KajKey is a freelance marketplace based in Dhaka that connects businesses and individuals with freelancers. KajKey claims to be the first Bengali language freelancing platform in Bangladesh. The creation story of KajKey is quite similar to how many of the successful startups such as Slack, Flickr, etc were created - serendipitously stumbling upon a problem that you have while doing something else and then making a decision to solve it.
In short, KajKey founders originally started with an animation studio called EndingScene.com. As the studio grew, they came across a serious challenge of finding well-skilled people. They tried a few things and then decided to use a freelancer model, which eventually led to the launching of KajKey.
In an interview with Future Startup, published in July 2019, Mr. Sabbir Ahmed explained how KajKey was founded. Below is a short version of the story. You may read the full interview here.
My entrepreneurship journey started with EndingScene.com, an animation studio. Currently, I am trying to build a freelancing marketplace which is known as KajKey.com with my business partner Ahsan Ahmed in Bangladesh.
Since we started the EndingScene Studio, an animation firm, we started receiving lots of requests for animated video content. But we did not have that many in-house animators and resources who could make videos for our clients. It was a struggle for us to find people to meet the demands that we’re getting. That let us to think really hard to find sustainable ways to find more human resources to fulfill the demand side. That’s how our ideas about how we can bring the two parties, clients and animators, on one platform came into being.
We formally launched KajKey.com in October 2018. But we had already been testing our MVP using Google sheet. We used to hire freelance writers using the google form and sheet to write blogs for our animation firm. We worked with multiple freelance writers for our in-house works, which helped us to understand how freelancers work. Through the process, we tried to understand the entire platform ourselves by outsourcing our own work before opening the platform up for others.
When we were working on KajKey.com, we had a natural advantage since EndingScene was doing well and we already had some contacts with foreign investors for our animation firm. By the time, we were already used to with things like company formation, pitching investors and putting together foreign entities, etc.
Once we decided to tinker with KajKey, we shared the pitch with our EndingScene Investors. They suggested us to check the response for the freelancing platform for a few months. We did not have a tech team or a developer at the time. We neither had the investment that we could use to hire a tech team to build the platform. I basically took the responsibility of developing our website and put together the platform. That’s how we started the journey of KajKey.com.
KajKey is a freelancing marketplace that connects individuals and companies who want to outsource their projects with freelancers. We are the first freelancing platform in Bangladesh to launch a platform in Bengali where anyone can easily post their work and hire a freelancer to get it done.
At this moment we have 50,000+ registered users, and more than 1000 jobs are open for bids. Freelancers bid for these works.
KajKey is a team of 30 people consisting of teams across operations, tech, marketing, and customer care. Our customer care team provides dedicated support to our clients and freelancers.
This is an excerpt from our interview with KajKey Founder and Managing Director, Sabbir Ahmed. To know the rest of KajKey story and how it has come to where it is today, you could read our in-depth interview with KajKey Founder and Managing Director, Sabbir Ahmed here.
