Pune Inc: This Class 10 passout designs new ways to expand his online graphic biz industry

The company’s success paved the way for Bhagat to set up a second startup, Doographics, which targets amateurs. Its online graphic designs enable them to create works that look professional but in less time and money. In 2024, the company is upgrading its technology by integrating AI in its designs.

What makes Bhagat an unlikely entrepreneur is that he is the son of agricultural labourers from Beed. Bhagat’s formal education ended in Class X, unless one counts the training as a pump operator-cum-mechanic in 2009 from ITI, which got him a job that brought in around Rs 4,000 per month.

Born into hardship

“In families like mine, where there is barely enough to eat and no permanent roof over our heads, it is unthinkable to plan higher education,” he says. It was Bhagat’s second job, as an office boy in a guest house of Infosys in Hinjewadi, Phase II that he saw that people working at the computer had a very different lifestyle.

What makes Dadasaheb Bhagat an unlikely entrepreneur is that he is the son of agricultural labourers from Beed.

Bhagat wanted to learn computers as he was told that there was a demand for designers. “From childhood, I have been a good artist. When my mother and father went out to cut sugarcane, I used to stay in school. There was an art teacher living next door to the school, who taught me drawing,” he says.

During the day, he began to study design at an institute in Pune, which no longer exists, and worked at the guest house at night. “Within a year, I got a job in design. I worked with video game characters in studios in Mumbai and Hyderabad. It was in Hyderabad that I found out about a course in programming languages for Rs 2,000, and enrolled in it,” he says. Software fascinated me and, during my free time, I used to make plug-ins to solve the problems of repetitive work, among others,” he shares.

In design, a person’s quality depends on how much work they have done. Bhagat could sit for 15 hours at a stretch, making a single design. “In one year, I got the experience of three or four years,” he says.

By the time he was at his last job, as a VFX supervisor in Pune, Bhagat was earning Rs 38,000 per month.

“I bought a bike and started showing off in my village. It resulted in an accident that confined me to my bed. But, I am unable to be inactive. I created some designs and uploaded them on Envato, an online resource for graphics, photographs and web and video templates,” he says.

Soon, he realised that these designs were earning him more than his Rs 38,000 per month salary. He decided to take a leap of faith— to quit his job and start ‘Ninthmotion’.

Looking forward

Between 2018 and 2020, Ninthmotion created a solid foundation of clients that ensures increasing year-on-year revenues. “Some of our clients said that they did not have a design team and asked us to customise designs for them. This gave us an idea to start an online platform where a customer could easily edit the design and make their own art,” says Bhagat. Called Doographics, the new company had to face the first hurdle in the form of the lockdown.

With his Pune office closed, Bhagat went back to Beed. Since the world was in isolation, he and a team of six hitched tents on a nearby hill, which had strong internet connectivity due to the presence of a couple of towers. They bathed in a pond, cooked their own food or received tiffin from home. It was here, in the wilderness, that Doographics was born.

Doographics is bringing an Indian touch to designs. Among its biggest customer base are families who are downloading the designs to create online wedding cards. It also provides snapchat fillers, LinkedIn covers, personalised biodata templates, logos and branding material for advertising and designs for Ganpati festival and Diwali, among others.

How does Doographic hope to combat competition from Canva, the popular online graphic design tool? “Canva has simple designs while Adobe is high-end and suitable for hardcore designers. What we are doing is allow amateurs to attempt what Adobe can do in an easy way. We are positioning Doographics between Canva and Adobe,” says Bhagat.

Among those who are cheering for Bhagat is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In his Mann ki Baat speech in September 2020, the Prime Minister said, “Unfettered by the Covid lockdown, 29-year-old Dadasaheb Bhagat starts a startup in a cattle shed from his hometown in Beed, Maharashtra. The software, called Doographics, allows the user to produce creatives and designs with an easy drag-and-drop interface.”