My Ebook Creator Platform Just Hit 200,000 Users
My name is Ayman and I’m the founder of Kotobee; a platform used to create, manage, and distribute rich engaging interactive ebooks or courses.
Kotobee was created with a specific goal in mind and that is to make digital publishing for interactive ebooks easy and available for everyone. It is currently used by authors and educators and anyone in the education, training, and publishing industries.
There are four main Kotobee products and services that comprise the Kotobee Platform: Kotobee Author, which is a desktop authoring software for creating and
publishing interactive ebooks. Kotobee Cloud, which is is a collection of services for efficiently hosting ebooks, managing user access to ebooks, syncing user data, and
protecting books from piracy. Kotobee Library is a solution for creating, publishing, and managing ebook libraries. And finally, Kotobee Reader is a customizable ebook-reader embedded in all Kotobee ebook apps and libraries. It is also available as a standalone app for download from the App Store and Google Play Store.
Kotobee has been in steady growth since its launch. Soon after the launch, it was honored with a 2016 Academic’s Choice Smart Media Award, a prestigious seal of educational quality. And now, writers, experts, companies, and educators across the
globe are creating engaging interactive ebooks with no coding and many times at no cost. With more than 200,000 users in over 200 countries and 2,000 new users every month, Kotobee is accomplishing what it set out to do which is to enable anyone to create beautiful ebooks that engage readers.
What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship was a term I learned much later. It’s when I thought “do they have a word for everything?”. It was not a decision to get into entrepreneurship but I guess you can call it a human instinct.
Since I was a young kid, it was in my nature to build things, hack everyday objects like tissue boxes, old toys, and invent new ways to play games. When I grew a bit older (i.e. 13) I found the opportunity to unleash my creative thirst into computers. There were minimal resources at that time, but my memory takes me to an attempt to build a small computer virus using Basic. The virus wasn’t harmful, It just tricks the user into believing the computer is about to blow up. As absurd as it sounds, the virus worked, which gave me more confidence in my programming skills!
After getting into several mainstream jobs such as a programmer or a designer, I felt it wasn’t enough for me to cover just one specific role, but wanted to carry a broader range of responsibilities. Not just that, but I felt like I had the minimum talent required in different areas. That’s when I decided in 2011 to establish Vijua, my company, and feed it everything I’ve got.
Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?
A wise person once told me that the only skill required to be a successful entrepreneur is the ability to handle stress. Back at that time, I thought “what a strange way to put it and disregard all the other important skills”. With time, I found that this was true. The amount of risk and stress involved especially at the beginning of establishing a business is unbearable for the normal person. If someone has incredible business and technical skills, and no patience or will to manage stress, will unfortunately either quit or face depression.
If you are about to start your entrepreneurial journey, take this point into account, and prepare yourself to handle the stress that comes at first before you start to reap the great benefits that come later.
There were extremely hard times for us at first at Vijua, I won't deny. There is some regret for some of the decisions that were made, and some regret for decisions that weren’t. There was a lot of pivoting around, and efforts that would sometimes lead to nowhere. But amid chaos, there would always appear a beacon of light to give us some hope in our efforts to keep going forward.
Since our company was established in 2011, we have worked in different areas such as software development, advertising, gaming, web development. I had to have a strong eye for opportunities since there was no solid revenue generator for us yet.
I’ve always been fascinated with interactive ebooks and created several related projects that failed. Thankfully, one of those projects succeeded which was Kotobee. It was launched in 2015 and at the time, ebook technology hadn't been adopted by major companies other than Apple and that’s when I thought, why not create our ebook creation software to help aid basic users in creating their interactive ebooks independently. There were many pivoting decisions at the time, such as choosing the markets and the target users for our software. Eventually, Kotobee was launched and has been in steady growth since then.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today we are a profitable business, serving individual and enterprise customers. We put a lot of our profits back into our company to create new products that are requested by our customers or ones that we know will complement our current tools and increase their functionality. Last year, we created our new product “Kotobee Mini Apps” which was a big hit among our users because right before it was launched they had to get those ebook widgets from 3rd party websites and that was very inconvenient for them. In the next year, we’re looking into expanding our business into the digital publishing industry as it would greatly benefit our users to have all their self-publishing needs in one place.
We’re also planning into investing more into digital marketing and SEO as these are the main marketing channels that get us the most website visitors and conversions. To elaborate more on this, we have a successful blog “Kotobee blog” where we publish content related to e-learning, digital publishing, writing, and everything that would be of help to people in the education, publishing, and corporate training industries (our main target audience). On average we get around 90K-100K views to our website and 20% of those are visitors to our blog and they come mainly through organic search. That’s why we’re planning on creating more SEO content in the future and on a more frequent basis.
Another great marketing channel that’s proven to be successful to us so far over the past few years is email marketing. It started with a few people subscribing to the newsletter that we initially created to promote our blog and asked people if they were interested to receive learning and digital publishing-related content. And now this number has grown to be over 100K subscribers who await our newsletter every week and always give us great feedback about it.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
There have been many lessons learned. I can share two with you here.
Making the right decision at the right time is one of the traits of a good entrepreneur.
A clear mistake we have made is with pricing. In our platform, there are a lot of variables such as the number of users, books, storage, and features. The end customer does not need to see all that information - some things are best hidden away. Our mistake is we reflected all these options in our pricing plans, which just confused the customers. Back at that time, we felt that everything was clear, but it was so because we were in the business. For new users seeing this for the first time, it’s confusing and they don’t want to invest minutes understanding all these details. I learned that we should present plans in a very simple and clear way, with minimum options. Just like fast-food restaurants. Combo A, B, or C, and with extra-large fries, please.
Another lesson learned is “time”. Do not underestimate the power of time. Sometimes “waiting” is the best decision you can make. Our platform was competing with several others, including Apple’s own free iBooks Author. It was a continuous struggle to try to beat them at their own game since Apple is the pioneer of interactive ebooks. Not just that, but their offering is free, unlike our freemium one. With time, more and more users started to migrate to Kotobee from iBooks Author. Eventually, in 2019 Apple decided to discontinue iBooks Author, an incident that led to more users joining Kotobee. Time played its role to our great advantage.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We use plenty of online tools at Kotobee, mainly the Google Workplace products for all of our documentation, analysis, and presentation purposes. We also use Flock for daily team messaging, file sharing, and team communications. And just like everyone else these days, we use Zoom for our team and clients’ meetings.
As for team productivity, we’ve had an issue here at Kotobee regarding managing and organizing tasks and projects in general and this is where Trello came to the rescue. Once we started using it, we were able to track various projects at once, the progress of each task within the project, and which employees are currently assigned to these tasks. I would say this tool helped with boosting our productivity in the last couple of years.
As for marketing, we’re always on the lookout for a good SEO tool as content marketing is one of our main marketing channels. We run a very successful learning blog called Kotobee blog. We’ve used lots of tools but we always come back to Ahrefs and sometimes Moz for any keywords research or technical SEO needs.
Finally, we use Freshdesk for customer support purposes, starting from allowing customers to create tickets and making sure to reply to them ASAP to creating a complete knowledge base for our tools and frequently updating it to make it easy for the customers to always be aware of our updates.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I love reading Neil Patel's blog posts and always come away learning so much from them. He’s one of the top marketing thought leaders and I get a lot of digital marketing and SEO tips and tricks from his posts.
I also like reading the success stories of other entrepreneurs and how they managed to create their startups and what methods they used to boost their business. I find those stories inspiring and push me to move forward.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
This might be unorthodox advice but I’ve seen several people start their entrepreneurial journey, perhaps at the wrong time or even as a wrong choice, and end up midway feeling lost with regret of losing their previous job. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone.
Everyone fills a certain role in life, and maybe, just maybe, the corporate ladder is the one for you. If you do not feel entertained and joyed by the process and hardship of building something with your own hands, and rather find yourself going after the “glamour” of startups, then surely my friend stay where you are, as this path is surely better for you.
If you, however, decide to start your entrepreneurial journey, do not account for overnight success. Get ready for a 2-year long struggle spent in hard work and sleepless nights, as that’s the reality of it.
It’s tricky deciding between when to quit an idea, hold on to it, or pivot away to a related idea. Just always keep these options in mind and lock away any stubbornness, as this will be your instinct towards your idea. There’s no one best choice to make, as it depends on the circumstances, the timing, the industry, and other factors. Making the right decision at the right time is one of the traits of a good entrepreneur.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’re not currently hiring any full-time positions but we’re always on the lookout for experienced and creative freelance writers to write posts for our blog.
Where can we go to learn more?
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
