During his college days, as part of his college project at Sarvajanik College of Engineering and Technology in Surat, Dalpat Prajapati would design icons. While doing research, he discovered that there was no marketplace selling micro stocks such as icons that were necessary for visual communication.
Dalpat joined Mohit Gandhi and Varun Trivedi, his college mates, and started Iconscout in 2015. His other batchmates were soon joined as co-founders by Arpan Level, Jemis Mali, and Tarun Mangukiya.
Centered in Surat, Gujarat, and now in Bengaluru, Iconscout is a marketplace for design tools that offers high-quality icons, illustrations, and images ready to use.
A collective of enthusiastic designers and photographers is powering the startup. According to the start-up, individuals from over 150 countries are currently buying more than two million icons, diagrams, and stock photos for their companies from their library.
Designers need pre-made icons and images to complete projects faster. Iconscout enables a marketplace where designers can buy/sell each other’s assets and earn on every purchase. They make it easy for designers to manage their assets through plugins for all design software like Adobe Photoshop, Invision, Figma. The product launches have consistently been the highest rankers on product hunt.
On the website, the creator uploads the resource, and the content curator team verifies the quality of each uploaded asset. For users to download, there are only authorized assets available. Users may then download the tools from the portal or from plugins and applications.
The team has developed the Iconscout plugin and framework for some software applications along with the web site, such as Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Office tools, Google Docs, and Google slide.
Startups like TechStars-backed Picxy are currently solving the relatability issue through highly contextual stock images in the digital content room. The niche e-commerce market along with gift market places in India is currently pegged at $30 billion, according to IndianRetailer.com, of which $400 million could be attributed to digital space.
The start-up says it is looking at various models of sales. The ‘pay as you go’ is there, where the designer prices every asset, and consumers pay the pre-set price for every asset they download. The customer can buy a monthly or annual plan in the ‘subscription model’, which allows them access to different services based on the package they have chosen. The price per month of these packages will range from $9 to $3000/.
Currently, the site focuses on Indian digital content and is also looking to build a large worldwide design community. They add more world-class artists to the platform and build a huge database of properties, Dalpat says. In the future, with all its properties, Iconscout aims to concentrate on strong icons, diagrams, and stock photo APIs, which can be part of other applications , making it very successful with users. The start-up also wants to launch a custom sticker API and is working on another ‘Poster’ product, which is a graphic editor focused on a regional language.
We are working to build a group of designers and photographers from India who can meet our country ‘s artistic needs. From a technology perspective, on Blockchain, we will also incorporate copyright and licencing of creative properties. “We are targeting $1 million in revenue by 2021,” says Dalpat.
