How Amazing Things in the World and evrystry are selling ‘Smiles’
It is really hard to stay positive and look at the brighter side of things in life with all the violence and hatred in the world. And the mainstream media, more often than not, highlights the dark side of things. Under these circumstances we all need something to pick ourselves up and restore our faith in humanity.
How Amazing Things in the World lead to the platform: evrystry
Shashank Vaishnav along with his friends co-founded Amazing Things in the World in 2012 when he was in his 3rd year of college. Through this platform they share about all the positive things in the world which are amazing and noteworthy. They have 4.2 million active fans on their facebook page at present.
Based on the vision of the page last year they founded evrystry.
evrystry is a story sharing platform aimed to share all the amazing and unique stories in the world. These stories can be about people, places, nature, animals and anything else where there is a story that has gone unheard or untold. The stories posted on their website reach as much as 5 million people all around the globe in a month.
They want users to share their stories and experiences. They are on a mission to spread positivity, smiles, happiness, and hope by sharing the positive stories with them. They call their users ‘Happiness Soldiers’ and collectively, a ‘Happiness Army’.
The Team behind it
Shashank Vaishnav:
Shashank is a soft hearted but impatient person who feels that the world has no limits.
From an amateur who didn't know what a domain name was, to the technical Shakespeare of an internet company, it has been a complete roller-coaster ride for him. Today, he heads the technical operation at Vatsana Technologies as one of the Co-founders and CTO of the company.
His expertise includes C, C++, PHP, MySQL, and Cloud computing. Scaling and building the infrastructure for the ever growing product of the company remains his passion.
He aspires to travel to Leh and Ladakh on his Royal Enfield and wishes to travel the world one day. His hobbies include sketching, karate, and gymming.
Parveen Singhal:
Praveen is the youngest, the coolest, and the funkiest in the team.
Even though he is just 19, he is the most rational person among all the co-founders.
He has a commerce background and he plays with social media. He has created communities with millions of people joining them over social media.
He is a quality freak and is known for getting even the most difficult of tasks done efficiently in the office. His expertise ranges from finance to social media to operations.
Fashion and sports bikes fascinate him even in his dreams. He wishes to live his life the Dan Bilzerian way one day.
Vinay Singhal:
Vinay is the visionary, father figure of the team and is probably the most unreasonable guy in the world in their opinion.
He is an angry young man with a golden heart and has expertise in HR. His job is to make sure things go in the right direction. When it comes to the maturity of thoughts, one won’t be able to guess his age.
He is a guy from a small village with big dreams. He acts like fuel for the company.
He is a social activist at heart, dreams of an ideal India and believes in being the change agent. He aspires to become the Prime Minister of India one day and retire as a teacher.
Business Model
They use different ad agencies to monetize. They have tie ups with OpenX, PubGalaxy, Adgorithms, MGID, ComScore, Quantcast and many more. Their vision is to make evrystry a completely ad free platform where people can promote their stories as "featured stories" to reach out to a much larger audience.
They want to give a platform to the businesses and people to "sell things" around stories. Stories will always come first on their platform.They want to remove the 'guilt' of clicking on an ad from the user's mind.
This creates a win-win situation for everyone.
Here are some examples of such stories created by their users to promote their products and causes:
Abigail, a sketch artist promoted her unique novel concept, which she and her kids had made using three different art forms. They were able to drive a good amount of traffic to their page from here and sell a few of them.Diego Koi was earlier an Italian tattoo artist but he soon discovered his real potential and he now does hyper-realistic paintings. Diego takes upto 200 hours to complete one sketch, but the results are surreal. The sketch of the woman on the right is a pencil sketch! As most people are sceptical, Diego actually documents his work in stages to prove the genuiness of his work
Laura Binkley suffers from terminal Stage 4, metastatic breast cancer and has been fighting cancer for 25 years. She started a pledge to raise funds and got good response and donors. You can read more about Laura's pledge here
You can check out more inspiring stories such as these on their platform here
The evrystry team is excited that people are using the platform to tell stories in their own unique ways and getting positive outcomes as well.