HaikuJam creators launch Inspo, an industry-first search engine for Inspiration

Struggling at the brainstorm session to crack your next Cannes Lions-worthy creative campaign idea? Or perhaps languishing at home during lockdowns and hitting blocks over your freelance article? Inspo is here to make the onset of creative processes less intimidating, more effective and fun. The first-of-its-kind search engine for inspiration has been designed to enrich creative thinking for freelancers, brands and creative agencies. Set to create a stir on May 27, 2021, the AI-human hybrid tool can generate GPT-3 thought-starters in a jiffy and gather relevant inspiration from sources across the web on any topic, for content creation, campaigns, ads, moment marketing, brainstorms, pitching or any other creative project.

Conceived and conceptualised by Dhrupad Karwa and Andrew Leung – founders of the HaikuJAM social writing mobile game that grew to over 1M users from 144 countries who published 100M lines of collaborative poetry –  Inspo has been built with a singular objective, to inspire on tap. The existing creative ecosystem comprises tools majorly focusing around the latter stages of a creative process, i.e. execution, monitoring, distribution, monetisation and so on. However, there has been no significant platform so far to assist with ideation, brainstorming and gathering inspiration, which are crucial for any creative workstream. Creative thinkers have thus had to rely on Google which fundamentally was designed to ‘inform’ but not ‘inspire’. With the current solutions falling short, Inspo was born with the purpose of delivering inspiration at its core.

All it takes is a simple keyword search (e.g. coffee, motorcycle, fitness, etc.) or by clicking on an event or trend on Inspo’s Inspiration Calendar (e.g. World Environment Day, #LockdownRecipes, etc.). The tool generates relevant thought-starters (using GPT-3 combined with creative associations from HaikuJAM) which can be further contextualised for a brand or topic by applying AI Lenses (e.g. coffee inspiration for Netflix). It also surfaces inspiration from cultural sources across the web, such as Goodreads, Twitter, Reddit, 9GAG, Creative Blogs, Unsplash, Metrolyrics and lots more. Additionally, Inspo offers sentiment analysis and unearths non-intuitive associations from collaborative poems written by Millennials on HaikuJAM. Users can save their favourite inspiration to “Inspiration Boards” and can even turn them into visual creatives, through Inspo’s integration with the graphic designing platform, Canva.

Inspo has been in private beta over the past year and has already helped inspire creative thinkers around the world, at organisations such as Dentsu, Royal Enfield, Jio, Tinder and Ogilvy as well as a few hundred individual freelancers. CEO and Founder, Dhrupad Karwa has been actively ‘building in public’, sharing the startup journey and reflecting on the nature of inspiration via his personal Twitter account. With an ambition to bring Inspo to as many people as possible, he and his 15-person remote team have opted for a freemium business model, thus allowing anyone to experience the product and inherently inspirational interface. And by simply sparing USD 10 per month, which is the equivalent of a pizza, users can get access to unlimited content on any topic.

Commenting on the launch of the novel tool, Dhrupad said, “Inspiration is one of the most important yet misunderstood ingredients in the creative process. Though intangible in nature, its consequences could not be more real. In a world that demands around-the-clock creative thinking but has a limited supply of the inspiration required to fuel it, lacklustre work, burnout and creative blocks are inevitable. Inspo is here to ensure that the supply of actionable inspiration never runs out and our creative tanks are always full.”

Having already raised seed funding for HaikuJAM and Inspo from Lightbox Ventures, Social Capital and more, the team is planning to raise a Series A investment in Q4 of 2021.  Following the launch, Inspo will be extending its vision of human-AI hybrid inspiration in the form of the “Inspirer Community” – where human creative thinkers can publish inspiration around briefs on Inspo and earn positive social currency; and Inspiration Board Collaboration – where teams can build and brainstorm on Inspiration Boards together.

Operating at the intersection of AI and human creativity, Inspo aspires to become the go-to-platform that supports people at the beginning of creative processes and help  usher in a world where 7.8 billion people think inspired.