Art and creativity traditionally had been the luxury of the elite until recently. In the digital age, it has become easier for many of us average Janes and Joes to skillfully convert our esoteric thoughts to art. Social Media went a long way in sharing our creativity with the world. But, somewhere in the myriad of functionalities that traditional Social Media Channels offer, it always has been difficult to find the exact set of tool that can help the casual creative geniuses among us to create and collaborate with others. This is where Arun Sharma wants to bridge the gap using Kritish.
Arun Sharma, The Co-Creator of Kritish always had a great respect and love for creativity. As a self-taught artist, he has consulted with masters, studied art instruction books, and shared his creative learning with others. Once he found his love and passion for art , his creative journey has been never ending. The passion to be an artist and to share this gift of creativity has been a driving force in his life. Although Arun has a keen interest in various forms of arts, he connects himself better with music, painting, photography and gardening. His vision as a co-creator for Kritish is to provide a social platform to bring out the artist in every human being. His firm belief that God has given all of us the power to create something that makes you think, something that makes you smile, something beautiful, is the inspiration behind the foundation of Kritish.
We had the opportunity to have a discussion with Mr. Arun Sharma about this new creative collaboration platform, Kritish. Let’s dive in!
Durofy: How would you describe Kritish in one sentence?
Arun: Kritish is an encouragement to show your creative work to the world, by which you inspire and invite others to join with you in the pursuit of collective creative happiness.
How did the idea of starting Kritish come about?
I have been into the creative space for many years. I consider that creativity is not limited to just artists – such as musician, singers, painter etc. we can apply creativity to most of the things we do. We hear that highly successful people attribute a lot on their creative side, whenever they narrate their success stories. However, I feel that many times people’s creativity remains with themselves and do not come out for the advantage of everyone. Artists and creative souls feel demotivated with the lack of opportunity to do anything outside their own little world – both physical and virtual. This has multiple negative effects, such as the creative person, starts feeling constraint and demotivated, due to lack of avenues to express their creativity. Second – because such avenues are missing, people who could benefit from someone’s else creativity, miss the opportunity to get inspired by great stories and ideas. And finally, there does not exist a social platform where multiple creative people can collaborate together to share their creativity, inspire each other and inspire the world. These all challenges were personally faced, and hence the idea of Kritish came to mind.
Who should use Kritish?
Anyone and everyone. We all are artists, we have our own canvases, and we have our way of expressing the creative side of us. Each of us can learn so much from each other, can inspire each other, collaborate with so many like-minded people. Young or old, amateur or professionals, everyone has something creative to offer to others. The greatest forms of creativity are often sparked by sharing the creativity of others.
The world needs people who put creative work out into the world. What seems simple to you is often brilliant to someone else. But you’ll never know that unless you choose to share.
What are the key features of Kritish? How is it different from other Social Media Platforms?
Kritish is about telling a story, telling your story, expressing yourself. It’s about being passionate; it’s not about creating right or wrong or to always get the right answers. It’s the answers we create, it comes from inspiration, inspiration found in the world we live in, and from the people, we live with. Kritish provides a medium to build a portfolio for yourself and your creations in a very powerful way.
We believe that each one of us has the power to inspire the world with our creativity. We start the journey by showcasing your creations on Kritish. You can Add / Edit Your Creations in the form of images, and videos.
Discover People is the feature by which you can not only find creative people around you; you can also Collaborate with them. You may not imagine how many different ways people can collaborate with each other. Kritish continues to give different Collaboration Ideas to you every day. Refine your search or the way you would like to see other creations using Location Specific options provided.
What were your biggest challenges while developing Kritish?
We want to give the community a platform, which showcases their creative sides in a most powerful way. We had an easy choice to make it another social media site where people could upload their creations. But then we were not doing anything more than showcasing those creations to the world. We had a thought process, in which we wanted to give users an end to end experience of adding creations, browsing beautiful creations, at the same time allowing them to decide, what creations they want to see. And finally, an option to collaborate with other creative people.
The biggest challenge was on how to provide all these features without being overwhelming to the users. We spent many days working on screen designs, deciding on user interactions, and to make Kritish.com an intuitive yet powerful community building platform.
How are the early reactions from the target audience to the closed beta launch of Kritish?
Very encouraging. People liked the easy interaction with the site, the pleasing experience of browsing through many creations, the choices they can make while browsing creations. At the same time, we asked our target audience, the areas of improvements and we are pleased to announce that we have refined Kritish.com significantly based on the feedback we received.
As a social platform, that promotes collaboration, we encourage our user to be collaborative with us and tell us their ideas, thoughts and how we can improve further.
Do you believe that Creative Collaboration is the next big thing?
Absolutely! Society is all about building relationship, and to collaborate with each other. Remember old days, we built our world one idea at a time. Sharing of ideas can be as important as working on an idea. Through sharing, we inspire the world, through sharing we rekindle the hopes in many lives, and above all when we share our creative ideas, we give our ideas a chance to flourish based on other’s inputs.
We are going to be as good as the stuff we surround ourselves with, follow and collaborate with people who are smarter than ourselves or doing interesting work. Our job is to collect good ideas, more good ideas we have, the more we can choose to be influenced by.
Creative collaboration is the healthiest way to collaborate with others as each one inspires others to do their best. Creativity cannot be faked. That is the reason for the collaborations. Only when people have genuine interests in others work, based on their creative side, then only they will collaborate.
What are your future plans for Kritish?
We have lots of exciting features coming up on www.Kritish.com, which we will announce in next few days. Every additional feature has been carefully considered and it focuses on building stronger communities through creative collaboration. We will continue to improve on user experience based on the feedback we receive. We will also be launching our mobile app very soon.
When can we start using Kritish?
Kritish is launching on 14th Nov 2016. We have opened the preregistration on www.Kritish.com and we encourage people to sign up today to be the first one to experience the Kritish experience as soon as we launch Kritish on 14th.
Sign up process is very simple. People just need to provide their name, email information and their location information. We just want to know your City, Zip code / Pin code and country and not the full address information. All this information is needed to provide you the creative contents based on your interest areas and your location.
What would be your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Life is a great big Canvas, throw all the Paint you can on it. Know your passion! Follow it, Dream It, Live It. It is never too late to start working on something that you always believe in. Trust your instincts, do your research and preparation and go for it. Remember you cannot succeed until you try.
