NZ Entrepreneur off to Chile to launch company
Entrepreneur, Pravin Daryani has been selected to participate in the Start-Up Chile program. His start-up, ContentForest, was the only New Zealand company in the 101 winning entries, which were chosen from the 1509 companies that applied.
After coming to New Zealand 4 years ago, he has already made his mark on the entrepreneurial landscape. Growing up in India, the 24-year-old founder started working full time at the age of 16 and when asked about the drive to start his own enterprise, he said "I absolutely hated the jobs that I had, which fueled me to work on my own and do something where I could use my potential and do something I was passionate about.
Before building his current marketing agency ApeForest which formed the base of his new start-up, ContentForest, Pravin dabbled with several business ventures spending 14 hours a day in front of the computer.
"Listening to authors like Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, Seth Godin, Wayne Dyer and Dan Kennedy definitely kept me going and eventually lead to the formation of ApeForest," he says.
With an extended list of marketing services from product launches, email marketing, and media buying; ApeForest helps companies, in the particular those with digital products, with marketing strategies to increase their sales. Today Pravin and his team handle the marketing operations of several multi-million dollar companies.
Pravin adds with a chuckle, "I would have never expected myself getting into marketing as I was a very introverted kid and in the early days my hands started shaking heavily when I went for business meetings.
"Content is king when it comes to marketing, so ApeForest provided this service to its clients as well. While doing so manually, I realised we can only help so many people and this gave rise to my new startup ContentForest. The goal is to provide the same value to millions, so our whole focus is on productising.
ContentForest is a profile-based platform that connects quality content creators of media such as image, text, audio and videos with publishers who need this content. Pravin's new start-up helps experts to promote themselves and increase their exposure as well as allowing
publications to crowdsource content and implement content marketing strategies on their own. "ContentForest is the next step in the evolution of managing and creating content - it has the potential to be a game-changer," comments Ray Cheung, founder of Webappers.com.
Pravin and his co-founder Lena Steinmeier will go to Chile to work on ContentForest for six months starting mid-October. They will receive US$40k of equity-free seed capital, a 1-year work visa for Chile and access to local financial and social network as part of the Start-Up Chile program. Pravin adds "The environment promises to be buzzing with innovation and ideas, and we can't wait to connect with other international start ups and meet like-minded entrepreneurs.
For more information visit their site here.
