Rooftop is an app based ed-tech platform connecting art lovers and artists through co-curricular engaging experiences. The two-year-old company offers workshops, courses, and education driven content about India’s traditional and folk art.
Kartik Gaggar started Rooftop in 2021 when he noticed the drift caused between art lovers and on-ground art experiences due to the pandemic. He realized transitioning to a virtual medium offering live workshops with local expert artists and veteran award-winning artists would not just help keep the art and its history alive but would also help many others experience and learn the art forms.
Founder and CEO of the company Gaggar told Entrackr, “Visual art forms across India are untapped and more or less unstructured. People living the fast-paced life want to consume creative things and for this we need to have a standardized platform where consumption can be friendly, and the experience will help people connect with others.”
Currently the community has on boarded over 3500 artists from about 162 towns in India. The platform offers around 30 different visual art forms that can be learnt through virtual live art workshops and maestro courses. The workshops are taken by local expert artists and are run through a course of a couple of days while the maestro courses are pre-recorded by award-winning artists providing in-depth knowledge about a particular art form. These courses last for a couple of months and are currently available in Hindi and English. Master artists who create the course receive royalty against the sale of their respective courses.Â
The platform has started its prototype of offline classes. The time for the maestro courses would be divided into online and offline. The platform has started working with a few local art classes/studios to conduct its offline classes in transitioning the app from completely online to hybrid.
Rooftop has two main revenue models- subscription model and direct payout model. In the subscription model weekly, monthly, and yearly subscriptions are available and the artists get paid a certain fee for each workshop conducted. The direct payout method is available mostly for the maestro courses, where the users have an option of completing the course at their own pace. The users can also choose a 30-minute exclusive session with a master artist through this method.
The platform saw over 8000 active users on Android and around 190 active iOS users in March this year. It recorded over 11,000 downloads on Android and around 500 downloads on iOS during the same time.
Along with expanding the offline classes, the bootstrapped company plans on adding 40 more visual art forms in another year’s time.
The global art app market showed a CAGR of 8.2% from 2018 to 2022. This number is expected to grow to 12.4% by 2033. The revenue share of the market is expected to grow to $1,867.7 million by 2033. The South Asia and Pacific region recorded a market share of 17.2% in 2022.
