We Called Our Venture PosterGuy for the Cool Touch, Says Puneet

These are the days of start-ups. Our website – ajournalistreveals.com – is a start-up too. We have been featuring start-ups on our website and one has been very striking. PosterGuy is a start up by 2 youngsters Punnet Gupta and Praneet Singh Sahai. They have people, many of them as young as teenagers, designing clothes and lifestyle products that are brought together and sold by the website. Punnet gave us an exclusive interview on their company and what can be expected from them in the near future.
How has the journey been so far?
I graduated as civil engineer from IIT Delhi in 2013 and instantly took the start-up route and did not sit for any job. I have also been interested in starting my own venture. My first stint as an entrepreneur was to design and sell t-shirts inside the college. Praneet, co-founder of PosterGuy graduated with me from Amity University in 2013, dropped his plans of doing MS in UK and took the plunge with me. He also had been actively entrepreneurial in his college from consulting for iphone repairs to getting sponsorship for his college projects.

We started with making Yearbooks for college students in our last semester and made some beautiful ones for different colleges around India and also won the Best Student Start-up award from Tata First Dot in 2014. But soon we had realized that we are targeting a minute portion of our targeted market and identified a bigger need that there are designers and artists in India who are not able to earn from their creative work and had to depend on some freelancing work.

So we created PosterGuy and provided platform to designers to convert their designs in the form of merchandise and sell across India. We have the largest variety of designs for multiple products. On PosterGuy, every designer has its own collection like their own store. We manage all the backend operations and marketing for them. Every designer has their creative freedom to design whatever they like and whenever they want.

We have designers who are as young as 17 year olds to be the creative head of our company. Some do it for the money, some do to feel satisfied in looking at other people wearing their designs in form of a t-shirt, iphone case, etc. A designer is easily able to earn around 5K in a month, just from the royalty fees from the sale of his designs.

How did you meet your friend – Praneet?
One of my batch mates from IIT I knew Praneet from his school days. We had another friend in our group. All of us discussed the idea of making of yearbooks in the last semester of college and gave the venture a try. The last semester of college, no matter how nostalgic it is, we virtually skipped our classes, farewell meets to build the next big thing. Unfortunately, our common friend had to leave because of his family problems but Praneet and me had developed a level of understanding and friendship that we stuck together to make our dreams come alive.
What inspired you to give the name PosterGuy to your venture?
We actually brainstormed for more than three days for the perfect name. We had some features in our mind. The name should click with younger generation but should not be too funky that we lose our middle-aged users. There should be a persona attached to the name. And most importantly no one should be using the name. “PosterGuy” is the only name that clicked with us and it resonated best with our vision. PosterGuy is derived from the word Poster Boy but we wanted to give it a more uber and cool touch. PosterGuy gives a persona around the brand and people also feel like they are communicating with a person rather than some product or customer service from a brand name. Even our social handles are named “iamposterguy”, which encourages people to become part of the family.

Are you planning any expansions?
We just launched wall clocks in association with BigOwl and many more products are in pipeline. The aim is transform everything into art, from your bedsheets to kitchenware. With almost 200 artists, more than 10000 different products, we are creating more tools for people with just an idea earn with PosterGuy and they are not even from a design background. Just to give an example a college student who sells his designs with us earns around Rs.10000/- a month just from his artwork. He sits in his comfort zone and is already financially independent. We want to share this opportunity with as many designers in India as the design schools can teach.