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Vivilio : Making Indians read more and better!

By Soumitra Sengupta on 13 Comments / 4932 views

Hi Rodinhooders

I am super excited to showcase our product,  Vivilio – a platform for book lovers to Discover – great content around books, Interact – with like minded readers and Buy – with every detail regarding a book including the price across all major e-commerce portals.

According to a survey, India is a country of biggest bookworms with people reading an average of 10.7 hrs a week.

By interacting with this segment of ‘casual readers’ for the last 4 years through IndiabookStore (our previous website for book price comparison) we realised :

  • there is a lack of a dedicated platform for people to discover which books to read 

  • most people who are aware of Goodreads are not happy with its UI and the lack of books by Indian authors

  • people read books suggested mainly by influencers they follow, friends/family or any current best-seller (read Chetan Bhagat)

With these in mind, we have launched Vivilio an online platform for book-lovers :

  • to read awesome content around books

  • get book recommendations from influencers

  • know more about the books – aggregated rating (from FK,Amazon and Goodreads), Description and Price across all major e-commerce portals 

Vivilio has been live for 3 months and have more than 85K page . On an average we publish 2 articles per day on topics like book recommendations, fun articles like – Books You Would Know If You Are A ‘Hindustani’ Engineer and more

Our initial traction has been good and our second release is due next month with which we will be introducing the Community aspect to the platform along with some really exciting features like shareable virtual book shelf,  which will help the readers to interact with other like minded readers.

Once we have a sizeable community we wish to open the platform to authors for social interaction and book promotions.

Vivilio team at work

We deeply believe that books are the best and the cheapest way to be mentored by the greats of any field be it business, spirituality or life in general hence we want to see Vivilio as the one stop platform for anything related to books.

Check us out at www.vivilio.com and let us know what you think! Will be great to hear from you to understand if we are on the right track 🙂

FB : www.facebook.com/viviliobooks

Twitter : www.twitter.com/viviliobooks

Thanks 

Soumitra Sengupta

Marketing Lead,Vivilio

Get in touch : sengupta@vivilio.com

*****

UPDATE SEPT 8, 2015

Hi Everyone,

After 2 months of talking to a lot of bookworms and development, we have finally launched our second version

Check it out here – www.vivilio.com

With this version we have tried to address three basic issue of any bookworm – organising their books,sharing their book list with friends and discovering new content around books.

We are in continuous development and are looking forward to your valuable feedback.

 ****

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13 Comments

  1. hey, nice!

    and if you’re not going app only in the near future – NICER!! 🙂

    i love the look & feel (i really enjoyed reading your crisp showcase post – though i normally dig reading about the story behind the story – why the founders started it, the story behind the name, etc. but that’s me!)

    your contest grabs one’s attention for sure. didn’t like the choice of books one could read, so let it be 🙂

    i searched children’s books (as a suggested option) but “didn’t get any results” [chk screenshot] – which is strange coz when i click on “children’s books” on the RHS panel – it takes me to the dedicated section.

    so your search is perhaps buggy.

    more later 🙂

  2. Hi Asha,

    No, not going app only but will be launching our Android app pretty soon 🙂

    Glad you liked the look, we have tried to keep it simple so that the focus is on the core functionalities. The contest will be an ongoing feature and if you subscribe to us you will get a mail when we do the next one (pssst…pretty soon)

    Surprising that the search didn’t work when you tried. We tried doing one right away and it function.

    If possible, we would love to have a short one-on-one call with you (and other Rodinhooders who love reading) about the features you would like to see on a platform like ours.

    Thanks

  3. Hi Soumitra,

    This appears to me an exciting product. UI is really cool.
    Currently as I could make out, you are working as an affiliate to Flipkart and others.Is this going to be revenue generator for you in near future?

    Thanks & Regards

    Sunil Suri

  4. Hi Sunil, 

    Thanks for the appreciation. We have kept the UI simple and effective and we will apply the same design principle to our upcoming app as well.

    Yes, the main revenue stream is affiliate commisions from the online book retailers and we are exploring other revenue generators as well.

    Will be great to know if you would like to see any particular feature up on the website.

    Thanks

  5. Hi Soumitra,

    I checked out Vivilio and I am hooked to it as I am true blue bookworm. I like the simple UI. Goodreads has always been my goto place for anything related to books but their UI (both web and the mobile) leave a lot to be desired. The one thing I would like to see is a good mobile app because the Goodreads app on both iOS and Android look like there were done out by unpaid interns. Also another reason I use Goodreads is to keep track of books I am reading/read/like-to-read and posting the reviews on social networks automatically. The reading challenge is one reason that keeps me coming back to Goodreads. Perhaps something on those lines would be nice to have recurring visitors.

  6. Hi Sridhar

    Thanks a ton for the appreciation. We are trying hard to keep the UI simple and at the same time deliver as much functionality as possible.

    You are exactly on the mark regarding Goodreads. In our user survey,we have found that the major pain point of all Goodreads user is with their mobile UI and that’s where we are trying to build-on.

    We are working on some of the features mentioned by you and if you subscribe to our mailing list,we will be able to get in touch with you when it’s live.

    Thanks again 🙂

  7. hey soumitra,

    rodinhooder ganesh has written a book called ‘underage ceos’

    https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/the-earlier-the-better

    diff rodinhooders are doing book reviews for diff sites. would you be interested? if so, anamika could do one for vivilio (unless you have a team of reviewers)

    either way let me know pls!! i’ll connect u to ganesh…

  8. Hi Everyone,

    After 2 months of talking to a lot of bookworms and development, we have finally launched our second version

    Check it out here – http://www.vivilio.com

    With this version we have tried to address three basic issue of any bookworm – organising their books,sharing their book list with friends and discovering new content around books.

    We are in continuos development and are looking forward to your valuable feedback.

  9. Hi Asha,

    Already in touch with Ganesh, thanks for connecting.

    We are not doing book reviews at the moment for Vivilio but will be happy to put them up on the blog of our other site http://www.indiabookstore.net (which has more traction btw) 

    Rodinhooders interested in contributing their Book Reviews can get in touch with me at sengupta[at]vivilio.com

    *We are hiring freelance writers for our Vivilio Blog – https://www.vivilio.com/blog

  10. hey soumitra,

    i checked out the new look – it’s much cleaner and better now!!

    i even checked out some books etc – superb experience! 

    keep rocking team!

  11. Hey Soumitra! 

    I am interested in doing my review for Ganesh’s book at your site. Do let me know the way ahead! Also putting things in mail.

    Thanks. 

  12. how has the response been soumitra?

  13. Soumitra,

    Would love to checkout your website and provide feedback once I understand what you are trying to do.

    1. “there is lack of a platform where people can find good books” – Care to elaborate, as to why GoodReads is not good enough?

    2. “most people who are aware of Goodreads are not happy with its UI and the lack of books by Indian authors” How would your community be any different from the one at GoodReads? Maybe you would have an awesome UI, but would you be more focused on Indian authors? Do readers face this problem, unable to find reviews about Indian authors?

    PS: You should also checkout Oditty (previously called ReadersDoor)

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