The Cloud Canvas

A gig platform, The Cloud Canvas enables creators to learn digital design, create content, commercialize offerings and turn into microentrepreneurs. Endorsed by Adobe, and recognized by keynote at their global summit.

Across the world, there are about 200 million people who consider themselves to be creators. These creators are fueled by the need to express their individuality, and freedom of how they live and work, and their number is growing exponentially.  These creators, who could be independent knowledge professionals, entrepreneurs, influencers, artists, designers, and filmmakers,  are channelling the shift from traditional mediums to promote their service or creation.  Traditionally, this freelance entrepreneurial talent was dependent upon intermediaries to provide connections and expand their reach such as freelancers relying on companies, filmmakers relying on production houses, artists leaning upon art galleries and musicians on record labels.

However, this trend is changing - ‘The Creator Economy’ is here… it is changing the power dynamics in the hands of creators. Despite this shift, a large number of creators remain unpaid across the world. It takes content creators an average of six and a half months to earn their first dollar. Just 10% of influencers earn $100K or more per year. Just in India, there are around 60 million creators, of which only about 150,000 can monetise their services effectively—i.e. less than 0.25 per cent. 

Opportunity is huge, the global influencer market is expected to reach $20 billion by the end of  2023. Within India, there are 637 million smartphone users, who reportedly spend an average of 4.6 hours per day consuming content. 

As a 16-year-old student, I bring to this challenge, The Cloud Canvas - a platform I have developed over the last two and a half years. Our platform is designed for the independent professionals, creators, and micro-influencers who would drive this creator economy, creators who want to create their own content, learn how to reach their audience and then finally, most essentially,  carve out ways to monetize this content. 

The Cloud Canvas provides digital learning tools to enable the creator community to build and promote their professional subscriber base, boost opportunities for outreach, create opportunities for endorsements and partnerships, expand their user base, financial independence, self-reliance and showcase their work directly to their follower communities.

Today this platform has enabled 8500+ individuals to learn digital content build-out from anytime-anywhere, empowering them to translate their creative aspirations into purposeful work. The community includes people across the country. We also focus on purposeful interventions, for example we have a special partnership with Nabet. In this partnership, we provide individuals with physical disabilities and members of the transgender community an opportunity to learn digital design tools and also find gig-employment opportunities. 

The platform has been endorsed and sponsored by Adobe, with the company appointing me as their Young Global Adobe Ambassador representing India. I was also given an opportunity to present The Cloud Canvas at Adobe Global conference as their keynote speaker.

The Cloud Canvas is a single destination for people to learn digital creative skills, fully understand the underlying levers of growing their community and finally create opportunities for monetization. This continuum of learning, from basics to growth to monetization differentiates this platform from scores of other content solutions out there. Finally, Adobe has given The Cloud Canvas immense credibility by endorsing the platform and offering to provide student licensing at highly reduced price points.

This platform is live with aggregated content that comprises three core pillars: Content - Community - Challenges. We help our learners to position their products and business services through easy, self-taught modules-based learning. We help them monetize their products, reach new audiences, and augment their connection with the community of like-minded creators.

The platform has already delivered results, we have about 8500 plus learners on our platform. We have also run special programs for individuals with disabilities of a social organization called Nabet. The proof point includes scores of design persons who have gained employment as gig workers and started to earn livelihood to create a self-reliant future for themselves.

By combining these different value levers, we should be able to create a whole range of microentrepreneurs, with an end-to-end understanding of the creator economy.

In 2021 I heard about Rachna Ranade. A chartered accountant amongst millions in India, teaching MBA students in her free time, Mrs. Ranade once uploaded a lecture for absentees, and within a few weeks the video went viral. Soon she gained 2 million subscribers. Mrs. Ranade was recognized for her craft and made far more of an impact than she would have ever made as an accountant.

This is the power of the creator economy, the ability to empower millions and promote self-reliance and financial independence.

While there are lots of learning content pieces out there to support such creators, I could not find structured pathway of learning for creative enthusiasts. The plethora of unstructured content ended up confusing me, with more information overload than productive learning. I ended up learning digital products without going through the rigour and foundation of design basics. 

This is when the preliminary threads of The Cloud Canvas began converging in my head, a platform enabling thousands of creators locally and globally to hone their skills, channel their reach, and create their own self-sustaining, financially rewarding body of work

I believe the platform would address this crucial need and fill the void of a knowledge-intensive support platform. To strive for a single destination to impart a structured learning path that covers the entire spectrum of design fundamentals to high-end digital tools. Teach creators how to build and curate community and finally equip them with tools to create monetization.

I am a digital creative, I have been creating content for the last three years and truly understand the challenges faced by young creatives in terms of building content, growing community and translating content into successful commercialization. 

I started building the platform with this first-hand experience. As I moved ahead in the journey, I got support of other influencers, then Adobe came in with their recognition, courses and licenses. As I grew further, I got support of the most established creator platform called Knorish. They loved my approach and joined hands to create learning packages to be used by their community users. Finally, I got support from Nabet as a partner to bring in end users who needed these services.

Overall, I was fortunate that with every step I took forward, a like-minded person, company or institution offered support. The process of seeking this support was undoubtedly demanding and tested all aspects of my resilience, but with every dozen outreachs I made, there was a supporting response … and a sequence of such supports created an ecosystem that made this platform possible.

Being a Creator myself, it was easy for me to relate and empathize with the problems being faced by this community. To truly understand the relevance of different solution pieces, I did a lot of in-person interviews and spoke to a lot creators to fully understand the problem.

In addition, I did specific reach out to the following members:

• Leveraged Adobe support to connect with their design customers

• Connected with Canva users through online Canva events

• Took the help of creator platforms like Knorish and One Impression to connect with their users

• Connected with teacher platform CENTA to get feedback from teacher community

• Worked with Sri Chaitanya School to get specific feedback from their students following the path of digital creatives

This reach out helped me understand the perspective of all three stakeholders, a- the creators; b - the design tool companies; c - creator platforms creating monetization for creators.

Existing solutions like Youtube have all the content, but it does not provide structured learning pathways. Then there are platforms like Udemy, which provide learning content but do not interconnect learning to monetization. There are also other platforms like Coursera and Udacity that provide a broader set of skills, but they don’t have a focused engaged community of creators that see these platforms as a single destination of their growth.

Against the backdrop of these great solutions, The Cloud Canvas has managed to create its own identity because of the following value propositions: 

A platform for

• Focused Audience: Young Creatives 

• For specific skills : Digital Design Skills

• Comprehensive Offerings: From Design Basics to multiple product choices including CANVA to Adobe Suite

• Interconnecting Dots: Joining content skills to community build-out to growth hack and finally monetization

• Credibility Markers: Adobe Endorsement

• Delivery Credentials: Proven delivery across 8500 plus users including individuals with special needs.

• Monetization Proof Points: through platforms like Knorish and One Impression, creating opportunities of Gig Workforce.

• Purposeful Journey: We have also run special programs for individuals with disabilities and members of the transgender community, transforming The Cloud Canvas into a purposeful and value-creating platform.

We expect the following functional goals for year 2023:

Number of Courses: We expect to have about 100 courses by the end of 2023.

Learner Reach: We expect to reach 30,000 student learners across 15 countries by the end of 2023. We are also actively working with teachers to equip them with creative learning skills and expect to reach 1,000 teachers by the end of 2023. Finally, we have a special reach out to individuals with disabilities and individuals from transgender community. We expect to reach 250 such individuals by the end of 2023. 

The Cloud Canvas is powered by a SAAS platform called Knorish. The platform combines a suite of tech solutions to provide a comprehensive set of services to creators. This includes:

• Identity Building engine that comprises websites, landing pages, mobile apps and connections for listing to enable affiliate marketing.

• Content Delivery engine that comprises course builder, assessment tool, and live recorded delivery (synchronous and asynchronous) options.

• Marketing Automation engine that comprises traffic connector, actionable intelligence, upsell and down-sell cross-sell funnels, mail and WhatsApp integration.

• Growth Ecosystem engine that includes digital marketing and follower monetization.

Scale

• Learner Reach: As of today, we have served ~8,500 learners, we expect to reach 30,000 learners across 15 countries by end of 2023. 

• Teacher Connect: In collaboration with CENTA and a few other teacher organizations, we expect to reach 1,000 Teachers and equip them with creative learning skills

• Social Impact: In collaboration with NABET, we have skilled 65 individuals with disabilities and individuals from transgender community. We expect to reach 250 such individuals by the end of 2023 and turn them into gig workers so they can live a life of self-reliance & dignity.

Our biggest challenge is to push the cause of gig employment. A lot of companies have begun to appreciate the power of gig workers but there are a lot of regulatory hurdles around benefits and compensation policies for gig workers. Hence, corporates are still reluctant to hire individuals as gig workforce. 

In addition, while there are lots of government grants for blue-collar workers, the extent of financial support to creators is very limited. We hope there will be more financing solutions for gig workers to launch their microentrepreneur initiatives.

We are working with the following organizations:

Adobe: After months of consistently emailing various officials of Adobe Asia, we managed to get the support of the Education Head of Adobe (Pan-Asia + Japan). The platform got approval to host their proprietary content for our community members. Further, with the traction gained by the platform and the increasing interest of our community in Adobe products, we managed to get an official sponsorship from Adobe. As a founder of this platform, I was recognized as the Global Adobe Ambassador representing India. We are now working on the final piece of this partnership with the intent to get discounted Adobe pricing for members of our learner community.

Knorish: Our underlying SaaS solution is a digital platform that enables hobbyists, professionals and niche experts to build, launch, market and sell online courses powered by their own knowledge and as an extension of their own brand. They are on a mission to change the way people learn by providing them all the tools they would need to convert their knowledge into a tangible and monetizable business that is sustainable and profitable, one that has the power to impact lives of millions.

Nabet: An NGO working for the inclusion and empowerment of the differently abled and the underprivileged. The map job profiles to specific skills and then work with learning platforms and skilling companies to train members of their community. Their objective is to make members of their community self-reliant and lead a life of dignity. 

CENTA (Partnership in-process): Centre for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA®) is making teaching an aspirational profession by assessing and certifying the competencies of teachers, connecting them to career opportunities, rewards and recognition, and supporting their professional development. CENTA® equally helps schools and systems attract, develop, grow and retain great teachers. This leads to a virtuous cycle where many more teachers are motivated to improve their competencies and aspiring teachers see this as a valid career option – therefore fundamentally improving the quality of education.

The Cloud Canvas platform is functioning live, there are learning pathways designed to create different career paths for the creators.

The platform focuses on three key tracks:

CREATION - A set of tools and techniques that allow young creatives to learn the power of digital design and create videos and other forms of digital content.

While most courses on the platform are free, we would like to start charging for gig job-focused learning bundles. This will be one-time fee for a job bundle, ranging from $10 per course bundle to $25 per course bundle.

COMMUNITY - The content creators are taught about building an engaged community and driving end-user engagement and subscriber base. The objective is to start building followership that can turn into deeply engaged cohorts. We expect this community to churn out gig-workers and we expect to take about 4% of annual compensation as a placement fee for these gig workers.

GROWTH & MONETIZATION - Once you create an engaged community, there is a structured path of growth hack that allows you to scale your viewership exponentially and create viral effects. This allows you to maximize your reach. Translating your creation into a sustained livelihood is an essential part of this platform. Hence, we introduce elements such as Customer Service Management, Data Analytics, Community Dashboards etc. We expect to charge a 4% commission on revenue made by our creators by selling products and services.

There are three aspects of revenue model:

• While most courses on the platform are free, we would like to start charging for certain course bundles, charge percentage take on securing gig jobs and commission fee on revenue generated by selling products and services. 

• This platform has been supported by Adobe, I am immensely thankful for their contributions till date. We would like to charge a small origination fee for license requests emerging from this platform to buy their products. We can extend similar model for other digital design products such as Canva.

• I have also received interest from a strategic creator economy player - Knorish, to take equity stake in the firm. They are keen to setup a commercial model to use this platform as their in-house knowledge academy for their creative users. With this, they will pay us a small fee for usage by Knorish users.

The platform is totally digital in nature and runs on minimal cost structures. A combination of the above revenue models should make this platform fully self-sufficient by the end of year 2024.