Goals provide direction and make our life more meaningful. By setting big goals, we stretch our belief and vision on what is possible and work hard to achieve it. Aslam Solanki, the Founder and Managing Director of Insidelogic continue to make progress by pushing beyond limits. His transformational journey from rags to riches by thinking local and building global has happened over a period of 16 years and is very inspiring.
Start small, think big
Aslam Solanki was born in Rajkot and raised in Saurashtra. His family was poverty-stricken. He had to drop out of school in Class 9 due to financial issues faced by his family. However, he had a very good upbringing. Right from a very young age, he wanted to build his own venture. With that purpose in mind, he started working a couple of odd jobs instead of pursuing graduation to reach his target.
Eventually, Aslam got interested in marketing. To improve his knowledge in this area, he familiarized himself with the basics from a few B-School textbooks and started looking for jobs in marketing.
From small beginnings come great things
Towards the end of the ’90s, Aslam worked for individual digital background designers, helping them sell their CDs to studios in Rajkot. It was during one such sales meeting, an album designer casually remarked about no automation available in the designing field.
This got his interest and he started working on building an automated album designing software in 2000. He had the vision to make an Indian product a world leader in image editing and designing. Over time, he incorporated InsideLogic Software and launched the software Album Sense in 2016.
Later, Aslam roped in industry experts to be a part of this 15-member startup. Raju Jayani manages Business Development, Hiren Joshi is responsible for Business and Channel Development, Yogesh Vachhani is the Tech Head, Munjal Solanki heads the Sales team, and Sarfaraz Munshi manages Retail Sales and Finance
Making the jump
Album designing is cumbersome as it takes about 300 photographs to fit into about 60 pages in an average photo album. The whole process takes a highly skilled photographer or album designer up to two days. However, Aslam built an artificial intelligence (AI)-based album designing portal, Album Sense, which creates albums almost instantly. Additionally, it automatically corrects the color of the images and comes with smart cutting tools. This helps save a lot of time by automating the whole process.
The second product from their startup, Visual Sense, helps to build online branding for social media businesses. Visual Sense is an AI-based automated branding and social media design tool. It provides ready-to-use designs and easy usage for businesses to add their logos, color scheme specifications, and other major details. The software remembers all these details and helps create branding and marketing designs based on these specifications.
The third product, Photo Sense, is an AI-based image editing and designing software loaded with 112 features. This is planned to be launched by late October,
Every accomplishment starts with a small decision
With a vision to solve issues faced by digital designers, be it photographers, album designers, and graphic designers, Aslam successfully built automated design solutions.
Currently, their primary product Album Sense is available for a single user and multiple-user usage. Album Sense boasts more than 10,000 paid users. The team acquired their initial customers from promoting the product through participation in trade fairs held across the country.
Their branding product, Visual Sense, is made available for three years of unlimited design downloads.
They have made the pricing of the products lesser than other products in the market. However, these products are much faster and better than their competitor’s products.
According to the bootstrapped company, their customer base has been growing by 20 percent, year on year. Their revenue turnover for InsideLogic was Rs 20 lakh last year.
Predict the future by creating it
Post its launch, they plan to make Photo Sense available free of cost for the first three years. They require users to make in-app purchases to use the advanced designing templates. However, advanced features, without the automatic album designing portal, they plan to make it free to use.
After the first three years, Photo Sense is planned to be available in a SaaS model with an annual subscription charge.
After the launch of Photo Sense, the revenue is expected to grow to Rs 2 crore by 2022.
In the future, Aslam has plans for InsideLogic Software to raise funds to expand to the global market.
