“Don’t wait too long to perfect your product before releasing it to real customers. Getting your barebones product or service out in front of customers (and getting real market feedback) is far more valuable than building a full-featured product with your own assumptions and theoretical understanding of your customers.”
This interview is with Darpan Munjal, founder and CEO of Squadhelp. They are located in Hoffman Estates, a suburb of Chicago.
What is your company and what is its main goal?
We are Squadhelp! We are a unique naming platform that utilizes crowdsourcing with advanced technology to disrupt the standard branding process. We have successfully helped more than 20,000 businesses with their naming, logo, and tagline projects.
Our main goal and mission is to create a seamless experience for individuals and businesses who are seeking a phenomenal name that will allow them to build a strong brand and set them apart from the competition. From these values, we have successfully grown into a multi-million dollar business and are continuously seeking growth opportunities and pushing ourselves to remain the World’s #1 naming platform.
When did you start your business and why?
The creation of Squadhelp was a happy accident, to state it bluntly. Darpan Munjal launched Squadhelp as an experiment in 2011 when he was personally struggling to come up with a fantastic name for a venture awaiting to be launched. In hindsight, he never assumed Squadhelp would grow to become a successful business; the initial intention was to share the platform as a resource for other entrepreneurs who were in similar name-stump situation. However, as the platform grew organically, Squadhelp began receiving a healthy number of customers as well as creatives through word of mouth.
What makes you different from your competitors?
There are three things that set us apart from our competitors; first, Squadhelp is the largest naming community that allows you to explore an unmatched breadth of ideas from intelligent creatives across the globe. We understand that a narrow focus and limited number of name ideas can be one of the largest and most adamant struggles and Squadhelp has managed to overcome these issues.
Second, Smart technology – which includes machine learning, gamification, algorithms, advanced dashboards, and AI – allow Squadhelp to yield the most rapid, collaborative naming process available on the market. These algorithms ensure that the creatives who consistently receive high ratings on their submissions can submit a plethora of ideas in the future. In addition to our algorithms, we’ve invested a noteworthy amount into “Gamification” features that make our platform immensely fun and collaborative.
Creatives not only receive a monetary award for winning a contest, but also receive badges and points for submitting excellent quality ideas. Creatives also have the chance to be featured in our monthly leaderboard -a coveted space for top creatives who have won an impressive number of contests. On the other hand, those creatives who do not submit suggestions that the Contest Holders are interested in are limited in how many names they can submit in future contests. This allows our contest holders to receive the most prominent and promising name, logo, and tagline ideas to sort through.
Thirdly, we provide an agency quality experience: In this experience, Squadhelp incorporates audience testing, trademark research, branding consultants at a fraction of the cost available in today’s market. In the Audience testing phase, we determine if selected names a contest holder is leaning towards is connecting well with their target audience.
What marketing channels do you use for your growth?
We believe that business growth almost always starts with an intriguing idea, innovation, and helping others solve real problems. Here at Squadhelp, we are able to tackle and accomplish these obstacles by disrupting the branding process by harnessing advanced technology.
Focusing on innovative and valuable solutions allows us to remain successful with paid advertising across several large and well established platforms, as well as other tried and true digital marketing strategies such as Search Engine Optimization. In addition to these platforms, we also seek out unique opportunities on a smaller scale from less popular channels.
One area we look to is Beta opportunities with advertising platforms. Additionally, Squadhelp specifically utilizes social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to showcase and inform our growing audiences of new domain possibilities and market our services.
What are you expected to grow in terms of revenue in the next 12 months?
In terms of growth, Squadhelp is continuously growing and expanding everyday. In 2018, we experienced an impressive 1,960.2% growth rate over a three-year span. In addition to this growth, we here at Squadhelp are currently celebrating our second consecutive year to be listed on Inc. 500’s All-Star Entrepreneurs list!
We continuously have major enterprises seek our professional help, – such as Dell, Nestle, Pepsi – through our naming platform and hope to continue this upward trend of being a prosperous business. To add to our excitement, Squadhelp recently launched a brandable domain marketplace that’s growing just as rapidly. Our fondness of innovation and continual quest for advanced methods to help companies pushes us to become the best we can be!
We hope to see these events as an opportunity for strong growth within the next 12 months.
