An innovative, visionary and talented individual – Raghav Sharma built a unique platform where writers could get finally an audience for their work.
“A very wise man once said – Entrepreneurship is all about finding solutions to problems and then making it happen on a global level. So for us, team Kalaage, there were three important keywords to make us take the leap – Problem, Solution, and Global.”
A person who likes learning and gaining knowledge is a scholar, someone who gets good grades and degrees is intelligent, but the one who reads and implements is an Entrepreneur. Raghav Sharma’s drive to end the turmoil in the publication industry led him to become the entrepreneur he is today.
His journey began with his first venture, The Wounded Tiger after nearly 2 years of research. It was aimed at educating the people through well-researched articles and visual graphics about all that India was and where we went wrong as a nation.
However, issues soon emerged such as sourcing content, finding the right platform to promote the publication and getting subscribers which forced Raghav to halt the publication.
This did not stop him from chasing his passion and he used this as a learning experience.
“One thing I learned from this experience was to never plunge into an area if you not an expert in a particular domain.”
Through this venture, Raghav also had another crucial realization that led to the inception of Kalaage.
“We realized that there needs to be a platform for publications to do everything at once – sourcing content, hosting issues, promoting themselves, etc and that is how got the idea of Kalaage.”
After halting the publication – The Wounded Tiger, the Kalaage team realized that the print and publication industry is in a crisis and are in a dire need to revive itself in this digital age. There, till date is no platform for publications to interact with the plethora of writers and source good quality content.
Raghav revealed that another major reason for starting Kalaage was to provide writers a unique platform to not only share and upload their content – ranging from poems, articles, stories to fiction and views – but to also send it to magazines and newspapers for direct publishing. Writers get a unique opportunity of getting published and a value proposition which is not present anywhere as of now.
When asked about his favorite part about Kalaage, Raghav replied, “That it is unique, that for the first time we are trying to create a global level product that comes from India and gets approved by the entire world. This is the kick that we get from Kalaage.
The best part of Kalaage is that since it is a social platform and mostly UGC (user generated content) you get to see the patterns and habits of people first hand and what they like and dislike. And on that basis you get to decide what needs to be added and what not.”
However, the process of building this sui generis platform was not an easy task. According to Raghav, the biggest challenge for any technological platform today is the User Interface and Experience.
“Big start-ups, like Medium, Wattpad, Canva are known for their design and the overall flow of their products. They make global products which anyone can use and relate to, so having a good interface has always been a challenge for us and we even today are trying to improve our platform in terms of design and interface.”
The next big challenge was to find ‘Writers’. Since there is no job title with which you could identify a set of writers, finding people and convincing them to write and share their content on Kalaage was a very big challenge but the team has managed to do that.
“And the most important (challenge) is creating a brand name. Since Kalaage is a very unique concept, it took a lot of effort from our side to make people understand the same.”
We asked Raghav what was his intention with Kaalage;
“We want Kalaage to be a default platform for writers to share and pen down their thoughts on and a one stop destination from publications to run their entire operations on the platform.
We want to be a first of its kind global platform which combines the power of the internet and print to reach out to each and every individual on this planet, because where the internet cannot reach, print already does.
We want to define Democracy and give each and everyone the powers to not only voice their thoughts and opinions on Kalaage but to also get them printed and published in magazines and newspapers across. Thus providing a very strong value proposition and creating a new wave of media start-ups. “
Kalaage holds a very exciting and dynamic future ahead. Their future plans include to release Kalaage in developing countries first like – Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc and then to also open up in UK, Canada, and other international markets. They also hope to encourage people to write in their regional languages and also promote regional publications. Apart from this the team also wants to encourage and provide unique offerings to artists, musicians, and theater artists to reach amazing heights of their creativity and skills.
The story of Kalaage inspires each to contribute their part to society. The thoughts and intuitions behind the venture are truly remarkable and we hope that it brings the change Raghav and his team has envisioned for not only the publication industry but also fellow writers who yearn to get an audience for their work. We commend the Kalaage team for the immense effort put into the platform and wish them the best for the future!
Visit kalaage.net now and learn more about this enthralling platform.
