Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Woodpie- A startup story

Woodpie is your one stop destination for finding what to read next. Here you discover what everyone around you is reading. You find authentic book recommendations from people just like you, and no marketing noise. You can share your own recommendations too. And that's not all, you can also exchange books and read your next favorite book free.

Anuradha Bajpai and her husband Manoj Jindal had no clue that their lives were about to be changed when they paid a regular visit to a bookstore in Bengaluru. The title of a book caught the couple’s attention- ‘Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps’. “The title was so interesting. But we were not sure if the book was good. Also, we had already read ‘Men are from Mars and women are from Venus’. So we decided not to buy it,” Anuradha recalls. By an amazing coincidence, the two technology professionals happened to see the same book again at a neighbor’s house, a day after their bookstore visit. “They told us it was a really good and funny read, and strongly recommended it to us,” Anuradha says. At that point they realized how much a recommendation by a friend can help you decide to read or buy a book. “We may not buy a book even after reading hundreds of online reviews because you don’t know how many of those reviews are genuine. But you will go for a book if your friend, who has similar interests, recommends a book. This led us to launch a social networking platform where friends could discuss and recommend books,” says Anuradha.
She was then working with Infosys and Manoj with McAfee. She quit her job to start the venture, while Manoj continued to work at McAfee to ensure they had some income coming in. In late 2010, they launched the venture that they called Woodpie.


The journey was not easy. They were on a limited budget. Both were backend coders, so they had to outsource the frontend design. But the outsource design did not look good. There were bad reviews about the design when they released a private version for friends in 2011 and a beta version for invited authors and reviewers in 2012. So Anuradha took a brave decision- to learn and do frontend coding herself. “I learned it when I was carrying our baby,” she recalls. The couple also had to move to the US around that time because Manoj had got a transfer to McAfee’s US office. “We thought it would be good for Woodpie too as it’s a global concept,” she says. The platform Anuradha designed turned out to be incredibly good for Woodpie. User numbers rose dramatically. But it was still tough on Anuradha. “I used to wake up at 4am and modify the platform based on users’ feedback. I had to run to our daughter whenever she woke up. We couldn’t afford a maid and so I had to cook before Manoj left for office at 8 am. It would have been funny to see me standing in the kitchen, holding baby in one hand and coding with the other hand,” she says. In 2014, Savie Karnel, a former journalist, joined Woodpie as a founding member. She helped Anuradha and Manoj sharpen the idea and understand the requirements of readers.


Today, Woodpie has over 10,000 users from 321 Indian cities, 35 US cities and other countries in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. The startup was recently selected for the accelerator programme of Ingram, a US book publishing company. Woodpie was one among six selected and the only startup from India. Ingram’s programme is one of the nine tech hubs in Google’s entrepreneurship network in North America. The programme also includes $30,000 in funding from Ingram Content Group Ventures. 

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