“Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sun-dial in the shade?”
These lines by Benjamin Franklin rightly sums up the ethos and the ideology of the Delhi based startup called Touchtalent, co-founded by fifth year student of Integrated M.Tech at IIT Delhi, Ankit Prasad is envisioning to create Touchtalent as a platform dedicated to socially creative people.
Touchtalent works on the philosophy that when we create we have the inherent desire to share and showcase our work with not only amongst our first circle of family and friends but also amongst the community of creative people to get a chain of feedback and appreciation running.
The three core pillars of the Touchtalent system relies on
1. Share: Exchange of content with creative minds cutting across geographical boundaries and talents.
2. Appreciation/Feedback: Any community relies on quality feedback system to help promote the new talent along with filtering out the chaff from the wheat.
3. Monetization: People can monetize on the content they have created.
Touchtalent initially began as a social experiment in the form of a Facebook page in November, 2011. Tens of thousands likes and an engaging community later it became a proof of concept that people were open to the concept of an online creative community where they could share their talent and be a part of an engaging community. By April, 2012 Touchtalent was released in the form of a beta access service.
Drawing analogy from how a typical social networking site functions, a user creates a profile, uploads images for the content they have created and engages with the community by sharing their feedback or promoting it on other platforms. A follow option allows a user to keep a tab on their favorite content creators on Touchtalent.
The homepage is a visual layout of the trending creative content shared by people ranging from paintings to photographs and everything in between. The idea is to get onboard people to share their skills which can be presented via the visual medium. The site encourages and thus is there content in the form of small comic strips, original videos and music.
After gathering a sizable fan following for their service, they would now be focusing their efforts on creating brand pages, wherein individual brands could share their visual content and have a conversation running. Gamification techniques would be embedded deeply in the Touchtalent experience, encouraging badges for people to show their community standing and skill level.
Ecommerce currently plays a role on Touchtalent wherein artist has the ability to sell their content. The future release is going to focus on having a bidding system in place for making purchase of the creations.
What seems amiss right now is some of the low quality content appearing on trending page and the Pinterest inspired UI which might be an issue in the long run. The self-funded venture has seen traction from more than 15,000 users from 152 countries of the world in the past 6 months alone.
The place where it does score over other similar platforms is its ability to have hobbyists and professionals co-exist with each other on a content sharing platform. And for this reason we would encourage you to try it out and share your feedback.
