CrazyHeads is a student startup by Vaibhav Sisinty and Vineet Ganti pursuing their engineering third year in GITAM University, Visakhapatnam. As they quote ‘Creativity is contagious and outrageous’, they believed they need to come up with something unique. So, here it is – 11 months old and running successfully. Initially with just a couple of people but now it runs with a team of 32 pan India and has provided service to national as well as international clients. When asked that how many clients they had provided service to, this is what the Co-founder Vaibhav had to say, “Well, every day, we meet up with a variety of clients. The diversity is amazing. All thanks to the reach we had in the social media. Till date we have served 40+ clients in the fields of web designing, brand identity, logo designing, animated explanations. We have 7 international clients serving them full-fledged round the clock.”
Vaibhav, a SAMGlobal Youth award awardee, trained around 2000 young minds in the aspects of Ethical Hacking, VFX, Photoshop and many more. Vineet Ganti is a tech geek,a Singer in his co-founded band named “Shaurya” is currently doing his research on Cloud establishment of SIM cards and temporary network establishment drones.
The Story behind CrazyHeads
Vaibhav, the co-founder of CrazyHeads explains to us in his ow words –
The story is quite a long one, we didn’t think of starting up overnight.
IT ACTUALLY TOOK US THREE YEARS TO CATCH THE RIGHT PULSE AT THE RIGHT TIME
We started off in a very small scale with an android portal called discoveringandroid.com which eventually failed cause we literally had no knowledge of how to move on. That was during the 1st year.
As days passed, we thought that this is not what we want, there was something missing and that was commitment and dedication. So myself and my co-founder, Vineet came back into action with a bigger plan than ever, CrazyHeadS. The first initial plan was to put up the biggest ethical hacking workshop of Andhra Pradesh in Visakhapatnam. We called up AnkitFadia, and it was the best experience we could get.
The college doesn’t teach us the skills, we agree on that point. But shall we sit back and lay ourselves low? No, entrepreneurship is something which cannot be thought, it comes with experience, responsibility for your work and a lot of sweat. We cannot blame the college for not giving us the knowledge on startups, so we approached them with other core members of the Student Activity Center and showed them the scope of an E-cell and from then, entrepreneurship buzz came into the college.
Story so far
The student startup currently manages Web designing & development, and take pride in bringing the website up in maximum of 72 hours. ” The personal record of our website making is 8 hours”, says Vaibhav. Apart from this, they undertake a whole lot of services such as Managing Brand Identity, Graphic and Print designing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Animated explanations. “The coolest part of our Start-up is the app development. We call ourselves the Android Ninjas for a determined feel”, says Vaibhav.
In this business, finding first set of customers and keeping them is hard. How did the team pick up their first few sales?
Offline campaign was the first step before the internet part, we had a tough time. We still remember our first call to acquire a client. Though we screwed it up initially, eventually we knew the art of presenting ourselves. We were literally on roads looking out for clients I the early days. We knocked the doors of all business men in the town. Disappointments were there but there was some little feeling that we were growing day by day, we are progressing day by day. Visiting cards were exhausted, phone bills reached to the max but good times do came and we clinched then right away.
We quiz Vaibhav on how the team and founders manage college and startup life? Vaibhav tells us, “Life is all about how you balance your stuff. It’s the key to every achievement. Satisfying the work, the classes and lecturers and academics was indeed a real deal. When it’s still not working out, half of the team does the work at least so that there will be no worries anywhere.”.
How does life look like for a student entrepreneur?
The advantage you have is that you can keep on experimenting with a new idea every day. Even if you fail, it’s not a big deal. Instead you should be proud that you at least tried. You are worry free all the time and have that actual ample time to grow up. The disadvantage to be frank affects a bit on your friendships. You start to talk business everyday with your close friends. At first it looks cool but sometimes it gets a bit weird and when it comes to the founders, you only have time to talk about your startup. We hardly even remember when we talked about a good looking girl in the college. But again, the picture of balance comes into play and you just have to settle down on your own.
The startup has been featured by in quite few print publications and is a Microsoft Bizspark Startup. The sheer determination of the team led them to the title of “Vishakhapatnam’s Best Emerging Start-up”.
Challenges
Starting up is not bed of roses. Vaibhav & Vineet did take a lot into their stride, and the situations around weren’t helping in a lot of times.
Last year, the Andhra-Telangana dispute was in full swing. Bundhs were being declared day by day, the streets were full of riots, fires set up on the roads, blocking the everyday traffic. The situation was completely chaotic. And we had our event set up. There was no chance of moving out. We were supposed to conduct a 1300 member Ethical Hacking workshop, the biggest in Andhra Pradesh by India’s most renowned Ethical Hacker, AnkitFadia. The dates were all setup, the campaigning was going good and this chaos occurred. The situation was completely numb. There were no colleges, which were our source for campaigning. The money was sanctioned both to the speaker and the venue. We had to postpone the event in order to do this. We had frustrations, and losses and we had to lose around 1 lakh to postpone the event.
How does CrazyHeads get talent?
CrazyheadS has a got a very unique approach of working, and one of the main mottos of CrazyheadS is training passionate students with the latest trend of technologies giving them the right push at the right time. With motivated brains, most of them joined CrazyHeads and did live projects which boosted up their profile and clients get innovative solutions because the ideas comes from young brains. With this small concept in mind, they trained around 45 students for around 3 months and now, they the awesome work they do clearly reflects on the portfolio.
CrazyheadS doesn’t have an office yet, all the operations of CrazyHeadS are managed from the science activity center of GITAM UNIVERSITY, Visakhapatnam. The College has been really supportive helping out entrepreneurial mindset students. Vaibhav has been instrumental in setting up E-Cell at GITAM University. ” There was no such thing as an Eco-system. Things go real incognito over here. There are some other start-ups who are having good potential but they as we say, balance is the key. We all should soon come up together and do awesome stuff.”, says a thoughful Vaibhav on the startup ecosystem in Visakhapatnam.
CrazyHeadS operates from 3 places – Visakhapatnam, Hyderabad, Berhampur (Orissa). They are presently trying to start it in Chennai, Vellore and Bhubaneswar from the next academic year. In less than a year’s time, CrazyHeadS has managed to create a lot of awareness on entrepreneurship among the youth.
Apart from CrazyHeads, the team is busy with Spread Smile – A tech NGO, Fotisto- social network of photographers, coming up with the most diverse blog ever and some real good product designs under the R&D to come up.
It is indeed heartening to share this inspiring Student Startup Story with all of you. We wish them good luck in times to come!
