How Squadhelp Combined Emerging Business Trends To Transform The Branding Industry

The disruptive startup industry – and the entrepreneurs driving them – could be the most impactful and widespread business trends of the last decade. In 2014, Europe saw the highest levels of venture capital investments since the dot-com boom, and the investments show few signs of slowing down. It seems that everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, starting their company and making an impact on the world – but, where do you begin?

How To Utilize Business Trends In Creating Your Business

If you identify as an entrepreneur, you’re likely keen to explore every potential opportunity that comes your way. Carving out the perfect niche in which your bountiful startup idea can germinate, grow and prosper is so important to you that you’ll readily invest large amounts of time and energy into manifesting your vision.

But what’s the point of all that emotional (and monetary) investment if your new venture isn’t going to make an impact on your chosen industry? Of course, you want your startup to develop a reputation as an industry leader. Ideally, you’d like not only to offer consumers something they need or want but something they never even knew they needed or wanted because nothing quite like your concept has ever existed before.

While building a completely new and unique business may seem daunting, it may not as hard as you may think. Creating an innovative and fresh business could be as simple as determining your area of expertise and combining a few current trends to create an entirely new business phenomenon in your field.

Combining Emerging Business Trends

An interesting example of the efficacy of combining emerging business trends is Squadhelp, a crowdsourcing platform that helps startups engage hundreds of branding experts in naming and branding projects. When launching Squadhelp, founder Darpan Munjal knew there were thousands of potential customers out there – people who needed help coming up with business names, taglines or logo, but who couldn’t afford the massive fees charged by branding agencies.

He thought they deserved a better deal. With a deep knowledge of technology and engineering and a keen eye for emerging trends, he envisioned a unique model that could offer companies a powerful service. That’s when crowdsourcing – then an emerging idea in its infancy – came into play and defined the concept. For a fraction of the price of what a branding agency would charge, startup founders could get hundreds of custom name ideas from experts and creatives around Europe.

He saw that other sites across different industries were beginning to catch on to the power of “the crowd”, so the startup plunged in and never looked back. To date, more than 8000 people have launched naming contests on the site, each getting hundreds of entries and all finding the fitting name. Munjal wanted to push passed the standard crowdsourcing model. So he kept innovating. Quality scoring resulted in a marked increase in the quality of name submissions, and gamification increased freelancer engagement and promoted constructive ideation and brainstorming.

At the start of 2017, Munjal and his team decided to push the boundaries of crowdsourcing, while moving branding towards a new frontier. Squadhelp’s crowdsource community had submitted nearly 5,000,000 names to the platform by the end of 2016. Incorporating big data, machine learning, and AI the naming process for the first time was irresistible to Munjal, an executive who had lead technology projects as VP and CTO of Fortune 500 companies. Therefore, the Name Genome Project – named after one of the largest learning programs that the world has ever seen – was born.

This new innovation is a sophisticated technology that evaluates “characteristics” of millions of previously submitted names using several factors such as startup category, name style and type, country of contest holder, ratings received, and more. This program improves the standard workflow and greatly enhances communication. For example, one of the major communication blocks between clients and freelancers is that clients are usually new to the naming process and they do not know the technical aspects of naming (such as styles and types), so they are unable to communicate their preferences. This problem can be solved using machine learning – analysing the client’s engagement trends and providing smart, actionable insights to freelancers in a language that they understand.

 

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