Exly: Empowering creators to build businesses

EXLY is a new-age platform that offers a helping hand to creators to launch, manage, and grow their businesses. “It’s a one-stop solution empowering professionals to fuel their passion and build a strong online presence,” says Sidharth Rawat, co-founder, Exly. Previously known as MyScoot, it was conceptualised and established by Suyash Sinha, Sidharth Rawat, Akhil Tripathi, along with other founding team members—Swati Singh, Tanveer Chawla, and Yash Gupta. The core idea behind this venture is to empower skilled creators and professionals to exploit their unique talents and create full-time business and employment opportunities.

“While the pandemic has hit the world hard and got people to rethink their ways of life, and many were hit financially, it has also been a great enabler of a creator economy and has taken it up a notch,” says Rawat. Some of these people were using our platform (MyScoot) to make ends meet. We spoke with more than 100 such creators, understood their problems, and decided to build a platform that helps them quickly go online and effectively manage their business.”

Exly helps its ‘Exlypreneurs’ to create beautiful websites in less than five minutes, effectively manage their business via robust CRM that captures, segments and engages the leads, facilitates seamless payments, analyses their traffic and performance, and a complete growth marketing suite to run email marketing, early-bird offers and discount codes to smartly grow. According to Rawat, traditional platforms are not suited for monetising and creating sustainable livelihoods for creators and professionals. It is an unfair dynamic where creators rent audiences from big tech platforms and are at the mercy of their algorithms that change every now and then. For all the hard work they end up doing, they get paid pennies for it, if they get paid at all.

“Creators need to own their own community on the internet,” says Rawat. “Giving creators ownership (both economic and political) can address a lot of issues around creator mental health, burnout, and anxiety around income instability. Being creator-friendly stems from ownership. And this is exactly what we want to achieve at Exly,” he says, adding, “Exly has created an effective and easy to use platform, where professionals can directly monetise their expertise while carving a brand identity for themselves.”

In the last 10 months, creators have earned more than $1 million using the Exly platform. “Within three months of their operations, creators on the platform have grown 3X on an average, and in select cases, we have seen creator’s growing more than 10X using the platform and leaving their full-time jobs to pursue their passion,” he informs.

Exly is a Y-Combinator startup (2019 batch) and had raised $1.7 million from VC fund Mayfield Partners and renowned angel investors like Kunal Shah (founder Cred, ex-founder Freecharge), Maninder Gulati (global chief strategy officer at OYO), among others.

According to Rawat, domain expertise of creators in today’s age extends to diverse verticals like health and wellness, astrology and tarot card readers, bakers, fashion & lifestyle experts, finance coaches, and many others who want to monetise their passion. “Our vision is to empower these creators and professionals to become entrepreneurs by providing them with the best-in-class platform and services to launch, manage and grow their business online,” he adds.