Anand R. Krishnan
Founder of Sapling Creations Private Limited
Anand R. Krishnan, a native of Malaparambu, Kozhikode. Founder of Sapling Creations Private Limited, a company that manufactures PowerPoint plugins, is operating in the Kozhikode Govt. Cyber Park.
Key Facts
Name: Anand R. Krishnan
Place: Malaparambu, Kozhikode
Title: Founder of Sapling Creations Pve Ltd
A company that manufactures PowerPoint plugins and tool kits used even by employees of Microsoft, which controls the global computer sector, is operating in the Kozhikode Govt. Cyber Park. Its name is Sapling Creations Private Limited founded by Anand R. Krishnan, a native of Malaparambu, Kozhikode
Anand’s story is about how he started freelance work as an extra income alongside his corporate job, but later turned it into his main job. While his father, a planter, had a tea garden, Anand named the company he planted and nurtured Sapling Creations, which means sapling.
Just like growing a garden from a sapling, Anand has worked hard to pave the way for Sapling’s growth. When Anand started Sapling at Highlight Business Park in 2018, there were only three employees, including his wife and IT engineer S. Anu and his friend K.E. Vinod. Today, Sapling has 35 employees and more than half a million users in 90 countries.
Anand completed his MA in Fine Arts in 2011 and joined Cognizant in Chennai as a user experience designer. After three years of work, he moved to an analytical company called Musigma in Bengaluru. In 2013, he started a web page design company with two friends as a freelancer, in addition to his job. But it failed.
Anand, who continued his UX design job at a corporate company, built a tool to solve some of the problems he was facing at work. He tried to sell it on Envato Graphic River, a marketplace website used by web designers and developers. The first three were rejected.
But the fourth one was accepted. He started earning a little income from it. A customer from the UK liked Anand’s work on Envacto and started giving him regular jobs. He also continued posting posters on Envacto.
Meanwhile, Anand realized that PowerPoint presentation templates were the best-selling products on Envacto. By 2014-15, he was starting to generate a good income from presentation templates. With the aim of marketing his product, he built his own website and continued selling through it.
When I realized that presentations had more potential, I started focusing more on presentations than poster making. For that, I created an exclusive website called Slide Bazaar. It was a huge success. After that, I developed a plug-in that provided presentation templates right in PowerPoint. When it could be installed right in PowerPoint, the number of users skyrocketed. The service was also extended to Excel.
Sapling Creations now provides services for both Google Slides and Canva. Today, Sapling Creations is ranked seventh in the world among companies providing such services. 30 of the world’s top 500 Fortune companies are users of Sapling Creations.
Sapling Creations has many applications, including Slide Kit, which can be used by teachers and those in the education sector, and Slide Chef Free, which can be used for free by students and the entrepreneurship generation. Sapling has 100,000 presentation templates in the market today. In a new phase of growth, Sapling Creations is focusing on developing tools for preparing slides using AI.
