DesignDODO Co-founder Keerti Chowdhry in describing the future of the DesignDODO platform:
We’re going make DesignDODO a living, breathing, self-sustaining market-place for design. We’re going to change how this country creates and consumes design.
This article is part of our Business Startup Spotlight Series featuring entrepreneurs and their companies. We hope these founders’ interviews will inspire and motivate you as you undertake your own entrepreneurial journey.
The Company
Name: DesignDODO
Sayantan Dasgupta, Communications Manager, Jaarvis Accelerator
Location: Gurgaon, India
Website: www.designdodo.co
Following is our FundingSage Interview with Sayantan Dasgupta, Manager, Corporate Communications, Jaarvis Accelerator featuring comments from Co-founders Rahul Sinha and Keerti Chowdhry of DesignDODO:
What is DesignDODO?
DesignDODO is an online design platform that designs, prints and ships graphical content. Imagine a website that offers the ease of drag and drop features plus a huge stock of images, templates and fonts. That is DesignDODO.co.
Rahul Sinha, Co-founder
What is the Origin of DesignDODO?
Last year when Rahul Sinha, a UX designer, was running his own creative studio, he would often attend startup meetups in 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 is said to have told 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. DesignDODO is the result.
Can You Tell Us More About the Platform and its Development?
Along with his co-founder Keerti Chowdhry, a recent post grad from IIT Bombay, Rahul built India’s first SaaS based design platform where you can create everything from social media posts to header images to visiting cards and many other items. Empathizing with Indian enterprises’ need to update their social media pages and engage their audience on every special occasion, festival, birth anniversary, in this country where every day is a reason to celebrate, the founders made sure that DesignDodo is a fully fledged, ‘desi’ at heart.
Targeting designers as well as non-designers, the platform not only has backgrounds, graphics and fonts, but also ready-made design templates that can be customized. “The idea was to make something simpler than Photoshop but more refined than MSPaint, that gives just enough freedom to a person to be able to translate their thoughts without flooding them with complex options”, says Rahul.
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What is the Basis for the Platform Design, for the Features Included?
“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”, says Keerti.
“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 mold our path”, says Rahul.
Has DesignDODO Received any Outside Funding?
DesignDODO raised a round of angel funding from investors at Jaarvis and is now a part of the Jaarvis Accelerator program.
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What is Next for DesignDODO; What are the Future Plans?
Keerti Chowdhry, Co-founder
DesignDODO aims to invent intelligent designing systems. We will soon add a ‘Contributors’ portal to the site, where professional designers will be able upload images and graphics created by themselves, and contribute to the DesignDODO inventory. Not only will this exponentially expand the stocks of graphics offered by the platform, it would also give graphic designers an opportunity to earn an extra buck without having to deal directly with many clients themselves. Future plans also include becoming a one-stop design solution by aggregating freelance graphic designers and curating portfolios, so that users can make their own designs as well as hire designers if their requirements are more complex.
“We’re going make DesignDODO a living, breathing, self-sustaining market-place for design. We’re going to change how this country creates and consumes design”, says Keerti.
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