Trying to clean up the mess in creative workflow and collaboration- tydy

Weekday or weekend, lazy day or busy day, sunny day or a rainy day – what never stops in your professional life and actually keeps it going, what is the first and last thing you check on your computer? E-mails! I bet when you are reading it, your e-mail is definitely open in some browser tab. There isn’t a space for argument about the necessity and utility of e-mails but the perennial e-mail threads and time lag in communication can be bottlenecks in collaborating within teams. The cons of e-mails have laid the base for online project management and collaboration tools, and we have a bunch of them today. To name a few – Colimetrics, Asana, Do.com, Basecamp etc do a good job.

When I met Nikhil Gurjer and Kiran Menon recently, we instantly connected on the nuisance of the necessary – e-mails. It was almost a year back when these two friends were brainstorming on some ideas to start up sitting in two different geographic locations – Kiran was working with the corporate development of Opera and Nikhil was with Mobivatar Interactive Technologies. The nitty-gritty of ideas, the concepts and recording all the iterations of thought process did not come of very easy over e-mails. Even the online collaboration tools could not keep them from getting frustrated when they were dealing with information requiring visual communication. They were empathizing with people who deal with pictures, graphics, designs, logos, shades and tints of colors day in and day out.

They started talking to friends, colleagues, designers, creative agencies, freelancers – anyone and everyone in the community of creative professionals who earn their bread and butter doing it. “Different aspects and inefficiencies of the creative workflow came to picture. Apart from managing clients’ visual assets, continuing iterations and versions of designs, feedback cycle was the major pain point,” says Kiran.

They realized that designers and creative agencies had major inefficiencies and mis-communication when it came to feedback. Discussing minute changes in any form of design or explaining many tiny things in an area of few centimeters was a headache. The whole feedback cycle was either in e-mail chains or needed the client and the creative to be physically present one place to get to the same page. The process got frustrating at times but nothing good can come out of frustration. The duo got some ‘tydy’ good out of it!

Kiran and Nikhil had just found the idea they would be starting up with, in the process of deciding what to start up with– a workflow and communication management tool for the creatives. tydy aims to simplify managing all the clients and campaigns a professional or agency is working on by providing a platform to manage tasks, deadlines, schedules, assets(5GB free space), feedbacks, iterations and the whole workflow from client brief, research, conceptualization, wire-framing to production – all at one place. The two co-founders - the ideators, developers, designers, marketers and salesmen, heartily give credit for the clean, simple and neat design of tydy to all the designers for their creative and honest feedback.

Framebench is another player in the same space which is venture funded but the market is pretty much open in terms of user acquisition. They pushed the idea to their target market in very early stage and took continuous feedback from their prospective clients all along. “We were not building a product for clients, we were co-creating it with them, for them,“ says Kiran. They had their super users, helping them at every stage, using the product, giving the much needed feedback to fine tune the product and it has paid tydy well. tydy currently has 200+ users with roughly 60% from India, 30% from U.S.A and the rest from other parts of the world.

Building up their initial user base in the open beta stage, tydy will have a subscription based revenue model in the near future with extendible storage capacities which can be bought at a fixed price. Based out of their garage office in Bangalore and with the target market clear in their minds, Kiran and Nikhil are looking for some seed investment now.

Checkout tydy and register for a free trial on their website.