Scalenut was launched in August 2020 and became fully operational in November 2020. It is a Seed-Funded SaaS-enabled fully managed marketplace for on-demand business services. At Scalenut, businesses can find various services at fixed prices, with pre-defined workflows & milestones, and delivered by top freelancers. Currently, the platform is offering fully managed content development services.
When said SaaS-enabled, Scalenut provides pre-defined requirements and standardized requirements. This helps freelancers in producing high-quality content. Also, end customers can share their requirements in a structured way. The end-to-end workflow module helps end customers in tracking their work, ensuring on-time and high-quality deliveries. Today is an era of managed marketplaces. Scalenut has seen various players disrupting industries like home service, ticketing, good delivery, and many more through a fully managed full-stack approach. The same has not happened in freelancing services yet. India serving global demand is also limited to IT but has not expanded to other categories. We aim to bridge that gap and build an ‘India serves the world’ business.
Mayank Jain Co-founder of Scalenut talks on the tools Scalenut provides for content creators and more…
You launched the company in the middle of the pandemic and the crisis. Why and what were the challenges faced?
We built on the idea and zoned on at what we want to do towards the middle of 2020. In August – September we started small and in November we went official. I would honestly say that we did not face any challenges due to Covid, but it was difficult when it came to putting the right team in place. In the initial stages, what happens is the team has to work together so there is bonding, but here everyone was working in silos thanks to WFH. The team bonding has not happened and that is a drawback. On the funding point of view and from a hiring point of view and building the business I think it has been all right.
Today, you know, all brands are into storytelling and content is being tailor-made for that audience. How do you expect them and help them do it?
Content is pretty much one of the most important growth pillars, for any organization. Due to COVID, the digital transformation or digital adoption businesses have surged. Producing high-quality content is always slightly difficult. Now obviously the quality of the content creators getting through is one issue, the second is to get the creators, getting the right set of tools and workflows, that’s another challenge. Now businesses don’t have all these things and they’re not equipped, so they would need someone who provides it. What we have done is have created this managed marketplace, that’s the core backbone of the business. The content creators who come on the platform, go through a rigorous vetting process and undergo certain training, et cetera before they start getting work.
We have eliminated the hassles of seeding for projects or spending time in sales or managing payments. All of that is done by the platform so they can get the project, work on those projects, submit it back, and get paid. From a business point of view, we have removed the hassles of hiring, negotiating, managing the content creators. Like for example, the way you would produce a product would be very different from the way we’ll produce an e-book or a blog. Everything has a different focus in terms of what inputs are taken and what is the output. What we have done is we have defined specific workflows on the platform itself so that the quality is high.
Scalenut is now building a set of tools, to enable both businesses as well as content creators. These tools will automatically check the quality of the written content on its own. Then we created an AI-based tool that is short-form content on its own. Basically moving away from the writer’s blog and helping them get started, we are building another tool, a very interesting tool, which can help you in content intelligence. What should you write? How you should write? What kind of brief it should have? By using ML and AI the content creators are enabled to produce world-class content.
The universe now talks about AI & ML. How different are you?
We fundamentally believe that technology enables in different domains. It will help content creators write better content. We are bringing together AI & ML technology. The top talent base using these technology tools will be able to do their job much better and much faster.
For example, if you are writing a blog right now and use any of the AI tools, it will help you generate a blog in a series of steps. What does Google actually want to prove to its users? It shows what kind of result should be there. What we are trying to build is, certain tools, which will help businesses and content creators to get intelligence, they will be able to generate some content which will help them get started, also the tools will help them in designing which will make it more efficient and stands out.
You mention that to be a fully managed content development service provider. Can you elaborate on this?
As I said, when you say fully managed services, when the users of businesses, come on the platform, all they need to do is to request what they need. I need an eBook on this topic and they will get the content for the review once they have reviewed it’s in the process. But if you look at the current market places, you have to actually hire a set of content creators, negotiate and manage them. But here if there is a delay etc. everything will be taken care of by the platform. I’ll give you just a smaller analogy. Imagine that some company for our home services, you get trained vetted professionals who will come do the job and go. I think that’s exactly what we are doing.
You also mention that, you’re trying to build a content creator economy in the global content marketing platform, how are you planning to go about it?
Our vision is to build a global platform because the content is universal and we are primarily targeting many teams to generate good content and we also feel that Indian talent is what drives our core content creators. We want to bring them to the world in terms of making them write and design reports and we are working towards supporting them within India and the international market site. The way we are approaching it, as I said, building the right set of tools for both content creators and businesses so that they come on the platform and they’re able to carry on with their job.
What is your revenue model?
For any marketplace managed its revenue model is very different. The creators get paid for what they create and they get paid for that particular task and for the tools it is straightforward subscription-based while right now they are getting built, but it will be fairly subscription-based.
What are your marketing strategies are you planning to promote this whole platform?
For example, you take any, large company and who has a lot of focus on content and content marketing, and they are into content strategies, et cetera. We give them these tools, which will help them in building the content. They can also use our Marketing teams to produce the content, and there are free tools available in-house.
So you talked about India having great talent, but you know, the whole industry is facing that talent crunch. How are you going to unlock this talent?
What happens in a marketplace is kind of a scenario, there are network effects that start kicking in, once this network effect starts kicking in more and more people join. As more and more people are joining, you already have an onboarding process set up, you have a training process and we have started building technology on those lines as well, which helps us to filter out the right talent. So our typical acceptance is 5 to 10% now. How do you build the next step? For every good content creator, if they do a good job, you need to ensure they’re paid on time, we are working on that presently and once everything falls in place the talent will automatically come.
