Serbian Book World – Blog Post
About our company:
Serbian Book Serbian is your only stop for buying Serbian books and educational games in the USA. Our hope is to promote and nurture Serbian culture in the USA.
Chicago Lean Launch Challenge:
Serbian Book World is currently participating in the Chicago Lean Launch Challenge 2012. Below is summary of our researches from the past 8 weeks of the competition:
Some of the things that we learned about our market:
Target market: Serbs who enjoy reading Serbian books - 1 Million Serbs in the USA. We also have B2B customers and B2C customers.
Interviews: 1st round of interviews: 40, 2nd round MVP interviews: 34, 30+ new connections within the industry
90% of Serbian/Bosnian/Montenegrin would order a book from a Serbian online bookstore
Serbs in the USA would buy 6 books per year through a website
E books are far-fetched future for them
Revenue Model:
Business to Business and Business to Customers
Offer lower books and shipping prices in order to attract customers
Marketing:
Word of mouth and social Media
SEM
Serbian community is very tight and open to promoting Serbian culture
Expenses:
We found out that we have very minimal expenses (shipping, marketing, and operating costs)
Projected Net Profit:
$230,000 estimated net profit for the last month of the 1st year.
Overall, we’ve learned how to work as a team, and especially when creating a team to make sure that your teammates have motivation and are responsible, because if they are good with accounting for example and you have them do marketing research that will not deliver good results.
We learned to listen, more than we should talk. We listened to our customers, people from the industry and community, our advisers and mentors, because we DON’T have to know everything either we are expected to.
We were suspicious about the idea of talking about your idea to everyone, and especially putting it on YouTube, and we had two options to either quit and to it on our own, or realize that that can only benefit us! And, yeah, we picked the latter.
We were pleasantly surprised how everybody in the competition was open to help you, and how we had advisers calling us if we need to talk to them. Also, we realized that you don’t have to pay to get a good information, or help from somebody, networking is the key, and people are nice to you if you are nice to them.
We realized that, if it wasn’t for the challenge, we would’ve definitely been off with some projections, hypothesis and numbers. To be honest, it was hard to talk to 10 people each week, but I’m glad that the lean startup process ‘made us’ get out of the building since it helped our judgment a lot. Customer feedback is the best marketing/selling info you can get! If you get that even before you start with your idea, than you are on top of the game!
Start small. We liked this repeated advice, kept us on the ground, and gave us a lot of space for growth.
Assigned reading was really helpful, books weren’t consisted of tons of unimportant info, but the info was hands on, like you are reading it and it is telling you what exactly to do, step after step.
Very important topic for us was class number 7 I think, it was about partners and alliances, which made us brainstorm and see which relationships we can make and benefit most from, since we initially thought that we can do it best by ourselves.
We could write for another hour, but let’s stop here and finish, by this:
We learned a lot. But we didn’t sleep a lot. We were using our brains a lot, but we didn’t make a lot of mistakes. We were talking but we were listening more. We met a lot of people, but still didn’t have a chance to have a beer with all of them. So we are hoping to get another month to do so!:)
Serbian Book World team
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5JTe7H6EMY
Tags: Chicago Lean Launch Challenge, Chicago Start Ups, Launch, startup launches, Serbian Books, Srpske knjige :
