This hearing-impaired entrepreneur is on a mission to empower gig economy

Sanjay Nediyara went through a great deal of hardship before setting up Sieve, a platform for freelancers to work as a team despite separated by locations

That Kerala is fast becoming a start-up hub is pretty much known by now. However, not many entrepreneurs from God’s own country, as the state is known as, have been able to achieve what Sanjay Nediyara has, despite his physical inability.

Sieve, the start-up founded by this hearing-impaired entrepreneur, last month attracted an investment from Biz Stone, a co-founder of social networking giant Twitter. It was certainly a moment of pride for Nediyara, who has been building the business from scratch against all odds. More than the investment, Nediyara says, he now has access to someone who has transformed the way people communicate in the era of internet, in order to build his dream venture.

"The past few months of our journey have been very tough. Biz Stone transformed how people communicate in the world. Now with Biz on board as investor and advisor, we are transforming the way people work across the world," wrote Nediyara.

“I have used Sieve's product as a freelancer. As an Angel, I consider the person first and the product second. I find that Sanjay is a dedicated, empathetic and extremely hardworking individual,” says Stone.

Founded in 2016, Sieve is a complete platform for freelancers and agencies that provide infrastructure such as websites, digital signatures and even invoicing and payment management. “Sieve is a complete platform for running a freelance business without paying a percentage of earnings. We’ve built every tool needed to run a freelancing business faster and more efficiently — Client on-boarding, requirement collection, NDAs, estimations, agreements, invoicing and payments in one place,” says Nediyara, who is also the CEO of the company.

Hardships that shaped the man

While pursuing engineering at the Government Engineering College in Thrissur, Kerala, Nediyara got infected with measles and lost his hearing. He had to abandon his studies, and got into a heavy state of depression. The best thing before him then was to commit suicide, he later on wrote in Medium. But he couldn't, for two reasons. First, his parents of whom he is the only child, and second, the nagging thought that if he ended life as a failure, he would remain a failure for eternity. Nediyara then thought of rebuilding his life, but it was not easy, as lost several job opportunities due to his impairment.

Eventually in 2012, Nediyara joined a Kochi-based company called Cyberprism at a monthly salary of $120 (about Rs 8,500 at today’s exchange rate) as an Android developer. The position provided him with one of the greatest learning opportunities, he claims. In November 2012, he became the director of Heuristics Technosol, a boutique mobile application development company in Kochi, and in 2014 he joined MobME Wireless Solutions.

The online world opened up larger avenues for Nediyara, to get in touch with eminent people across the world and exchange ideas and knowledge. In 2013, he took up the role of a Community Manager for Google Developer Group, a group of enthusiast developers who gather to share knowledge. Prior to this, he also got attracted to the start-up world and co-founded Kerala Start-ups, an initiative supported by Technopark TBI, Thiruvananthapuram and Startup Village in Kochi, in 2012. During those days, he also developed an app on Facebook that allows users to share famous quotes.

In 2015, he left a full-time job and got a full scholarship at Draper University, where he met and interacted with several stalwarts and mentors, such as Tim Draper, the billionaire investor who has invested in companies like Tesla and eBay, and Phil Libin, founder of Evernote. While he received job offers from companies like Facebook, Nediyara’s heart was elsewhere. Eventually, he decided to build his own start-up in 2016. In 2018, Nediyara got selected as one of the Forbes fellows. He bagged the Reach Award instituted by the Eric Weihenmayer Foundation in the US and was also invited by Google to attend its largest developer conference Google IO, as a guest.

Setting up Sieve

"I believe in a future where everyone can work from anywhere in the world at one’s own comfort, where technology enables us to collaborate with the best people across the globe and get things done. This is why we are building Sieve," says Nediyara whose other investor is Friends of Oorjja, an ecosystem for empowering differently-abled community.

“Think of Sieve as a mega service that allows other people to hook up to infrastructure on-demand and build their own agency, without incurring the kind of expenses, or leaning on the kind of expertise traditionally required for setting up such a business."

What makes Sieve different is that it is trying to build something for the future, rather than solving the current day problems. "That’s like trying to design San Francisco to better accommodate horses after cars were available," says Nediyara. "We want to design the ideal way for a knowledge worker to work on the internet and then stitch a company together out of that worker, amplified, rather than starting with a 17th century organisational model for water-loom operators and try to make it a bit more effective at routing email between UX consultants."

The company is currently charging a monthly fee that ranges from $4 to $50 a month from its users. However, Nediyara refused to divulge details on the number of clients, or the company's financials and valuation.

Sieve if is currently operating in the US and plans to expand to Europe soon. It is introducing inter-country payment routing, complete incorporation of companies online, background checks and verification for freelancers in the upcoming quarters.