Walk the talk with an Entrepreneur – Abhaya Agarwal
In this ”Walk the Talk with an Entrepreneur” session i am presenting to you an interesting interview with Abhaya Agarwal (pic below) Cofounder of Pothi, a print on-demand and self publishing startup in India.
Firstly, could you please tell us about yourself.
I come from a typical middle class household where only 2 career goals exist – become an engineer or a doctor. I was good in Maths, so I chose to become an engineer. Once in engineering college, I figured out that I actually liked computers and programming a lot. One thing led to another and after graduating, I found myself working for a startup in the field of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). After working there for 2 years, I went for a PhD in language technologies. My idea was to work on something which I would be able to commercialize at the end of my PhD and CMU seemed like a good choice for that. However, once there, I realized that it would take 6-7 years for completing the program and that is too long a time frame to bet anything on. Hence I decided to come back to India and do right now what I wanted to do 6 years later.
How was the idea for Pothi born? Who are the key people at Pothi?
In 2007, as the signs of recessions were appearing, publishing industry was one of the worst hit. With e-books, Print-on-Demand, reducing ad revenue for News Papers, there were all the signs of massive changes coming in. It seemed to be where music industry had been few years ago. Both myself and Jaya, my co-founder, share a deep love for reading, writing and languages. In the idea of building a Print-on-Demand platform for India, opportunity and interest found a perfect combination.
Pothi.com was started by Myself and Jaya Jha. We have one more full time employee and a virtual team of freelancers for publishing services.
What is the USP of Pothi?
From an author’s point of view, Pothi.com provides an ideal platform for people looking for a Do-It-Yourself publishing option. They might be looking to publish a mass market book or something for private circulation, using Pothi.com they can be holding the book in their hand in a matter of 1 week! With Print-on-demand, there are no upfront investments required in printing. Moreover with only required number of copies being printed, there is no wastage from left over copies.
We now offer e-book publishing, provide tools for automated conversion of blogs to books which lowers the barrier to publishing even further.
From the readers’ point of view, on Pothi.com you can find books on niche topics which you will be hard pressed to find in other stores. Some foreign authors are using our services to provide cheaper Indian versions of their books. It makes it much faster and cheaper to get those books. Then there is the enormous wealth of older books, CC licensed books available online which you can print a copy through our service for your personal use.
Can you briefly explain our viewers your business model?
There are 2 parts to Pothi.com. First we provide publishing services like editing, typesetting, cover design to the authors. However these are not a prerequisite for publishing through Pothi.com
The second part is the print-on-demand platform. Once an order is received for a book, we print the required number of copies and send them to the buyer. We take a percentage of the royalty earned on each sale. Authors are free to decide the MRP subject to a minimum and royalties are computed accordingly.
What are the initial challenges you faced when starting Pothi.
When we started, we wanted to build an in-house POD infrastructure which meant learning everything about the book production. Different types of papers, all the nitty-gritties of printers, finding reliable binders. We did that for 5-6 months and actually achieved very good quality. However it left us little time to concentrate on the other aspects of business and required a lot of capital to take to next level. So we decided to partner with an established printing house for the same. Then there were usual problems in getting a payment gateway for the site and also finding a reliable accountant – something which we are still struggling with.
Finally, looking back to the time you started – what would you do differently now?
We would start looking to hire people a lot earlier then we did this time. Also we think we are not fast enough on execution. We would like to move much faster next time around.
Who would consider as your closest competitors?
Our closest competitors are not the other print-on-demand providers in India – there are few now. I think our closest competitors are many of the so called traditional publishing companies who are actually subsidy publishers. Many of our authors keep getting “publishing deals” where they are asked to buy few hundred copies of their book in lieu of getting published. The lure of getting a publisher’s name and seeing their book in book stores, still attracts a lot of first time authors to them. We have consciously tried to avoid going that route – we ask authors to not mention Pothi.com as a publisher and get their own ISBNs – since we do not think it is fair to either authors or to the readers.
Where do you see Pothi.com going forward? How do you plan on accomplishing your goals?
Today we have close to 600 print titles and 150+ e-books available through our store. On an average we are adding new titles at the rate of 1 per day. We would like to see this increase to tens and then hundreds of titles per day. That is when the scalable nature of our business will come into play. You simply cannot handle that sort of inflow in traditional publishing chain. Another direction in which we want to grow is to get more and more publisher to try and adopt POD as an integral part of their publishing strategy.
But we also realize that we cannot put cart before the horse. The technology adoption has to be driven by visible business gains for all the stake holders. There is still a lot of effort required in demonstrating those gains to the industry and to the individual authors. Our plan is to create some success stories which can act as landmarks for those looking to venture in to this brave new world. We also plan to forge more partnerships with other startups and companies in the industry and help create a ecosystem so that there is less friction to the adoption.
What is your definition of success, and has your company achieved it?
We will consider ourselves a success when we have become the default first choice of first time authors in India and when we have become the default choice of all independent and small publishers in India. While we have had a good start, there is still a long road to walk. We are definitely not there yet.
What part of entrepreneurship you love? What do you dislike?
The best part is of course the total freedom to try and validate your ideas quickly. But even more than that, I like the feeling of being an employer the most. Although we have only employed 1-2 people full time till now 
The bad part for me is that you spent some of the best years of your life stuck in a office working your ass off 24×7. While it is great, I personally love to travel (one of the reasons I wanted to become a prof – you get to travel to all the exotic places at the cost of your university). I would have liked to spend this time traveling and seeing the world. But I guess, you cannot have all your wishes granted at the same time.
Are you planning to raise Venture capital?
We are not actively looking currently but are open to talking.
What advice do you have for small business entrepreneurs?
Well, I doubt I have any thing new to say. My learning from running Pothi.com for 2 years has been that customers and cash-flow are the 2 things you should always pay heed to. Always assume that everything will take twice as long as it should but make sure that your customers don’t have to make the same assumption about you. In todays’ world of instant gratification, speed makes a hell lot of difference.
-Hitesh, vcBytes.com
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