The Start-up Story of Sahil and DeskAway

Founded in 2005, India-based DeskAway is an online platform that helps businesses to organize, manage, and track their projects collaboratively.

Facing intense competition from services like Basecamp and Huddle, founder Sahil Parikh explained that DeskAway was created with two simple ideas in mind: simplicity and power.

“This is our mantra. Keep things simple yet pack enough power under the hood,” said Sahil.

DeskAway is positioned between the simple project tools and complex project management software which meets the needs of small business and teams within larger organizations. Its list of clients includes ING, McGill, The City of Calgary, and DallasNews. DeskAway was also featured by The New York Times, CNBC, Mashable and VentureBeat.

The Start

Sahil was educated in the U.S and returned to India in 2005. Back then, India didn’t have too many service companies around and gave the world the impression that it was a low-cost country that was good for outsourcing work. Sahil disagreed with this and wanted to make a change.

“When I moved back to India in 2005, there were just too many service companies floating around. Plus I never liked, and completely disagreed with what people abroad thought of India: a low-cost service country, perfect for off-shoring and incapable of building a quality product unless directed from abroad.”

“This fueled my desire to grow a product-based software business that had the potential to affect tens of thousands of small businesses and teams globally.”

The ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) delivery model had not arrived in India back then. Sahil thought it was just a matter of time before India adopted SaaS. He saw great potential in creating a SaaS-based offering which would provide more value than the products on the market at that time.

It turned out he was right. DeskAway went on to conquer the market by providing a SaaS model with real-time changes and updates for project management.

“Going back in time, Project Management 1.0 was all about planning, getting schedules right, and setting up the project with nice looking charts and graphs. Today, with dispersed teams, always-online gadgets, and sophisticated online technology, Project Management 2.0 is about people, conversations, relationships, notifications, sharing, execution, and collaboration,” said Sahil.

Synage, Sahil, and the Future

Before DeskAway was formed, Sahil and his wife founded Synage in 2005, a service company which funded most of the development of DeskAway. By 2007, Synage had transformed itself into a web company that delivers software as a service (SaaS) over the internet to a global audience.