WowMakers - First Entrants to the Kochi StartUp Village
When Startup Village, the Kochi based startup incubator selected WowMakers to be the first company to be mentored by them, it was an enormous turning point for WowMakers. What started out as a logo and branding services on freelance basis for small businesses in the western countries, has now metamorphosed into something much bigger.WowMakers had three people creating wow initially- Vivek Raghavan, Jithesh Lakshman and Jaseem Thayal Shareef. “Right from our college days, we had all been keen on avoiding working for the typical ‘big evil corporation’ and rallied along the idea to make something of our own”, says an excited Vivek. Back then, it was all about freelancing. “Once I won $300 for a submission on 99designs.com and ever since that moment we knew that we could make this love for graphic design big”, says Vivek.
Two years later, just before they graduated from college (in 2009), the team met Unni Koroth, co-founder at Foradian (coincidentally Foradian were the winners of the recently concluded Edustars event). All three joined Foradian and the team continued doing the occasional freelance projects during their spare time and kept expanding their portfolio.
Starting up
A year down the road, having had a fruitful time at Foradian, in June 2011, WowMakers came into existence. Renting an office of barely 100 sq. ft. in Kanhangad, their hometown in North Kerala, the small team started working and expanded their portfolio to web development.
WowMakers contacted many established companies to help mentor the team, and one such company was Kochi-based MobMe Wireless. One thing led to another and by late 2011, the people behind Startup Village had heard about WowMakers through MobMe. They were invited to move to Kochi and as of April 1, the day StartUp Village was inaugrated, Wowmakers were the first to move into the Kochi setup.
By this time the team had also grown to a strong size comprising of 10 entrepreneurial folks. Some of them had worked with the trio initially but had moved out to work for bigger organizations. But as it is said, “Home is where the heart lies”, these youngsters quit the ‘corporate world’ and were back in the startup would after convincing their families (which in most cases is the hardest part).
Opening up to new horizons
Coming in touch with more people and especially the people at Mobme, Wowmakers remodeled their B-plan and will soon be starting mobile app design and development. Apart from this, they’re also planning to start work on producing Animated Explanation videos. “We’re working towards achieving our dream of building products, especially for the mobile platform, while leveraging our design skills for creating great user interfaces” says Jaseem. The fact that the WowMakers team is composed of designers with a background in engineering givesthem an added advantage in product development.
The team has noticed an aversion among many tech startups in India from spending on branding, starting from their logos right up to their websites and UI of their products. WowMakers is looking to change this situation by becoming the first design firm to focus on “Branding for Startups” in the near future.
More about WowMakers here.