Sujit Thakur (Co-Founder & CEO) started his Journey as a Technical Writer in Bangalore. With his masters degree in IT and 5 solid years of Job experience, Sujit started to realize that he was born to do more, something on his own, something for the society, and of course make a royal living out of it.
Pallavi (Co-Founder & Director) an MBA in Human Resources & Marketing shares this vision with him. Pallavi came to the table with exposure of hardcore Business Development and Marketing. The women entrepreneur in her forced her to start work on SitePandit as a part-time activity before she got involved more than full time. Sujit joined her fulltime in the early 2015. Couple of months of backbreaking work and SitePandit was formally born. A unique marketplace and a platform for connecting talent with opportunities. Safeguarding the interest of all parties and adding sheen to the freelance community with its mighty reach and versatility.
Sunny Kaul (Mentor & COO) happened to be a work friend of Sujit. Looking at the opportunity involved and the fact that Sujit needed help, got Sunny involved. An engineer by profession with a decade of IT experience Sunny brings a lot of creativity, ideas and strategies to the table.
The trio almost started to function as an effective, well-balanced team. They are happy working together towards the common vision of “making available great work opportunities to everybody”. Mom’s returning from maternity, workaholics wanting to do more, people searching for different career options, hardworking students wanting to make descent part-time income, people between jobs, people trying to strike the right balance between work and family, and the list goes on…
How exactly your idea sparked? An “article about the unemployment” is where all of this started. We were shocked looking at the statistics. There are so many skilled but unemployed people across the world. Unemployed because of various reasons, but one definite reason being lack of a platform connecting opportunities to workforce.
If you see the present statistics around 13% of Indian skilled youth are still unemployed even after graduating from premier institutions. The rates are much higher in Greece, Spain, Italy and other countries of the world. In addition to this, it is not incorrect to fall prey to the common belief that, most of the people who are already employed are struggling. Struggling to pay their bills, struggling to strike a right balance between work and family, struggling to for job satisfaction, struggling to say with confidence this line of work suites their skills and ambitions.
How can we NOT think of creating a platform where people can work by their preferences and earn a decent living? People are smart enough to decide what’s best for them. Yes!
How SitePandit works? How someone can make use of it online? SitePandit is a modern-day answer to the “job-workforce connect” situation we have. It’s simple. What Amazon did to the “consumer-manufacturer connect” situation is what SitePandit does in this industry?
SitePandit has all qualities of being a premium market place for freelancers and organizations/person looking for freelancers. Huge resource pool, variety of categories, well thought online user experience, secure software, best for when technology.
As soon as you sign up with “sitepandit.com”, you will get an option to create your profile and showcase your services, products and portfolio. Once you have created your profile, it can be shared on social media to promote your services. There are several algorithms through which we rank and promote the service providers in our platform which helps service providers to get more projects and spark a healthy competition with other service providers. Algorithms are in place to make sure ensures the quality of work which is provided to the customer, secure and transparent payment transactions with no hidden charges.
How your startup disrupts? We have kept it simple. Participants get to decide their work hours/time. We help them bid attract assignments that best match their situation. That it! People can treat this as a part time activity for side income or more than full time activity to earn an above average living. While it provides a platform to fresh talent to weigh themselves in the practical world, it also provides and launching pad to experienced folks to leverage their multitasking skills in the right way. We don’t do anything apart from give a state of the art marketplaces connecting people and opportunities.
What was technically the most challenging part of developing Sitepandit? Since our concept is new and unique, we didn’t have concepts available to copy from. This meant the learning curve was really steep. Creating a unique flow and experience for users while searching for services, projects, products (digital) all at the same time was a difficult hike. Technically all three are different platforms with different functionalities, and we had to give similar experience to any user while surfing any of our platform.
What do you wish you’d have known when you have started? Well, as we are still in our initial phase itself so I don’t think we know everything, but still we wish we would have been more specialized in technical codes to debug the errors efficiently in first shot while development.
How many people got associated for working together? When we started with a casual conversation over a dinner it was only us. Today we have a team of excellent web designers, developers, sales and marketing executives who help us with SitePandit. In just a month or so we have descent fan base of around 15k people following us in Twitter and other social media network. We can very clearly see this web user population, employee base, fan following, investor network simple grow manifold in the coming day.
What makes your endeavors unique on Internet? Freelancing profession in many markets, except in the US, is not given a high weightage. Lack of well-organized marketplaces (online or otherwise), is a primary reason. Whatever market places are present, don’t have enough infrastructure to give comfort of doing fair and risk free business.
SitePandit providers an online easy to use marketplace with enough thoughts in place to make sure everybody’s interest is safeguarded and a fair play is promoted.
Another uniqueness is in providing a platform for freelancers across industries/communities i.e. multiple categories ranging from Logo Design, Graphic Design, and Blog writing to developing complex Software, to Digital Marketing, to EPR consulting, to Consulting advise on various platforms, to what not.
What philosophy drives you doing this, your business philosophy? Freedom and independence is all about being able to work without the bondage of corporate business processes, striking the right balance between work and family, and earning what you decide your efforts are worth.
Imagine a platform that provided great, equal and uncompromised opportunities to women returning from maternity breaks, energetic folks to leverage their multitasking capacity, ability to earn purely in line with your ability to perform, allowing people to return to work without penalizing them for a break in the career due to personal situations.
You dream just came true! SitePandint is here…
Where do you see SitePandit in 3 years’ time? Definitely a huge and dependable global customer base. A robust platform where independent contracts get attracted, just because of its user experience, variety or work, mighty network, helpful analytics, and next generation easy to use algorithms. We would surely like to be called know as a digital service provider and a one stop shop ‘Pandit’.
Who do you see as your target audience? How are you reaching them? What tools you use? Any person who requires or provides any type of digital services is our target audience. We need both, service providers and service seekers. Our sales and marketing team is working round the clock, literally, on strategies laid down by the management. Apart from that we do profusely use the standard tools/techniques of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Referrals as well as E-Mail.
What do you find most interesting and rewarding in terms of doing your own business? First of all personal satisfaction is the one which provides us the energy to keep doing it. It gives us flexibility to work on our dreams. Even if we have to work 16 – 18hrs a day, we are still energetic as we are doing it for ourselves and we love doing the same. We get control and freedom to make our own decisions & passion to make SitePandit.
What is your ultimate message for netizens? Are you a person who enjoys multitasking? Are you a person who likes to manage workload yourself and not have people bossing you? Are you a person who believes in smart cuts? Are you a person who loves working with people across the globe, from multiple cutlers?
Then you will make a solid carrier, loads of money, total happiness and have awesome fun, being associated with SitePandit.
shardulpandey@sangkrit.org