Why we rebranded ourselves?

Let me start the blog with a cliched statement, “ Change is the only constant.” As much as it sounds like a cliched statement, it has its importance. Change has been the nature of human beings and animals alike. We change to become better, fight sharper, adapt and survive.

Be it nature or business world; change is the status quo. We have a fancy term for the change in the startup world called “pivot.” Startups change track or business models based on customer feedback. We have done that ourselves and would like to share our little story of failures, learnings and finding the right product market fit.

In 2013, we started Venturesity to solve hiring problem. Finding the right talent is a challenge for companies irrespective of their size. Whether it’s a startup or a big company it’s difficult to attract a good set of talent and retain them. Job portals like Naukri and LinkedIn have been solving this problem, but we took another path to solve it. We started doing instructor-led courses in both online and offline format to create talent and fulfilling the burgeoning demand. The name Venturesity made a lot of sense, Venture Plus University.We did see a decent initial traction but soon realized that MOOCs had become a fierce competition and people have enough options to learn for free.

We started doing hackathons to build a community and promote our courses. These hackathons saw good participation and good projects being built. An interesting thing happened in these hackathons. The sponsors and judges found talent through these hackathons. The teams that won or created innovative projects got interests from these judges and were eventually hired.

Voila! Eureka moment for us. We quickly pivoted to hackathon model for hiring and raised an angel round to build an MVP and scale the business. The new funding gave us the momentum, and we proved that hackathon was a perfect model for hiring the right talent. It was a level playing field for job seekers to show their skills in front of companies. We discovered other use cases of hackathons and built customer base around it. Now, startups and enterprises have started using hackathons for developer evangelism, digital disruption, and training.

Furthermore, we realized that what companies are doing by conducting hackathons is building the community which they can tap into whenever they need. We realized that our client companies were conducting hackathons to build communities which they could tap into whenever necessity demanded.

We started making the next version of the product, a platform to build communities, do activities and engage them. Users can now follow communities, participate in the activities, create their profiles and showcase their skills. The name Venturesity didn’t do justice to this new power-packed platform. It needed a name that users can relate to, hence the change. After all, they are going to show their skills on the platform. So, skills were the root word that we picked and came up with the name Skillenza. Skillenza is a portmanteau of two words, ‘skill’ and ‘enza’. The platform has features to conduct challenges with multi-stage levels and engage the audience.

I will write another blog post around our features in detail and focus on how enterprises can leverage our platform and build talent communities.

You can check out the new platform here: beta.skillenza.com

What next?

We have conquered the first summit of rebranding and are ready for the next set of milestones. We will be focussing on skill sets other than technology like product management, growth hacking, user experience and inside sales.

The rebranding exercise and launch of the new platform is an exciting moment for the whole team, and I would personally like to thank our customers, investors and above all our users. We have learned a lot from all of you and will continue to do so.

We will be launching a whole gamut of features and product offerings for our users and companies. Stay tuned to our blog to know more.