Darpan Munjal is the CEO at Squadhelp, an innovative platform which connects creative individuals from across the globe with savvy clients who need branding and marketing assistance.
How are consumer behaving in your specific industry, why is your product important and what problem does this solve?
Every year, millions of startup are launched worldwide, and for many of them, the first step typically is to come up with a great name for their business or service. A name plays a critical role in connecting your brand with the target customers, but it can be extremely challenging to come up with a great name that is available. Some companies end up hiring a branding agency, but that process can be very expensive and time consuming. Our platform solves this problem by allowing companies to host Naming competitions on our platform and receive hundreds of high quality suggestions from hundreds of naming experts within 2-3 days.
What is your product? How does it work?
If you are looking for a great name for your business, you can host a naming contest on Squadhelp. Within few minutes, you will start receiving thoughtful name ideas from our naming community of more than 60,000 creatives.
Our system automatically checks for URL availability as well as Trademark availability. All you have to do is rate the entries as they come in. Based upon the feedback, the submissions get better and better, and in the end you pick one name as the winner. The winner receives the contest award prize. The entire process is highly collaborative, quick and results in great name suggestions. A typical contests receives more than 600 name ideas within 2-3 days.
Please describe your (founder) personal journey in the creation of your business.
I launched Squadhelp as an experiment in 2011 when I was personally struggling to come up with a great name for another venture I was planning to launch. To be honest, I never thought Squadhelp would grow to become a fairly large business opportunity and my initial intention was for the platform to be used as a resource by other startups who were in similar situation. However, as the platform grew organically, we started getting lot of customers on the basis of word of mouth. Our creative community also started expanding organically.
As we received significant organic traction, I got involved full time into the business and we began investing in some interesting platform features to take the platform to the next level. We now have a community of 60,000+ creatives who have helped 8000+ businesses and submitted over 4 Million names in our platform.
How does your product differentiate itself from your competitors, or current alternatives?
There are several factors that set us apart from the competition but the most important aspect is our focus on quality vs. quantity. We have built some advanced algorithms that determine the overall quality score of all creatives.
These algorithms ensure that the creatives who consistently receive high ratings on their submissions can submit lot more ideas in future contests. On the other hand, those creatives who do not submit thoughtful suggestions are limited in how many names they can submit in future contests.
As a result, all our contests receive significantly high proportion of good quality, thoughtful and well researched suggestions. This is one of the primary reasons for the significantly positive feedback we receive from our customers.
We have also invested in a lot of “Gamification” features that make our platform extremely fun and collaborative. Creatives not only receive monetary awards for winning contests, but they also receive badges and points for submitting good quality ideas. They also get featured in our monthly leaderboard, which is a coveted space for our top creatives who have won the most contests.
Who are your customers, and how is this evolving with the emergence of new technologies?
Our primary customers are startups across the globe. However as the platform grows, we are now getting a lot of customers who run local businesses, or large companies who are launching a new product or service. Interestingly, we are also getting customers who are looking for a new title for their book, or a documentary. Our platform is truly global, and we are finding that it works as a great resource for anyone looking to come up with a name for their company, brand, product or service.
What trends currently excite you in this industry?
Crowdsourcing has gone through an interesting evolution, and I am excited about the prospect of tapping into the collective intelligence of creative individuals across the globe to solve real business problems. In a digitally connected world, there are no constraints on who can submit great ideas. If managed right, a crowdsourcing platform can create a “win-win” outcome for all constituents (customers, and creatives). However it is extremely important for the platform to focus on quality to ensure that the customers do not get overwhelmed by lots of low quality ideas. We are excited to have an awesome community of experts, and are looking forward to taking our business to the next level.
