Headstart 2022, the 15-year celebration connects us to a few successful startups. Small Enterprise India, had caught up with a few of the Startups during the event and had an insight into their successful journey.
- Brief intro about you and the company, your team, and your journey so far.
Hi, I’m Ashish Chawla, founder, and CEO of 1729 digital. We are a digital persona management company catering to personal branding for individuals and professionals. 1729 Digital started as a passion project for me and Prachi Jaruhar who is the Co-founder and Creative director of the company. At 1729 Digital we believe that ‘relationships move the world.’ We assist leaders and brands in nurturing their connections and expanding their businesses by presenting their best selves online. We are a team of 17 members with 50+ clients across 8 countries. Our journey so far has been an exciting one. We started as a team of 2 and have now grown and progressed while getting the opportunity to focus on individual growth. I can proudly say that we have been able to foster an environment that largely focuses on learning and development while delivering organic and unique content to our clients.
- What made you become an entrepreneur?
After working for consulting firms for over 14 years, I was privileged to have diverse exposure to various business models and their working. This experience resonated with my innate need to improve the efficiency and value of any operation. I realized entrepreneurship, would give me the perfect platform to execute my thoughts and drive me towards implementing unique solutions to everyday problems.
- What purpose does your brand solve? Which industry does it fall under? We are a digital persona management and content creation company for professionals. We propose to fix up this problem by helping people in curating a digital persona that not only aligns with their stupendous personality but also gets reflected in their online profile- eventually helping them reach out to their audiences and tell the ‘real story of them-personal as well as professional’. So now we are guiding people by carefully auditing and analyzing their digital presence and coming up with their persona management plan- wherein we help them improve the three elements of their digital personality – Deep, Wide, and Warm by conscious, strategic, and continuous efforts.
- Have you raised any funding earlier? If yes, what was your experience and how many investors did you meet until the final meet clicked?
We have not raised any funding yet.
- If you haven’t raised any funding, what are your plans for fundraising?
Since we have moved from the validation stage to scalability mode, we intend to start the fundraising exercise shortly. However, our objective remains to find partners who are aligned with the core principles that our company advocates.
- Briefly explain your Business plan – Why your brand, competition, USP and how do you see it growing in the next 5 years?
Many of the great business stories and insights have been left unsaid because either the person in question doesn’t have time for it or they do not have the right talent to word up their thoughts and ideas and steer their career and business in the right direction due to the lack of this crucial ability. This trend has led to a dearth of quality information and content for people to consume and get insights and findings. Content marketing is one of the most important aspects of individuals and businesses, but finding the time to create quality content can be challenging. We found a sheer lack of talent and technology that can bridge the gap and perform this task – somewhat automated but with human creative precision. We are an early entrant in the market which is a niche in itself. It gives us an advantage that is unique to early entrants. We work with CEOs, lawyers, chartered accountants, educators, consultants, and physicians to improve their digital presence. We’re heavily invested in the process of building a platform that is both technologically advanced and GPT-3 enabled for creating organic content.
This will enable our clients to create robust and organic content that will get distributed on various online channels giving them a competitive advantage over others in thought leadership as well as reach and connectivity to their target audiences. We’re working on an in-house framework that will handle content creation, execution, and monitoring on blogs and social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, Medium, ResearchGate, and others. The solution will up the organic content, remove plagiarism, and reduce human errors to a very large extent.
With a growth of 10% every month, we plan to expand our services and stay aligned with our organic content-driven approach.
- How was your experience at Headstart HS.X 2022?
Our experience at Headstart X 2022 was a remarkable one. Getting the opportunity to connect with several entrepreneurs and learn more about their businesses was an enlightening experience. HSX 2022 gave us a great platform to network and create brand awareness while several people understood the importance of our niche and showed interest in our services. It gave the team an excellent overview of the current startup landscape and provided an efficient introduction to other entrepreneurs leading their companies in new and innovative ways. Overall our experience at HSX 2022 passed our expectations, and the event was fun, informative, and engaging.
- Please share your advice/suggestion for those aspiring Startups.
a. Stay focused on your objectives.
b. Be patient while walking the startup path.
c. Be sanguine to the voice of your customer.