December 30, 2013 (Powerhomebiz.com) With an eye on the $ 526 Billion global market for advertising, marketing and digital services consumed annually by small businesses around the world, India born agencyonnet.com is looking at raising the initial seed capital exclusively through crowd funding.
“When we started work on agencyonnet.com six months ago we were clear that this was an idea that we would take to institutional venture capitalist sometime down the line” explains Rajesh Menon the CEO and founder of agencyonnet. “At the outset since our idea was primarily focused around small businesses we decided to approach the market itself to funding the idea”
Crowd Funding works on the principle of a large number of people contributing small sums of money towards a startup. Internationally crowd funding is an accepted form of raising capital be it for charity, startup investments or for personal benefits. Sites like Indegogo, Razoo, Crowdfunder and Kickstarter have been successful to a large degree in bringing crowd funding to the masses. Closer home in India crowd funding is yet to kick off with sites like Pik-A-Venture, Wishberry just about finding their feet.
The global market size for the marketing and advertising industry is estimated to be $ 1.17 Trillion with 40-45% of the annual spends being consumed by the small business community. Agencyonnet intends to be the first to capitalize on this by launching a specific small business focused B2B e-commerce marketplace connecting both parties. Unlike a directory search, Agencyonnet will be focused on providing transactional services to small businesses and agencies around the world.
Using the marketplace, small businesses can now source and send out marketing, advertising and digital briefs to agencies. The marketplace would match the small business requirement with agencies who have registered with them and provide small business owners with concrete proposals that meet their marketing, advertising or digital requirements.
According to Rajesh Menon, “What we are going to do will make the industry sit up. We will have the first mover advantage in several areas including being the world’s first B2B E-commerce marketplace for this service.”
Speaking on his crowd funding attempt Rajesh explained. “Out of the seed capital requirement of $200,000, we were able to raise $100,000 from internal sources but for the balance, we decided to look at crowd funding. We looked at all options and realized that India was still pretty much behind the rest of the world in this area as far as the digital option went. But the idea seemed relevant. So we decided to go traditional. We drew up a list of potential investors from our contact lists and we approached each one of them through a combination of email and telephone. At present we have already reached our halfway mark of the target we have and are looking at overshooting our initial estimate. We were also lucky that we managed to rope in one large investor at the very beginning!”.
About Rajesh Menon
A professional turned entrepreneur, Rajesh Menon has over 24 years of marketing, advertising and digital marketing experience in a variety of roles in client and agency sides. He was the COO of Brandquiver Ltd, India’s first brand consulting firm for the Internet in 2000 and the CEO of India’s largest marketing services agency until its acquisition by Publicis. Agencyonnet.com is his second entrepreneurial venture. His first entrepreneurial venture was Impact Marketing Services Pvt Ltd which is among the top 10 agencies in its field in India.
About Agencyonnet.com
Agencyonnet.com is a global B2B E-Commerce marketplace connecting small businesses with agencies in the advertising, media, internet and marketing industry. It aims to provide a transactional benefit to small businesses by bringing together agencies across multiple domains under one roof. Agencyonnet.com is scheduled to be launched for both Indian and International audience in January 2014.