Yourslate: Confessions of a serial entrepreneur

The story of Hasan Ali’s art venture...

He comes from a family of artists/painters. His grandfather H.R. Raja was a critically acclaimed artist who used to paint zebra crossings, roads, pavements until he became famous for his fine art. But not Hasan Ali, while pursuing B. Tech in electronics and communication engineering from JSSATE Noida, this 22- year old from Noida is a serial entrepreneur.  

Hasan’s ventures deal with art for artists’ sake. His startups are interesting stories where art gets promoted through opulent creations. Hasan shares his journey with Baishali Mukherjee.

I work with three startups, being founder of two and chief of marketing of one. My first initiative is yourslate.in, which is all about art (inspired from my family). The services we provide include portrait making, wall art (interior designing/decorating) - graffiti, doodles, portraits, paints, installations etc. and paintings. We offer the service of delivering portraits and paintings at the doorstep. For business, startups, offices and co workings we offer interior designing/wall art services and even consultancy.

The next ideation that was made into a business reality is Toat, a fashion apparel startup in the space of school/college events including farewell, annual functions, scribble day and others. We are building the next generation customization platform in collaboration with various firms, one of them is Yourslate. The platform will enable customers buy their personalized products of all sorts. Everybody likes to wear their own personality and we are taking this idea forward. Our bouquet includes customised apparels -T-shirts, sweatshirt, bands and other accessories along with delivery to their respective colleges.

My third venture is pencil co-working which targets community building of and for entrepreneurs. My small team and I run this community on Facebook called ‘Noida Startups’ which caters to building a stronger startup ecosystem in Noida, Ghaziabad and Gr. Noida.

Idea intensive ventures

Hasan Ali

Hasan Ali

I started Yourslate on October 1, 2016 with the ambition to market artists’ works to the relevant audiences and create better opportunities for the artists. After learning about the struggles of my grandfather, it came to me as a social purpose.  The art landscape of India is very unprivileged, non-uniform and sparse. We thought of starting with that one thing which everyone would buy, so we decided to start Yourslate with portraits. Toat was born out of the problems we faced as students in college. All the college societies wanted their customized apparels and didn’t know what to do. We saw this problem as an opportunity. It’s been 10 months now since Toat started its operations and now we are in more than 10 colleges of Delhi NCR and UP.

Building from scratch

Mine are not capital intensive initiatives and there have not been much of initial investments, apart from domain registrations and hosting which I did out of my savings from internships. My father helped me with technical support and gave his company’s resources. Rest was from family friends relatives.

Catering to a niche market

The global art market is booming but investing in art comes with a certain risk. In countries like Australia, Russia, other European countries where there is a lack of labour there is a huge demand of handmade paintings and it is set to increase. The painting market alone will rise to three trillion by 2020. In the coming years we plan to expand to more countries in terms of our services. Presently we are in India and Australia.

We have a robust set of customers at Yourslate who ask for making portraits of their parents, grandparents, friends or girlfriends. Portraits are priceless gifts, when you see it with your eyes; it touches your core. With the trend of customising fast catching up especially with the youth, our customer base for Toat is also getting sparky.

The future looks bright as interesting things are happening for me. Recently I bumped into Rohan Jetley (CEO of TGI Friday chain of restaurants in India) at an event. We had a small conversation and connected after the event. Now, I am working on something for his restaurants.

Going slow but steady

The main reason behind the venture was to increase opportunities for Indian artists which are still not there. I feel we will be successful when we will touch life of around 50 per cent of the artists in India. Also in Toat, There’s a long way to go until we have a monopoly or capture majority of the colleges in Delhi NCR and around also.  In a period of seven months we are just shy of a 100 customers for yourslate. In a period of 10 months, we have covered two college fests, four Scribble Day’s and more than 30 college societies.

We are a team of 12 people at yourslate and team of six people at Toat. Pencil coworking has me as manager, the other co-founder as CEO, a community manager, a digital media head and marketing guy.

Straight talk

Everybody assumes rich and successful people their idol and I feel it is correct too in a certain way but people who bring a change and make an impact are always my idol. I am so fascinated by Bharat Sethi (founder and CEO of iDECORAMA who sold PosterGully in 2016). He bootstrapped his startup and it is never easy to pull off a startup in art sector in India. He is my real Startup Hero. I admire people who have built their businesses from zero without any funding. One needs to work very hard and for a very long before he/she can actually live the cherished dream. So do what you love and be patient while you work at it.

How long does it take for an art venture to break even? Please share your views?

 

 

 

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