I raised couple of questions in my earlier review of Pothi – whether they would like to create a brand of their own or partner with stores, are they targeting serious authors or casual ones (like bloggers etc).
So, here is a quick QnA with Jaya Jha and Abhaya Agarwal, co-founders:
What’s your target market?
Writers and Readers. Yes – it is that simplistic for us. It is likely that we’ll see this model becoming more successful with either certain niche kind of content or with certain kind of writers. But right now, we are not putting our bets on one or the other. The market is nascent, awareness is low and hence these are the broad challenges we need to tackle right now.
What’s your funding status? Are you looking to raise funds?
We are currently bootstrapping with small amount of funding from friends. We are certainly looking for funding as funding would help us move at a much faster rate that we currently are able to and we are talking to some VCs. But right now our priority is to put the basics in place. So, we are not that aggressive on this front for next few months. Following up with VCs taken up a lot of time, which we can use for the company right now. We’d highly welcome indivdual investors (as opposed to investment firms),
who see the potential in the idea, identify with our passion for books and are willing to put in some money.
Do you see a huge opportunity in India? What do you think can potentially tip the market?
India is one of those rare countries, where print medium is growing. We certainly see a huge potential here. It is difficult to pin-point one thing that would really tip the market, but we see big latent opportunity with Indian Language writing and invite all the Indian Language authors to give self publishing and Pothi.com a try.
What’s your strategy in terms of acquiring customers – partnering with a content player ? or market on your own?
Partnering with a content player is not out; in fact we’d certainly do that. But our mainstay is going to build a community of authors and readers on Pothi.com, for which we will market on our own. The idea is to create an ecosystem that promotes book publishing and reading. The next set of features we will release on our site would be aimed at making it easier to prepare a book for the author and at helping readers decide which books they want to buy.
What questions do you have for Pothi founders?
Leave that in comment section and I’ll ask them to reply here.
tags: pothi, print-on-demand
What is their source of competitive advantage?
It would be interesting to see how effectively they handle their back end operations and cost structures.
interesting, just want to know, if someone wants to publish the book, why dont they publish as softcopy , they may have major reach ! why print on paper ?
-Raxit
Do you guys plan to support all the languages?
Hi Jaya and Abhaya,
This is Gautam from Ammas.com.I came across your site and couple of Ideas came up to further enhance your site awareness.
Lets talk when best convenient to understand,what best we can bring to the table.
Thanks & have a nice day.
Warm Regards,
Gautam Thadani
Head – Ad Sales & Affiliation
gautam@ammas.com
Ammas Ltd (www.ammas.com)
Phone (India): +91-9923106182
Jaya and Abhaya:
Very neat website and simple concept; good execution too, so far.
I have a crib about the cost structure of purchase.
1. I live in Delhi; you are making me pay Rs 51 per book for shipment. That’s a 33% addition to a Rs 150/- purchase.
2. Credit card/ paypal transactions add another Rs 15/- to the cost.
Finally, I grew up in Calcutta where the “little magazines” were a movement on College Street. A big reason for anyone purchasing any of the “little magazines” was their desire to help budding authors. So, a little more content on the previews on your website may not be out of order. After all, we do go to a bookstore and browse a bit before buying. Especially if the author is unknown.
All the best.
Yes Pothi founders you have to do something with costing .and based on that your pricing
Hi …..
This is Manadhii…..interesting, just want to know, if someone wants to publish the book, why dont they publish as softcopy , they may have major reach ! why print on paper ?
@raxit, @manadhii > so anyone who wants to read, first needs to spend 20k on a computer or 40k on a laptop? one needs to carry devices to the loo, in the train, beach, holiday spot just to be able to read?
softcopy means nothing to 80% of the population.
if saving paper is your intention then it’s a whole different story.
hi this is muggulu..It would be interesting to see how effectively they handle their back end operations and cost structures.http//:www.kolamdesigns.com