Jade Magnet

Company history

Jade Magnet was co-founded by Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra, who were classmates at the Great Lakes Institute of Management. The company was born out of their idea to develop a crowdsourcing platform, based on the notion that solutions coming from a physically disconnected world could still serve business needs.

The idea behind establishing the company was to tap the market space comprising millions of small and medium businesses around the world which need creative support in their marketing campaigns but are unable to work with large creative agencies due to budget constraints. Crowdsourcing could cater to the needs of all such businesses on a single platform, bridging the gap between small businesses that could not afford big agency fee, and freelancers who were looking for creative freedom and opportunity. Also, there was an opportunity to work for large and mature businesses in search of new creative ideas for their marketing campaigns and willing to experiment with more people than traditional agencies can provide.

There's a case study being written on why the business after scaling up couldn't reach the next level by professors in Great Lakes Institute of Management. The founders, Sitashwa has moved on to do startup in financial services vertical called Stockal while Manik has started a venture in Real Estate Space called Pin Click

Contest Based Platform

Under a pilot program for testing the business model by the name of creADivity, the founders brought on-board 45 providers and got their first five customers. In July 2008, creADivity got selected for The Indus Entrepreneurs’ (TiE) Entrepreneurial Acceleration Program (EAP), which selects one or two startup companies every year and assists in funding, mentoring and networking to support them. The program provides role models in successful entrepreneurs, and helps with the support required by early-stage entrepreneurs.