Pothi.com
One of my seniors at IITK came up with pothi.com. I wanted to take it up for further analysis for one of my projects in entrepreneurship courses. But we didn't and I want to tell why.
If I have to tell you in one line than it was because we could not convince ourselves of their B model.
Let me briefly explain what exactly they do. Pothi is a self publication website, so you can write a book and publish it there. You can also ask family and friends to buy it. It pulls out the role of the publisher completely, providing writers a chance to be more imaginative. The author can also go out, run a campaign to publicize the book (e book or hard copy) and sell it through the website. It also offers editing services, it doesn't offer marketing support though. It has no retail outlet. So, the only channel is new media. So all these writers (who in most cases either are not able to find an editor/ publication house endorsement or are doing it as hobby) come to the website, publish themselves and then finally, take the responsibility of selling its copies to their connections.
Initially, Pothi.com won a lot of publicity. It was all over the news and everyone seemed to know the founders. They won funding for their venture in a B school competition (this is why I always doubted competitions to be a good place to judge ideas, some times hype picks up and no one seems to be thinking hard about it).
Also note that the fees of editing are not usual, given these really high potential people are sitting down to do this work. There is no mention of staff, revenues etc. on the website, but founders invented the category in India and claim to have published 500 titles so far.
Unfortunately, I have serious doubts about their idea. I am sure that some other people have some other opinions about it.
But let me run a simplistic version of porter analysis for them, any high potential author (suppliers) will never come to them unless he dislikes money and also, in most cases, he isn't rich. The buyers of these books are coming through these suppliers, they aren't plenty either. Competition is practically zero, which is harmful for any new category. There are negligible barriers for new players, given that it needs printing, a website and frankly, little skill. There are no network effects in this. So please let me know where is the money in this?
The problem is that it seems more like a hobby than a venture and my suspicion is that the very design is such that it will never help many people and so it will never be big.
If I have to tell you in one line than it was because we could not convince ourselves of their B model.
Let me briefly explain what exactly they do. Pothi is a self publication website, so you can write a book and publish it there. You can also ask family and friends to buy it. It pulls out the role of the publisher completely, providing writers a chance to be more imaginative. The author can also go out, run a campaign to publicize the book (e book or hard copy) and sell it through the website. It also offers editing services, it doesn't offer marketing support though. It has no retail outlet. So, the only channel is new media. So all these writers (who in most cases either are not able to find an editor/ publication house endorsement or are doing it as hobby) come to the website, publish themselves and then finally, take the responsibility of selling its copies to their connections.
Initially, Pothi.com won a lot of publicity. It was all over the news and everyone seemed to know the founders. They won funding for their venture in a B school competition (this is why I always doubted competitions to be a good place to judge ideas, some times hype picks up and no one seems to be thinking hard about it).
Also note that the fees of editing are not usual, given these really high potential people are sitting down to do this work. There is no mention of staff, revenues etc. on the website, but founders invented the category in India and claim to have published 500 titles so far.
Unfortunately, I have serious doubts about their idea. I am sure that some other people have some other opinions about it.
But let me run a simplistic version of porter analysis for them, any high potential author (suppliers) will never come to them unless he dislikes money and also, in most cases, he isn't rich. The buyers of these books are coming through these suppliers, they aren't plenty either. Competition is practically zero, which is harmful for any new category. There are negligible barriers for new players, given that it needs printing, a website and frankly, little skill. There are no network effects in this. So please let me know where is the money in this?
The problem is that it seems more like a hobby than a venture and my suspicion is that the very design is such that it will never help many people and so it will never be big.
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