India is known to have the largest number of young population. Recent years has made access to higher education easy and affordable. This has given space to the young adults to think creatively and independently. Tech-savvy youths have come out with their creative ideas and become successful entrepreneurs. This has led to the start-up culture in India. To meet growing requirements of the young and old population of India, new business initiatives and start-ups are the trends of the modern generation. Keeping this in view, the 2017 budget came out with policies to boost the emerging business, such as tax relief measures, MAT extension, and focus on digital payment systems.
Among the 19,000 technology enabled start-ups in India, one story is about five college students from IIT Hyderabad. The five students are, MuditTanwani, Ankit Mishra, Sanyam Kapoor Chinmay Jindal who are juniors and Rijul. Their initiative is known as StoryXpress.This article is based on the interview conducted by YourStory with Ankit Mishra, the founding member. The seeds for their startup came from the idea that with the increasing need for businesses to strengthen their presence on social media there is a requirement for marketing ideas. They realized that people are more attracted to videos than mere images and that videos can tell a story much better than motionless pictures. With this in mind, they developed the StoryXpress which is a cloud video creation program that is a one stop platform for people to create promotional videos for their businesses at affordable prices. The professional movie makers are highly expensive which places the small and medium scale businesses on a lower footing, the founders believe that their tool will help such people widen their market base. Their tool is a bridge between the high charging video makers and tiring manual ways of video making.
Initially, the tea to market their business. The results proved that the small and medium scale enterprises hardly had any access to popular marketing strategies such as promotional videos to market their goods and services. They also concluded that having a video usually promotes your search engine visibility and therefore enterprises lacking do not make it to the front page. They began with the ideas of capturing the Indian market at the beginning and proceed to Africa and Europe.
The start-up was founded in 2013, two of the initial founders have graduated and at present Sanyam and Chinmay are heading it with a group of committed members. The team includes LavanyaLoomba, who is the content marketing manager; RashmiSahani, Motion graphic designer; PayalKeswani, and NishantBazzad.The team has also come out with personalized dynamic templates which will give the viewers a unique experience. They also offer a DIY tool to create videos for a business of any size, and also an API that can be used to convert images into videos. As of date, they have been able to create 78,694 videos and reached out to 24,821 businesses. They have reached out to various sectors such as online shopping, real estate, local business, and fashion among others. The start-up has successfully carved a niche for itself as professional videographers. Their mission is, “To build a one-stop video marketing platform for brands and business of any size.” The start-up has been ranked under the 1000 best start-ups in India.
Such initiatives undertaken by college students have become successful and are inspiring lessons to many. One of the features of such student-driven initiatives is that they are not mostly profit driven but are based on needs of the society, creative and unique ideas. They do not have the pressure to earn but rather find a practical way to implement their creativity.