For the love of books

I just came across this article “In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation” in New York Times and could not help but agree with most of the points mentioned there. Many articles have been written before on this subject, where they compare our investor environment with that of the Silicon Valley. However, most of them miss out on one crucial aspect. It is not just the change of the environment with more incubators for startups that is required or the need for the Government to make bureaucracy less tiresome but it is our mindset that has to change.

We, Indians, are highly risk-averse people. Right from our childhood our upbringing is such that parents encourage us to dream of becoming doctors and engineers so that our life is set. You may eventually branch out to some other field but it is so. Further, our educational system is oriented more towards rote-learning, and testing us on facts rather than on concepts, and forget the whole  personality development part of it.

Even in IITs and IIMs exams are such that if you do not study the whole semester but on the last day, you can get through. Very few professors actually test you on your clarity of concepts, who encourage you to apply yourself. Further, so much importance is paid to hard-core numerical subjects that softer skill-based courses are so often ignored. Just go to any IIM and you can see for yourself – students toiling under the burden of 8-9 finance electives in their second year just to get that “one” course, which will be instrumental in making or breaking their future in an I-bank.

And what do they miss out on? Courses like Strategic Business Negotiation, Advanced Oral Communication, and Entrepreneurship, etc. I would say these were probably the best courses I had taken during my MBA. It is these HR courses that eventually help you in your professional and personal life.

As a community, we Indians generally get married latest by 28-29 years of age. And with marriage comes responsibility and pressure to be earning well enough to support our family. This trend is something totally missing in the West.

In Israel, which is a great hub for entrepreneurship – the second-largest after the US in LifeSciences, people are drafted into the army and when they are released they have a whole world of opportunity lying out there in open. In the US, it is not uncommon for people to do MBBS after their engineering just because they had a change of heart.

In India, is it even imaginable? We are urged to finish off our education in one go. School –> College —> MBA —> Job. Why not an year or two of job before MBA? If I enroll myself in an MBA school in the US now, I  probably would belong to the youngest bracket of my class. Why is it that if someone fails CAT, his life is ruined because his friend has made through and will be earning his 24 lacs for one extra year?

Take our own example, when we, Rajat and I, had wanted to chuck our calls, we were under pressure to reconsider and do our MBA first. The reasoning was that a diploma from IIMs is a safety net in case we failed. Only one or two thought about mentioning the fact that it might help us better understand business nuances. It just reflects the mindset of people around us.

So all I am saying is that it is not just the investor and regulatory environment, which is to be blamed here. We ourselves are a part of the problem. India once had a flourishing trade and was one of the richest countries in the world. Over 150 years of foreign rule has culled our spirit of entrepreneurship, which was followed by the so-called “Hindu” rate of growth. It is the 21st century now, and we have come a long way. We are roaring to go forward.

Let us not replace the Civil Services and Government jobs of erstwhile India with private high-paying safety nets. Let us instead shape our destiny with our own hands and bring a change from within before we lament the lack of innovation in India.

So the next time if someone compares you to Amazon and says – “You are the Amazon of India”, then your answer should better be “Patience my friend, you have seen nothing yet!”

It’s been almost a month and a half since we launched LeBooks.in. Over the period we have implemented numerous features, removed various bugs and finally had a major upgrade over this past weekend. It has been a topsy-turvy ride with its ups and downs but one thing has been constant, we have learnt a lot and have come a long way since.

Both Rajat and I are essentially non-IT guys. While it did put a big constraint on us (and it still does), we did not let this hamper our plans. We went ahead and outsourced the website in August thinking that it would sustain us for the few initial months while we concentrate on other stuff and build our IT team. Though we knew that the website can make or break our business, we still thought it was an ok-acceptable decision (considering the circumstances, which I won’t dwell into here) for isn’t India an hub for outsourcing and aren’t there numerous multinational companies happy with the work done. Well we were wrong, terribly wrong.

I cannot generalize for the whole web-development and -design industry in India or even NCR based on just one experience but we believe that the state of affairs would have been the still the same if we had instead chosen any other company. This company was “supposedly” the best in the NCR region with a number of big-name clients like Sony, Hyundai, Penguin, etc. in their kitty. As a hindsight it seems to us that for them we were just a small fish to prey upon.

We had made it pretty clear before signing the contract that we need the website by the stipulated date and if it cannot be done then let us know. Also, that we are very particular of what all things we want and how we want them implemented. However, over the course of time, our inputs were totally disregarded. The code for the site was lifted from the code of their other websites. We could easily see commented out stuff such as email addresses with jobs@xxx.co.uk and page categories as Departments, Other Stores, etc. They did not even make an effort to remove this.

Things came to a head when the site crashed, when it could not even manage some 10k books because the database was not normalized, and that too when the site was already delayed by a week and was still half-completed. Attempts to communicate through to the CEO, whom we thought was a decent fellow having started-up and having being featured on “Young Turks”, were of no avail. He mysteriously disappeared after responding to our first mail. We believe that most of these web-companies make websites for clients who are either ignorant and are happy with whatever is given to them or have lots of money to shell out, which we did not.

It hit us bad – a wasted couple of months, wasted money, missed opportunity at the Delhi Book Fair, missed revenues, and more than that dented credibility with our suppliers and publishers whom we had given a launch date. Well the lesson’s been learnt:-

a) When outsourcing services, opt for a smaller company, which needs you as much as you need them. It helps in negotiating contracts. We could not get a clause put into the contract where the web company would be liable for monetary compensation in case of any delays and missed deadlines. Most of the times anyways the contracts cannot be fought out in the court.

b) If you as a start-up need to get a critical service done, then try and do it in-house only, especially when it involves a lot of feedback at every step. Don’t assume that you can outsource and be done with it. Even the best of the companies cannot stick to the exact stipulations laid down by you.

So after the crash, we were pretty much in the doldrums. I started learning coding while Rajat handled the database. My sister also really helped us out. For fully a month, we worked day and night to somehow get the website back up.

Whatever might be your degrees, whatever you might be good at, in a start-up you will eventually end up doing something, about which you may have no clue leave alone any expertise. But the learning is stupendous.

During the process we eventually realized that the basic HTML code was also horrible. The site was not at all W3C compliant with 750+ errors and warning on every page. The styling was done in-line instead of making complete use of external CSS. And then the site took up to 3 mins to load and even more so on slower net connections. Frankly, the site could hardly be used except maybe referred to just family and friends, and that’s what we had to do.

But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It gave us a period of trial-run where we became aware of a lot of operational issues. Even after months of planning, one cannot really anticipate all the problems that might occur when you launch a product in the market.

Since then, we have been building our IT team. As a start-up, you need people who are self-motivated, who are quick to learn and essentially don’t need you to supervise them the whole time. We found a great guy in Mayank who has been instrumental in implementing a lot of our current features over the past month. And we are still looking for more.

Finally I am glad to say that we have a website, which though might still be very basic is ready for the world!!

While I write the first post for the blog, many topics come to my mind on what the blog should really focus on.

Personal Experiences
When the seed of the idea germinated some three years ago; our reasons for launching LeBooks.in; our efforts and struggles over the past six months.

Or Professional Insights
The current state of the Indian publishing industry; the highs and lows of entrepreneurship; our learning in the process of starting up – hoping that this will eventually encourage some people to leave the rat race and live up their dreams.

Or Simply Books & Customer Experience
New releases, authors, reviews and discussions; features that you may want on LeBooks.in; ways to help improve the overall customer experience.

Well, I guess its going to be a mix of all because in the end everything is actually inter-related.

The customer service and experience is not just front-end but rather hinges on a number of variables with one crucial factor being the back-end information and supply chain system. Just to give an idea:-

The benefit of an online store is that there is no restriction on the number of titles it can hold. The books are not kept in inventory (under certain exceptions, which I will address in some other post) but rather procured from various distributors. Like any other regular supply chain, in the book industry also it is pretty simple:

Publishers -> Distributors -> Online & Offline Retail shops.
That’s the basic business model you need to start any bookstore!!

However, as you may see, the biggest advantage of an online store can also work against it when compared to a retail store, which sells only what it stocks. Since an online bookstore does not hold any inventory and works against confirmed orders, it really really and I must stress really needs to have good tie-ups with all upstream entities in the supply chain and get accurate information on a timely basis. If we say the book is in stock and ships in 2-3 days, then this is based on the information provided to us. If it is inaccurate and the book is instead out of stock or no longer in print, then we can lose a customer!!

And that is where you set yourself apart from any other online store – how do you value your customers? Just like another statistic on the excel sheet resulting in profits for the business or rather as a friend?

Our intention is the latter and it was really great to feel the thrill and joy upon executing our first orders this week. Thank you all for the great reviews. We need your constant support to make this a huge success. All feedback, criticisms and compliments are welcome.

We hope that in the process, through a journey together, we all revel in the marvelous world of books.

–
Vikas
LeBooks.in – We too love books!!