were next-door neighbours at college. We graduated in May 2011. I am currently working as the Co-founder and Director at thewittyshit.com , the HR head at NSS-IIT, Delhi Chapter and as the Advisor at Aahvahan, an initiative to reduce illiteracy. In the past, I have worked as the General Secretary at NSS-IIT, Delhi Chapter and have been the Marketing Coordinator of several organisations. Harsh Snehanshu: I was also pursuing B.Tech in the same college but in Engineering Physics. Like Apoorv said, we were next-door neighbours and that is how two people with similar interests came together. I was a researcher at the University of Glasgow and am presently the Co-founder and Director at thewittyshit.com . Apart from this, I am an author as Srishti Publishers and have authored two national bestselling books, namely Oops! I Fell in Love and Ouch! That Hearts. (From hereon, the conversation is presented without attribution to Apoorv and Harsh. Both their inputs are consolidated.) Nice! So an author and researcher and a marketing expert… How did you ever come to TWS? We started ideating in May 2010 and incorporated in November 2010. Both of us were in our final year at that point of time. We skipped our placements in order to take up this venture full-time and needless to say, it has been very rewarding so far. As founders, both of us have a writing background. With a dearth of avenues that incentivise the creativity behind one-liners, slogans, status messages and tweets, we started this portal with a goal of promoting and monetarily acknowledging the creativity of the common man. So for those still trying to figure it out, tell us what is TWS and what was the idea that led you to set it up? It’s a creative networking platform where people can submit their original one-liners, network with others equally witty and watch their one-liners go viral. The icing on the cake is, you get monetary benefits for the same! What could be simpler than writing just one line and being paid for it? TWS facilitates this by conducting literary branding contests for corporate clients, merchandising the submitted one-liners into products like tees and selling these punch-lines to ad-agencies. Humour is taking the lead above every other form of entertainment in India. Activity on social networks can’t be imagined without an access to humour. And therefore, our dedicated platform which caters to humour and wit by the common man solves the higher purpose of not only entertaining the masses but also promoting them to become witty, because it has got incentives on TWS. So what is the ultimate dream that you wish to achieve via your portal? We want to be the largest network of creative people across the globe. And while doing that, our aim is to cater to the aam-aadmi and letting him know that there is a platform where his creativity would be valued, recognized and if it’s good, even can make money for him. But can wit and one liners feed a business? How many people do you attract? As you know that the founders have a writing background. The basic idea was that there was no avenue that could incentivise little creativity of coming up with a one-liner, slogan, status message or tweets into anything more than a few likes on your status message. And therefore we started with this portal with the single goal of promoting and incentivising basic creativity of the common man. We think the idea has shaped pretty well. Our engaged community, corporate clients willing to try our brand and a database of over 10,000 one-liners bear testimony to that. Our reach is around 30,000 customers. But we have around 7000 active customers on our website. And where do you run your operations from? Before graduating from IIT Delhi, we used to operate from our dorm rooms itself. Currently, we have rented a 2BHK flat in South Delhi. We have converted one room into an office from where we operate. As founders, we are the only two full-time members right now. We have over 60 students associated with us (part-time) and around 5 full-time interns working with us presently. And how does this work from a business point of view? Initially, we concentrated on building an engaged community. Now that we have around 25,000 active users, our business model has shifted to conducting creative contests to cater to the needs of corporate houses, while outsourcing our pool of creativity. Besides that, we also conduct competitions at our end on current issues and work on sponsorships for the same. Tell us about some existing interesting features of your portal. Any additional features you want your viewers to look forward to? We have a daily feature of the ’Wit of the Day’. There is an achievers section which awards some of the wittiest users. We are working on introducing games on the website which would induce greater involvement. We are soon launching ‘FunZone’ where users are expected to come up with witty replies to specific questions asked by us. Also, Wit-trophies are going to be introduced to award active users. What do you think sets you apart from other ventures like yours? Our USP is ‘originality’ and we exercise a regular check on that. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited. You host a lot of events on your pages? Let us hear more about that . We are very active on our Facebook fan page. It’s the place from where we have kept our users engaged. We post a lot of interesting questions based on current affairs and induce healthy discussions around them. Tell us a bit about the market size that you are trying to capture via your website? We are trying to capture the janta active on Twitter and Facebook. We not only read about the contributors of creative content but also about the end consumers of this content. So the market that we are trying to target, pretty easily covers over 500 million people. How has the response to your portal been so far? Response has been decent, but not so spectacular. We are getting an average of around 5000 views/day but it keeps varying between 3000 and 10,000 views. We are launching a new design in a month and opening up the website for media consumption, following which we are expecting more views. Cool! So let’s have some figures … what is your annual turnover like? Currently, our turnover is around Rs. 24 lakhs. After investment, we project a turnover of Rs. 1 crore within a year. Do you have plans to spread to other realms too? How do you plan to scale up TWS in the coming years? We do plan to expand on verticals like photography and art but we wish to take it up one by one. Our main goal is to build a community where wit and humour is acknowledged and we intend to expand this community network first. Right now, we are pitching to investors. With the funding, we will be able to hire full time employees and our first target would be customer acquisition. We have a few marketing strategies in mind that could help me in reaching to a million users within six months of investment. Interested investors are welcome to reach us at contact@thewittyshit.com We see that you have a Wikipedia page to your name now! Congrats! Where else have you been featured? Thank you. We were acknowledged with the iAccelerator award at IIM-Ahmedabad and People’s Choice Awards 2010 by YourStory . The prominent magazine Businessworld enlisted us as one of the Hottest Young Entrepreneurs of 2010 . We featured in major dailies like Mid-Day , Mail Today and Hindustan Times . Recently, we made it big on Yahoo. Earlier, we were just a network for people to post one-liners. Now we are into corporate branding and have conducted contests for over 15 clients. And before we close this, your signing off line would be… Believe in your dreams, dare to trudge on different paths. And making some wit happen.. If we had to put that as a one liner, then “Regular jobs are not going to make you Steve Jobs!” YourStory.in congratulates these two young chaps and their team on having achieved success already. We wish that their successes continue to multiply. You can sharpen your wit with them at www.thewittyshit.com Credits: Ankita Rajan and Rohit Rohan
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by Paul Joseph
February 2, 2012
Featured
It doesn’t take much to support a needy entrepreneur in a country, where majority of the poor do not have access to institutional credit. All it takes is the willingness and the right platform that can facilitate such communication between an aspiring entrepreneur and a social investor. And that’s what We Care India is all about. YourStory caught up with Mr. Sanju Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of Samrudhi Micro Finance, who is determined to change India’s perspective on microfinance and extend a much needed helping hand to those who truly deserve it. Set up only last year, We Care India is a project of Samrudhi, which has been developed around the widely feted model of Grameen Bank. It’s a peer-to-peer online platform that enables individuals to become social investors by lending small sums of money to borrowers listed on their website www.wecareindia.org . Borrowers are usually small rural entrepreneurs such as tailors, shop owners, cattle breeders, who are shortlisted after careful screening by their field partners. “The name, We Care India is self explanatory; anyone who cares for the underprivileged in India can join the site and invest by providing funds as low as Rs 100,” explains Kumar. Through We Care India, borrowers pay an interest rate of 8 percent per annum, out of which 1 percent is utilised to cover the websites’ maintenance costs, while the investor earns a return of 3.5 percent per annum and the rest is utilized for operational purpose. “We follow a peer-pressure model. It is mandatory for borrowers to join a group and if one member fails to repay, remaining members from that group have to pay the loan on his or her behalf. Also, no one from that group remains eligible to receive another loan”. Each member undergoes a compulsory training for five days where it is ensured that every borrower understands about the services such as rate of interest and repayment terms. After training, individual profiles are verified carefully using housing surveys, assessing poverty level, their credit history and credit need, and only then one is eligible for a loan. We Care India conducts a loan utilisation check within 15 days from the date of disbursement to ensure that the borrowed loan is used for the said purposes. “The organization targets mostly rural & urban poor women, who are not only the most marginalized section of our society, but they also tend to use resources more productively than men do”, says Kumar, who has over ten years of experience in the field of agriculture, microfinance and socio-economic development. He is a graduate in Agricultural Science and a GSBI fellow from Santa Clara University, USA. About 80 percent of the project was funded by We Care India’s mother organization Samrudhi and the rest came from their US based partner Asha. Kumar explains that of- late credit support from mainstream banks to MFIs (microfinance institutions) has almost come to a standstill. “Banks are not willing to fund MFIs as almost all of the banks are following a wait-and-watch strategy ever since the Andhra Pradesh crisis.” It was this stagnancy that encouraged Kumar to start an online p2p lending platform. International organizations like Kiva, Microfunds and Vitaana have already succeeded in sourcing money globally through online lending and Kumar believes there is no reason why such models cannot be replicated and implemented in India. Getting approval for the payment gateway was the biggest challenge Kumar had to face while setting up We Care India. “In India, there isn’t a single payment gateway willing to go easy on non profit organization such as ours. We thus, had to partner with an US based organisation so that we could use PayPal to accept payments,” he says. Kumar and his five member team are working to introduce similar loans in education and healthcare. “We want to give social investors a wider range of choice to invest in and we want to ensure that each product is tailored as per the need of the beneficiaries,” he adds. Samrudhi is currently operational in Northern Karnataka that works in collaboration with organizations such as Asha USA, Indians for Collective Action USA, KBS LAB, Ananya and IDF Financial services. Within a month, almost 3000 people have visited the website and 200 have registered. They are actively looking at hiring in various levels and by 2014 Kumar expects to consolidate Samrudhi’s operation in all 23 districts of Karnataka. Kumar believes that the poor are bankable and have a keen credit discipline. They undertake small and manageable enterprises and have the potential to improve productivity and make sustainable profits to alleviate India out of poverty. Author: Krishnakali Sengupta
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