Picxele – A Cover Story

Rishav Agarwal – Founder & CEO, PicxeleRishav Agarwal successfully started and ran a business that provided an easy link between Companies and Gig Workers before he even graduated from the college. With his app “Picxele” garnering thousands of users, it’s no secret this bootstrap venture has been a success.

1. Picxele is a bootstrapped venture. Till now, it has not received funding from anyone.
2. The company is running on revenue. 
3. It has already generated 8CR+ INR (80 Millions INR) Revenue till date with a total of 750,000+ Users.

In his own words – “My life took a 180-degree turn after joining the college. Before my Bachelors in Tech, I was clueless about the online world. Once I got exposed to things in college, it was like an ocean of opportunities for me that I dived into. I am still diving and learning new things”, says Rishav Agarwal, founder of Picxele. 

He further adds – “During my second year in the college, I did about 43 internships in different companies and various fields, not only in IT but also in Marketing, Sales, Operation, etc remotely. What I found at that time was that we students were having trouble finding any paid internships or skilled work. So I talked to many companies I had been working with and I found that they were also having problems as the interns were not meeting the requirements for the work.

I talked to one of the companies and decided to launch a platform where I take the work and get it done via the task force called remote Gig Workers. After taking the requirements from the company, the task force was doing user acquisition, product sampling, market research, sales, data entry, etc. Through this platform, both parties were satisfied. The companies were able to get their work done, and Gig Workers were able to get paid for their work timely. Simultaneously, they were also able to upskill themselves with more new stuff on the go.

Throughout 2018, it was a manual process. By the end of 2018, I decided to launch an application to allow the whole operation to run smoothly. Previously, everything was done offline but the application allowed the Gig Workers to find the Gigs/Tasks on app, do the work and submit it directly, and get paid there itself.

I graduated in May 2019, and in June of the same year, we launched the app called Picxele. Since then, I’ve been operating Picxele full-time and having decent growth each year. The growth and revenue of Picxele have been growing consistently.  The revenue is three times that of the previously recurring year.

I am happy for the gig workers and the companies who have benefitted from this platform and looking forward to taking this to even new heights.

According to Rishav – “The first hurdle in starting Picxele, was the formation of the company, the legal and the paperwork. Since being a College student I didn’t have much idea about the same and there wasn’t anyone to guide me about it. But with time, after having faced certain instances I got my legs in and with that understood how to take things ahead. 

The second hurdle was that we needed constant revenue to pay for the monthly expenses. Since in order to meet that we needed Recurring business from companies and ultimately, I managed to meet that. I was pretty scared when approaching these two things, but over time they worked themselves out.”

When asked about his journey – 

He adds – “My favorite thing about being an entrepreneur is that I get to work for myself and the people that I’m associated with have the same mindset. Before my Bachelor’s Degree, I was in West Bengal, India and I knew nothing about how things work online. I had started college in 2015 with the plan of going to college, studying well, and getting a good placement. That carried out well in my first year, but then in the second year, I started working with lots of companies and my mindset shifted. I had the idea that I could start my own Company. Before I had even graduated college, I started the business and was running it.

As of now till January 2023, we have around 720K+ Gig Workers registered on Picxele, with 10% of them, working dedicatedly doing various tasks and projects and earning regularly. The average earning of an individual Gig Worker is between 500 -10,000 INR a month depending upon the amount of work being done by the individual. We have more than 400 Companies associated with us for whom we are meeting requirements continuously. 20-30% among them are meeting their On-Demand requirements through Gig Workers on recurring Month on Month Basis using Picxele.

Throughout the journey, I’ve been working with numerous people from different parts of India and also different Sectors. I’ve learned a lot of things culturally and apart from that, I’ve learned things outside of my degree which I was undergoing during my college days. I’ve also seen a personal growth in terms of communicating with people since I wasn’t able to speak fluent English and was a little hesitant towards speaking to others, but with time I came out of my shell and grew.”

Discussing on key takeaways and learnings, Rishav mentions – while building Picxele there were multiple things which I learned personally about the market and most importantly you cannot keep the same approach every year. A shift in strategies helps the startups scale more. One constant thing i learned is no matter what others say in the end being you the founder you shall know how to run the company and it runs on Revenue and Profits.

Talking about Uniqueness of his business model, this is what he shared – 

“Our business model is quite simple. 

1. The companies send us their requirements and we convert that in the form of Tasks or Projects and post in the Picxele App. 
2. From there Gig Workers can start working based on their Interest and Eligibility. We charge on Per Task completion from Companies and from that by keeping our margin we pass on the rest to the Gig Workers. 

We also saw a spike in the number of Gig Workers using our platform once the pandemic hit, since mostly people were sitting idle at home, looking for ways to earn Remotely. Similarly, Companies on the other hand were looking for Remote People to work for them and we managed to meet Demand and Requirements from both ends.”

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All the details mentioned above have been written and composed by researching from the various resources both online and offline. All with the help of books & magazines, corporate websites, founders websites, business websites and search engines like google.com, bing.com et al. The sole purpose of sharing this information is to boost the zeal of entrepreneurship and ignite the passion of many budding entrepreneurs.