If you don’t succeed at first, try, try again. Amit Verma of DigitUp certainly follows this maxim.
A chemical processes engineer by training, with his last position in that industry at chemical company Hexion’s European headquarters, and despite not having a formal IT background, Verma started DigitUp in 2019. With the IT services and consulting company having since made a name for itself in working out innovative IT solutions and systems processes for a number of brands, including but not limited to website design and maintenance as well as SEO indexing, Verma says DigitUp is just getting started.
Losing his position at Hexion after the company went through a financial crisis and series of company-wide layoffs, Verma found himself at a crossroads, between continuing as an engineer, getting an MBA, or starting his own business back in India. Choosing the last, and possibly the toughest option, he started an experiential company for clients.
After helping around 25 brands curate experiences for their clients, Verma found that he had reached the time limit he had set himself for the start-up to reach critical mass, and he moved on from the company. However, like any good processes engineer, he had systems in place for every redundancy.
“I had known there’s an extremely high possibility of failure in any start-up, and so I was prepared for when I left the experiential company and reached out to brands for project management and consultancies, and because I had been exposed to the IT side of operations in the previous venture I could act as the conduit between the big enterprise service providers and the brands, because often they couldn’t communicate effectively with each other,” says Verma, adding that this further helped his knowledge across the entire domain of website and systems operations, even as he moved from smaller to larger brands.
“I then began to help Knorr with operations, and created processes that they found extremely helpful, and hadn’t been able to get from the large players. And because as one gives, so one receives, I told them I would like to become their vendor,” explains Verma, reminiscing about the birth of DigitUp. He then proceeded to do that, setting up DigitUp in late 2019 and building his team. And word started to spread.
The company develops innovative and creative products and services that provide value to its customers. Among a suite of services, Data Analytics, Machine Learning and AI are the company’s key focus areas. They also provide web design and development, tailor made applications, e-commerce solutions, Integration, managed hosting and internet portal management.
“Since then, we have built up a lot of expertise across the entire IT and website services segment and also develop innovative products and solutions for brands across their operations. We design the entire site architecture and maintain it for them, and provide them with insights on how we can make it even better, even as we are creating new tools and solutions for our clients, with our latest focus being on using Machine Learning to help drive and improve SEO rankings,” says Verma.
And while noting that the amount of mobile to desktop usage favours the former in a mobile-first market like India, Verma points that there hasn’t been, nor likely to be in the near future, a further decline in desktop usage, which currently at around 30%. “Most big purchases are done over the laptop and not your phone, and most people are still comfortable on desktop websites. Larger companies and enterprises exclusively work on desktops, so desktop usage isn’t going anywhere.”
Looking forward, Verma shared, “We are in talks with a major e-commerce site, one of the largest private national banks, and other clients whose names I can’t yet reveal in creating some truly innovative proof of concepts. We have built all global sites for Lipton, and are working on scaling up our competencies across the entire website experience for brands, and while we have been catering mostly to enterprise and b2b players till now, we’ll begin catering to b2c players in the coming months.”
Performance marketing is another area DigitUp is exploring, as Verma says the team has gained a lot of expertise in the area over the last four years, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle, or rather, architecture that the company is building for brands. “We are developing performance marketing and measurement tools that we plan to offer to clients, but one can’t only depend on performance marketing, and we want our clients to grow organically as we help them deliver the best customer experiences across their websites.”
