Nothing’s more delightful to a bibliophile than the sight of a new book and the pleasure turns many folds if we are presented with the book. I, as a bibliophile, would love if I get to lay my hands on hundreds of book, given that they belong to the genre I am fond of. And visiting a book store or a library is out of question (they are miles away).
India has one of the highest population of educated youth who spend the highest time in the world, on average, 10.7 hours a week on reading and that creates an amazing opportunity for start-up such as Vivilio to provide more value to this demography.
Vivilio endeavors to create a community where the book lovers can discover great content created around books which strives to further impinge their interest in reading through interaction with like-minded readers and get in-depth information regarding any book which will enhance their book buying experience.
Why is Vivilio different?
The users will be able to create a profile, interact with other users, get curated reading recommendation and store their bookshelf (books they have read, are reading and the ones that they want to read) and eventually contribute content as well.
“We want to give a platform for readers to interact and also plan to open up the platform for authors and publishers for promoting their books pre and post launch”, says Priyanka, founder and CEO, Vivilio.
Currently, functionalities like book price comparison and book profiles are active on the site and Vivilio is focused on reaching out to their target group through content marketing.
Vivilio considers ‘aggregated’ data collected for over 2 million books over the last 3 years as its strength. Vivilio has segmented data into multiple data points like Book Description, details like ISBN, Publisher, Pages and Avg. Book ratings (aggregated from Amazon.in, Flipkart and Goodreads),which gives users comprehensive information on any book. Their current USP is the price comparison feature which compares the price of any book across 7 major e-commerce store in India, enabling the price-conscious Indian consumer to make an informed purchase.
Vivilio’s Journey so far
Priyanka’s tryst with book-based-business isn’t first, she started out as early as 2010 with her venture, IndiaBookStore (www.indiabookstore.net) which was a book price comparison engine. While building IndiaBookStore and interacting with the customers Priyanka realised that there is a huge growth of casual book readers in India but most of them are stuck with limited reading options (like Chetan Bhagat and pop-fiction novels) as they are not aware of a platform where they can get curated book recommendations and interact with other readers.
Vivilio as a product was conceptualised and started in the month of Apr 2015 with a 2 member software team. Within 3 months it has doubled its size to 6 and is looking to recruit another 2-3 members in next 1 month. Vivilio is growing 100% month on month in traffic and records 500 unique visitors, on average, per day.
“Our major push is in content marketing and for that we are generate 2-3 blog posts a day which gets published on all major social networks. We are currently experimenting with a lot of growth hacks for organic growth and have been able to grow our FB and Twitter page to almost 300 ‘organic’ subscribers in 2 months”, confides Priyanka.
Vivilio’s struggle story
“For Vivilio the main challenge was to create a product which is simple, efficient and fast. We are also working on micro-services model for our backend to organize the code better. This helps us breakdown big projects to small ones and do production releases faster”, expresses Priyanka.
“we realized that content is going to be a major focus to attract book readers, we started looking for writers who love books and writing. Each of our content piece goes through about 2-3 review cycles. And it gets a green signal only when the article title, content and images all look superbly well”, adds Priyanka.
Vivilio’s team
Vivilio, currently has 6 full time team members including 3 software developers, 1 marketing lead and an Editor along with an Intern and a board of 10 freelance writers. Animesh Jain, VP of 1mg (earlier known as Healthkart) continues to provide is advisory to the team.
Future plans
Vivilio aims to-
- Build targeted community of book lovers
- Provide a platform for authors to reach out to their audience through blogs and AMAs
- Provide a platform for the publishers for book launches, audience building and gauging reading trends.