Starting a Creative Studio: Pilot Episode
A live documentary of starting a 3-week old Creative Studio, from scratch.
This is the live action documentary of what has happened since April 15th, when I called up my friend, literally on the opposite end of India, and decided to start a creative studio.
I’m Ayan. He’s Deeptarshi (I call him Deepto). We’re both in our early twenties, he’s completing his masters in management and interning at Puma, while I work at a startup designing websites.
We both might be fools, or we might just strike gold.
Why did we do it?
I know what you are thinking. A bunch of 20 year olds? Starting another Creative Studio? Are they mad?
It’s because we wanted to.
Not because we needed to—I have a great job designing websites, he’s a Graphic Design Intern at Puma—we’re happy enough.
Not because Entrepreneurship is “cool”—we don’t care about writing CEO on our Insta.
Not because Gary Vaynerchuk screamed at us on Youtube—he did.
We wanted to start a Creative Studio, that does everything a Creative Studio should, except this is exclusively for startups. Startups with great ideas, big ideas and small ideas. Startups that excite, startups that delight, startups that provide.
Startups that’ll shape India’s economy in the next 20–50 years.
We want to be a part of that. We want to work with startups, and when they get big, we want to say that we worked with them. That’s the entire premise of starting this studio. We want to design India’s future.
We want to touch gold before it becomes gold.
How do we do it?
We offer to understand your business inside out, and offer you ways to grow it. With or without design.
We offer complete, utter immunity to problems that you might have related to all things branding and marketing.
We offer to take over your branding (logos, websites, apps etc.) and your marketing(ads, social media etc.) while you do what you should do—run the business.
We offer to be a one-stop shop for everything related to design, with iterative constant feedback so that you’re in the loop but not involved enough to get distracted from running the business.
We offer exceptional design service, topped with an exceptional customer service.
We have just one ask — be good at what you do, because we are.
What do we aim to do?
We are a three week old company, with founders that have experience in design but zero experience in business, except for a strong intuition and a desire to do good.
Since we want to work with startups, here’s what we are offering:
If you have a feasible, unique and great idea—an idea that makes people excited, we’ll brand you for free.
That’s not a typo. Let me say it again (as in, write it again, but in bold).
If you have an unique idea, we’ll brand you for free. Everything design, for free. And that’s for every unique idea that we recieve.
If you don’t have an unique idea, but you’re good to work with, contact us on Instagram or mail us and we might have something for you. ;)
(If you’re not from India, but would still like to work with us—first of all, we are flattered—and secondly, please feel free to contact us. You are entitled to all the offers above as well as exceptional service, just know that an Indian startup has more preference in terms of being selected).
What have we done?
(There was no way I could find to make that title less intimidating)
This is basically the section that will be updated in future blogs where I talk about what the company is doing, the rest is just the pitch.
So, for the last three weeks, we have laid out the business plans, poured over tons and tons of resources on how to run a business and have stayed up late at nights developing strategy on how best to get clients.
We have set ourselves up with a name, Crossroof, it’s a great name—rolls off the tongue, is unique on all social platforms and even has a .com domain! If you visit it now you’ll see we’re launching soon. You’ll also see our logo, designed by me, and for our technical audience, it’s hosted on Github (we plan to go for a headless Drupal backend when we launch.)
Socially, since our domain is design and design is pictures, we decided to focus on Instagram first, and then branch out to Facebook and Medium. We’re ‘crossroof’ on all of them. Give us a Follow/Like if you wish—it’ll be appreciated.
So that’s what we have done, seems so less when you put it in writing, but giant steps for us as entrepreneurs.
Thanks for reading! This is my entry blog for documenting our journey as we step into the world of entrepreneurs. Clap this up if you enjoyed it and want to see more, would really encourage us!
Follow our journey in pictures — Crossroof on Instagram.
Follow Crossroof on Medium, you’ll find fun stuff. ;)
