I started my venture Innovent Solutions last year with content writing that too catering specifically to automobile blogs and websites, as prior to this I was working with CarDekho’s editorial team looking after their content and training their sales and content team the technicalities of automobiles.
I got my first order through a vendor located in South India who gave me an order of 10-15 articles of 500 words each to be delivered on a daily basis at a rate of Rs 100 per article. I connected with my college juniors and batch mates who were unemployed and got that volume getting delivered to the vendor for next 2-3 months. The payment cycle was of 45 days after raising the invoice, which created complexity.I kept trying for new business but wasn’t able to get much work plus faced a lot of delivery issues with freelancers. Work was getting monotonous and directionless.
Later in order to source new business, I used to go to Naukri.com and search for the jobs in field of content writing connect with these companies and tried to convince them to outsource work so tat they have to pay for the words they were getting. In this I was providing them edited and copyscape pass content. Most of the times contact details were used to be of of HR persons and others who never understood the concept and hence never connected to the authorities whom I could have explained the USP’s of the model.
In November last year, through Naukri.com came to know about an upcoming automobile website. I reached them out, and they agreed to outsource complete content work to the company as they were having a bulk demand. They agreed to outsource us monthly content volume worth Rs 90,000 at a rate of Rs.150 per 500 words. Excited with such a big order I along with my partner set up an office at her place and started hunting for full time writers. We first reached through skillpages, linkedin, local community pages in Jaipur, placement agencies and newspaper and were able to hire a team of 3 full time writers and a dedicated editor.
But when we started working, the client reduced the work volume to less than half and we were unable to pay our employees the committed salary.This compelled us to switch to target based salaries rather than the fixed salary,we deduced the salary if they didn’t meet their targets and paid incentives for the extra effort.
Meanwhile, I dropped mail to all the digital agencies in US, UK and Australia for outsourcing their content work but never got any satisfactory volume of work. Some India based blogs in automobile, finance and all gave us a small work on regular basis which kept the business going and put in our small savings. We got all the furniture for office from our homes and didn’t invest any money in infrastructure. Its just that when the summers came we invested in fans, then in a desert cooler for the writers. We didn’t invest even in the computers just got 1-2 computers from our home and hired the writers who have their own laptops so we do’t have to invest at that moment in the work stations.
We connected to some web-development companies in Jaipur in April who gave us some on page article for static websites and brochure writing work at a rate of 60-70 paise per word but again work volumes were low and it wasn’t a regular work.
I connected to Alok in December last year inquiring for the content work, he connected me to Mukul and Rohit. Rohit told me to connect him in month of March as they might have some requirement so in April we got a chance to do1000 questions for some app for C2W. In the same month we got an order from an e-commerce portal who gave us some beauty product description and blog writing work at decent rates.
I then figured out the usability of Linkedin for generating business and started using the professional account of same. Using Inmail feature of Likedin, I dropped mail to CEO’s of some top internet companies and told them about our services, few of them really gave me a positive reply and outsourced us some work. Again the rates were too low but we agreed to work just to get some big name in our clienteles which might give us some leverage in future.
I realized that the web-development companies outsource the tedious writing work job to us at a very low rates and then sell those websites at a very higher rate and we are operating on a wrong model of B2B rather than B2C.
One of our web-development companies connected me directly to a client who was setting up a fashion jewellery store in Jaipur and wanted a 5 pager content to be done for their static website. I pitched that client for an e-commerce portal and a blog which will be beneficial for him in the longer run. He got convinced by my idea and decided to go for a e-commerce portal and we did the complete photo-shoot of the products as being a freelance motoring journalist I am having my photography team in Mumbai, Delhi and Jaipur who cover the automobile launches for our client sites.
So we did photography, UI design, product descriptions, blog and he also gave us his social media account management and turned out to be a profitable deal for us. In meantime my classmate from school also joined us on a profit sharing mode who has worked as Search Engine Marketing specialist in a digital agency in U.S. for two years.
We realized that if we really want to make profit than instead of content work we should go for complete digital marketing work. So we liasioned with some freelance Web-developers and SEO agents in Jaipur and started pitching to companies in Jaipur who have got the good offline presence but have no digital presence and we successfully was able to convert few of them.
We started our own auto blog called allonauto.com a month back and got 50 percent stake in an another site called carzy.co.in. We are also planning to come up with some big auto-portal with some differentiators and are targetting for a daily traffic of around 20,000 in next 4 months. By this we will have our own network of automobile sites and which will give us a leverage over our competitors as then we would be able to sell leads of 4-5 websites to auto OEM’s and give them a bigger spectrum to advertise.
We also liasoned with a digital agency based out in Mumbai and they gave us 1 Social media account as of now and wanted to increase the business once they are satisfied with our work.
Still, we were facing issues that in all these projects profitability is very less plus for our own auto blog and the website in which we got 50 percent stake we are putting money from our profits as they will start monetizing in next 3-6 months. I and my partner are not taking any salary since past 1 year as we have no liability and just cater to our phone bills, fuel bills and all. Last month only we spent close to Rs 35,000 in office furniture as the work was expanding. Currently we are facing following issues:
- Clients don’t pay us up-fronts and asks for multiple editing and we get paid on word per paise basis, so editing adds on to our costs which they don’t pay.
- Low rates, for bulk work we are paid close to 30-35 paise per word and we have to pay our writer only 20-25 paise for good quality work.
- No fixed volumes and regular work, out of a sudden we will get a lot of work, but then we can’t go and hire very next day it becomes difficult to meet the deadlines and then again we have to go on freelancer mode. As writer has his maximum efficiency of writing 2000-300 words daily we can’t push them to do more.
- Hiring, we tried Naukri.com, Monster jobs, news papers everything, experienced writers ask us a high salaries whereas our clienst are not ready to pay more for bulk work.
- How to get work from off-shore clients as they hesitate in outsourcing to us and if they outsource us we have to take the risk that in the end they will pay or not as they also don’t pay us up-front.
- Is our decision of venturing into Digital Marketing is good, as this are already has more than n number of players.
- I and my partner is not taking any salary since past 1 year, which demotivates us sometimes and also we are not able to calculate actual profitability as out time also has got some monetary value. So shall we fix some basic salary of Rs 10k-15k monthly and include it in liabilities.
Currently, I have a team of 10 full-time writers, 2 graphic designers, 1 web developer, 2 Social Media Executives which sums up to liability of nearly Rs 2 Lakhs every month.
I am the elder son in family and my father expired 10 years back, mother is a government teacher so in a longer run I need to give some amount back at home, right now she doesn’t pushes me much as I cater my all expenses and pay my education loan EMI of my mechanical engineering. Digital companies and automobile publications offer me to join them and ready to pay 50-60k in month but I really don’t wanna turn back and go back to job as I started out of my passion and I am optimistic that digital has got a future but just wanted to identify mistakes in business model.
I request fellow Rodinhooders to please guide me how to work out on these issues, as being a first generation entrepreneur, TRHS is only source of guidance and motivation.
You can check my company’s facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/InnoventSolutions
Our website will be live next week as we recently hired a web-developer.
Best Regards,
Sankalp Sharma
autocontentjpr@gmail.com
+91-9887177657