Bokapo, summaries for reconciliation with the world of books

Facilitating users’ access to content in its various formats is one of the areas of interest Startup have been placed and each of them has provided a solution for it. Meanwhile, the book is one of these content formats that users, despite being interested in reading it, usually do not find a suitable platform to interact with it. In this situation, providing audio and written summaries of books is a solution that can solve part of this problem. To answer the question of what is the purpose of Bokapo, we can say that Bokapo Including Startup There are those who have decided to pursue this solution and in addition to providing a summary of all valuable educational points, they will also present it to the audience. To learn more about Bokapo, we had a conversation with Farshid Vahedian, who manages this startup. We share this conversation with you.

Let’s start with yourself and the experiences you had before Bokapo.

I am Farshid Vahedian, a graduate from the University of Tehran and the manager of Bokapo startup. At the beginning of my studies, about seven years ago, I started Saffron Karis company, and after less than two years, together with Mr. Alishiri, under the direct training of our dear friend and teacher, Mr. Ali Ashrafi, the manager Marketing We were placed in Alibaba, and after a year and a half, we started consulting various companies in the field of marketing strategy Business We paid and in the meantime I worked as a manager of IT and investment projects of Elhamgostar Holding.

What caused the idea of ​​Bokapo to be formed?

One of the basic problems of our society is that our managers and entrepreneurs do not have enough education in the field of management and related sciences, and they do not have much faith in study and science. During my activities in the field of counseling, I have noticed the low level of study in this group. Based on this, we decided to follow the example of foreign countries to solve this problem and we realized that one of the best solutions is to present summaries of books, magazines, etc. in 20 to 30 minute formats, which can be an important step towards reconciliation with reading. On the other hand, according to my own experience, generally, a large part of the books in this field are unimportant and time-consuming, and they only repeat and expand the subject, and since similar foreign services had been very successful in this field and were well received by the people. , we also entered this field.

What does Bokapo mean? What service does it offer?

Bocapo is a combination of two words, book, which means book and capo, which means manager in Italian. Bokapo presents the world’s best-selling books and magazine articles in multiple parts and summaries. For example, you can search for a book with ten different topics, whose key points are explained in audio and text format. In fact, we don’t just summarize the books and articles, but teach all its valuable points. The user can take notes and share on the site, and currently we have decided to add about 50 to 70 books to the list of books every month. Our books are in the fields of management and leadership, personal growth and development, marketing, entrepreneurship, etc Start-up businesses applied psychology, relationships and social skills and productivity and time management.

In Bokapo, by spending half an hour a day on your phone or computer, you can be ahead of others with about 400 of the best books in the world every year.

Do you have domestic or foreign competitors? What is your competitive advantage?

Our foreign competitors are summary, getAbstract, blinkist, and get flashnotes, which according to our surveys, Iranian users are not very interested in using them due to the language difference and the high subscription price (about 250 to 500 thousand tomans per month). In addition, except for one or two cases whose content is close to ours, of course, these also do not have complete photos and other facilities. Others are very far from us in terms of content. Also, in this field, there are Iranian websites such as Fidibo and Sabakto, whose main field of work is not book summaries, but they provide summaries of books that have only been translated and are often not highly scientific and educational; But we use photos, text and boxes in the produced content so that the content is not boring for the audience, and the recordings are segmented and themed, and the summaries are prepared with a certain attitude. In fact, we are the only Persian reference for summaries of books in this field. In summary, the books that are presented in Bokapo are of two categories: one category is the best-selling books from previous years that are known or recommended or written by the great masters of this field in the world, and the other category is new books that have the potential to become known, and these books are generally They enter our market with a delay of several years, and since we prepare the summaries of the books from their original versions, we provide their translated summaries earlier than the publication of the book translation.

How do you see the general situation of your market?

The book summary market did not exist before this and this market is being created and according to the numbers and figures we obtained with the market research, these numbers are changing every moment. According to the current trend, we will have a high percentage of the market in the future.

How does Bokapo make money?

At the beginning, when the user registers, he will receive a book summary for free according to the topic he has chosen to familiarize himself with the quality of our work, and he can also read the first page of other books, but to read the next pages, he must purchase a subscription. There are 4 subscriptions (no limit on the number of books) for one month, three months, six months and one year. Of course, in the blog section of the site, we also provide some of the content related to digital and printed publications for free.

What is the composition of the Bokapo team?

The team members knew each other for about 2 years before starting work. Of course, Mr. Alishiri, who is the marketing manager of the collection, and I have been colleagues and friends since the beginning of our professional career. At first, we screened the ideas from among the five options in cooperation with each other and we all reached this idea unanimously (due to the community’s involvement with it). Currently, along with me and Mr. Alishiri, Mr. Riahi is the content strategist, Mr. Shafizadeh is the human resources manager, Mr. Nurbakhsh is the financial manager, and the chairman of the board of directors are the main members of the team. We also have a translation team, the translated text is transferred to the content production team, and this team summarizes the translated texts according to the original text. In addition, to improve the education, we use a number of photos and graphic frames that Mrs. Ghafar In the graphic department, they do the work and finally Mr. Ahmadi, who is the editor of the site, does the final editing and the texts are placed on the site. To convert to audio, the final texts are sent to the audio team, and for this reason, the audio files are placed next to the book about four days later than the original book.

Have you ever attracted capital?

At first, we started the work with personal capital, but now that the work has progressed to a certain extent, we decided to Attracting investors We have taken it to make our growth process go at a better speed. Of course, a number of private investors, based on the history of our interaction with companies such as: Oil Company, Gas Company, Elham Gostar Company, Alibaba, Noorbakhsh Trading, etc., wanted to cooperate with us, but for some reasons, we postponed this process for some time.

What steps are you taking to develop the product? How to enter the market?

In the first step, decide to Launch the application After that, we have interactive features such as introducing the book, which is accompanied by people’s participation, and then we have interviews with prominent people in relation to the introduction of the book and the creation of educational reports in the next six months.

We are currently in the stage of getting feedback from the audience to optimize the four p’s of marketing. To enter the market powerfully, our main goal is to increase brand awareness through influencers in the relevant fields and use inbound marketing to attract interested audiences.

What challenges did you face on your way to Bokapo?

Because our goal was to create quality content, team building It was the first problem we faced. It was very difficult to choose the content production team because we had to choose those who were suitable for our work in terms of speed and quality. The second challenge is the unfavorable conditions of the market, where the unfavorable state of the economy makes people less likely to go in this direction, and with these conditions, we have decided to implement new strategies. The third challenge is the lack of trust in Farsi content due to the existence of a large number of low-quality content, and another issue that most startups, including Bokapo, faced was the technical team issue; Because it is rare to gather a professional team familiar with the market and committed in this field.

What do you think about the current state of the startup ecosystem?

A startup goes well when the country has a stable economic trend; But on the other hand, many successful companies have started their work in the worst conditions and they rose with the construction periods after that, so the companies that can reject these economic crises will move with a high growth trend, which can be a promising point. . For example, we can mention the trend of companies in the end and after the imposed war or the 2008 American economic crisis; Of course, the reason for the formation of this wave of disappointment among startups at the moment, in addition to market fluctuations, is the saturation of the startup market and the lack of results from startup weekends and seminars, etc., and maybe it is time to make some revisions in this field and move away from the usual models. It is assumed that this has happened to some extent.

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