eChai with Apurva Raj, Co-founder, Pictales

How did you come up with the idea of 'Your venture' ?​​

I was getting better and better by my lately but newly found passion for reading and writing. I become more observant and that habit lead me to notice one of the most unrealised and exponentially rising problem on the Internet. It didn't occur to me instantly but it was a long process of solving few little problems related to content finding and lack of timing to consume all in. 

What problem are you solving?

We are solving curation and time problem. There is heavy size of content flowing through the ocean of internet. Many good and helpful stuff while many useless, unproductive and not good. All are in the competition of seeking our attention, where often important information with real/true value doesn’t get the mainstream attention. And this is increasing by each passing nanosecond. Also We don’t lack right information. We lack TIME. We have a limited life. To find the right ones. To find the necessary ones.Interestingly solving those problem indirectly also solves the misinformation, hoax spreading, pseudo intellectuals around everywhere issue. Ones and for all.

How does it work?

Pictales is creation and curation platform. Where one can sing up and post their content in a very specific and simple format. Pictales is a title, a pic and story related to it within 2000 chars. Here every posted content is being monitored. You can post about almost anything and attach tag. Though that tags will be attached only after we approve it. You have your own feed. You can follow people and tags to get updates in your feed. We make sure nothing fake or time wasting content you get. 

What is your target market?

Our target market is millions of people who write and read on internet. The ones who are never interested in reading are also target. As we aim to make everything interesting and time consuming.  

What is your competitive advantage?

We are driven by our vision. We don't have any direct competitor yet. For now, we are doing things that don't scale(Talking to prospective users personally) to bring people on the platform. We also have unique business model that hasn't tired out by anyone. Once we gain enough user base. We already have plan to innovate many things incrementally. We have already working on/for future. So we are already 3 steps ahead if anyone tries to copy our startup.   

How much time did it take you from conceptualization of 'your venture' to actually launching it in the market?

I've always this idea about 4 years back. But I had zero knowledge to implement. I didn't like my college, it was huge time waste. I self learned programming and did lots of reading. Then in 2015 I got co founder. We started building product. Countless hours are already spend on getting first version of product ready, making and changing strategies and get the underlying philosophy and fundamentals high. We launched 6 months back but flunked. Took a break. Made lots of improvement on our inner-self and now we are hitting the market again.  

Tell us more about your team?

Apurva Raj. He has computer science background and also had this idea of pictales since 11th std. Later he came to know the career and life path he is choosing is called "Entrepreneurship". He is passionate about coding, food, reading and writing. He do regular research about things from https://www.brainpickings.org/ 

Jaydeep Dave. He is non technical co founder. and also final year IT student from GCET, Anand. He loves reading, like actual serious reading. He is jugadu.

PS. Apurva Raj likes to be called his full name. Jaydeep Dave likes to be called JD. Apurva Raj is introvert while JD is super extrovert.

What is your technology stack?

Pictales is a web application. Built on Laravel framework. Relational and noSql databases. Elastic search. Hosted on AWS

How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies?

We are going to do things that don't scale at first. We have handpicked more than 7000 good writers and going to talk to them personally. selling our idea and vision and invite them to try.

Using social media to do content marketing is obvious one. We are also thinking on to have our first few thousands users of USA. As other countries including India look up to USA. Specially we Indians try to adept everything that western countries are doing. We are thinking to leverage this simple fact. 

What is the revenue model of 'venture' ?

Ones we have enough user base, we are going to introduce premium features. Such as one of the best writing tools to write from short stories to novel. Also to connect them to publishers. Here we intend to bring all big and small publishers so that authors and publishers can connect and benefit each other. We charge very low to authors and high to Publishers.

What do you want to achieve from this? What is your larger goal or vision?

I love this question.

10 minutes of your life on pictales and anyone will get to read about 5 different things that will be totally in his/her interest and worthy of their time. No more misleading or fake content. Pictales as a brand will be enough to trust the authenticity of content. People learning new things everyday with fun and also finding anything easily with our intelligent search

What sort of support and feedback are you looking from the community?

First and foremost we are looking for Visionary hardcore technical people to join us a team. And some shutout will be helpful..