Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's guest is Catherine Sears.
Catherine is the co founder and chief marketing officer of booktrope, a web platform that allows authors, editors, marketers and designers to form a team and work together to create and market a new book.
The company is based in Seattle and was founded in 2011.
In this episode, we're going to talk about how BookTrope turned a simple idea into an innovative new category in book publishing.
How the business launched and operated for one and a half years with no software product.
We'll talk about going through Y Combinator and the experiences and lessons learned by the co founders.
We'll talk about how Catherine went from not even having a Twitter account to using it to build authority and attract new customers.
And we'll talk about what booktrope did to get to their first million dollars in annual run rate.
And with that, let's get back to the interview.
Katherine, welcome to the show.
Katherine Sears (01:25.830)
Hello.
Omer (01:27.270)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who is Catherine when she's not working?
Katherine Sears (01:35.830)
Well, Catherine is mom to a nine year old little girl and I have a husband and we actually live a little bit east of Seattle.
We like the woods and remoteness of the mountains, but mostly folks would not know where Fall City, Washington is.
So we call ourselves Seattleites.
Omer (01:55.380)
I know where False City is.
Katherine Sears (01:56.820)
Oh, fantastic.
Well, that's actually where I'm speaking from right now.
Omer (02:01.060)
Awesome.
Now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Katherine Sears (02:14.820)
I'm not really a quotes person, which I suppose is funny since I am a book person.
And I think that's because I've never been able to settle on anyone.
It changes every time I see something fabulous that becomes my quote for the day.
Omer (02:29.200)
So tell me about what drives or motivates you to get out of bed every day and do what you do.
Katherine Sears (02:38.000)
You know, I think I've always been a creative person, but I've also always loved puzzles.
And there is no better puzzle than forming a company and keeping it going as you grow.
And so for me, I look forward to that every day.
I look forward to seeing what is going to land in my inbox that I hadn't expected.
Omer (03:01.060)
Awesome.
So let's start by giving our listeners a better understanding of booktro.
Can you tell the audience a little bit about who your target customers are and what are the top pain points that you're trying to solve?
Katherine Sears (03:12.980)
Sure.
So strictly speaking, when somebody creates books as a big part of their business, your instinct would be to say that readers are our target customers.
And certainly from a revenue generation perspective, that is the case.
But more purely, our customers are the people who use our platform.
And we do consider what we do a technology platform.
It's a website called TeamTrope.
And the people who use TeamTrope are authors, editors, designers and marketing managers.
And those are all the people necessary to take something from manuscript form to finished book and to a consumer.
You may not realize everything that goes into that process, but it's a pretty extensive process.
So strictly speaking, our customers are authors and the other book professionals.
And the challenge for them right now is that publishing is in a massive transition stage.
It's going from something that's been the norm, the traditional or legacy publishing industry, from for literally hundreds of years to being more user centric.
And that's largely through the advent of the ebook, led of course by Amazon and their Kindle product.
And the idea of self publishing has also been around for a very long time, but up until recently it didn't have the legitimacy, if you will, that it's starting to enjoy being a self published.
Authority used to mean you were wealthy and that you could afford to pay someone to publish your work.
And while it still costs money, I think the idea that it's free is a big misunderstanding.
It's not as it was before.
And so there are challenges with both sides of those.
Getting into the traditional publishing industry is really hard.
You have to get an agent, the agent has to sell your book.
It's not a simple thing.
And it's becoming more difficult because those are really top heavy overhead heavy businesses.
So they really have to have best sellers.
So getting into that system is harder and harder.
On the other side, self publishing, there is no barrier to entry, but you have to pay the team of people needed to create a book.
So the author then becomes a business owner.
They become, in a sense, an entrepreneur and they have to find an editor, hire the editor, pay the editor, and then same for the designer and the same for every other step along the process.
So authors are challenged today in that they've gone from having no choice to being spoiled for choice and figuring out how to publish their book.
Booktrope fits in the middle.
So our system not only permits the collaboration of the team, but everybody on the team works for for a percentage of the profit.
So you are not, as an author, forced to pay the team members, and you have people who have a literal vested interest in, first, producing the best book possible, second, doing it in a timely fashion, because, of course, nobody's getting a paycheck until the book is for sale.
And lastly, working together to market the book, because again, everybody succeeds or fails at the same rate, including booktrope.
We don't charge upfront fees, so we don't make any money if the book doesn't sell either.
And perhaps most importantly, we're not self publishing because we don't accept all materials.
We have a vetting process for manuscripts, and we have a vetting process for every role in our system, because we have a commitment to making sure that if people do work in the system, they stand a chance of making what they would working as a freelancer and making a reasonable profit as a return on the investment of their time.
Omer (07:10.630)
Okay, let's maybe go through an example of how this would work.
So let's say I'm an author and I have an idea to write a new book.
So the options, as you said, available to me are either I go to the traditional publisher route or I go and try to self publish.
And you talked about the pros and cons of both.
And so Booktroop offers me an alternative to either of those.
And so the first step, I guess, would be is I would still create a manuscript, just as I would if I was going the traditional publishing route, but I would submit that to you guys for approval.
Katherine Sears (07:49.820)
That's right.
Omer (07:50.620)
Once I get through that, then how do I form this team?
Katherine Sears (07:55.690)
So after we vet your manuscript, and we do that in its first stage using a logic tree that we've developed, and you would apply online.
And if we accept your work, then you get a login to our TeamTrope platform.
And TeamTrope, in a lot of ways, looks and feels familiar to people because you create a profile, you provide information about yourself in that profile.
Really anything that your potential team is going to need to know about you and your work in order to decide whether they're interested in working with you.
And then in the platform is.
We call it the Grid.
And the Grid has all the different projects.
It has information such as the summary of the work, what genre it is, you can download and read the manuscript.
And in a lot of ways, it's pretty organic at the moment.
One of the future features on On Deck, right Now is a more proactive suggestion and matching system.
But at the moment, people are always searching for one another.
And you can sort the grid by your discipline.
So if you're a cover designer looking for a project, you'd sort by that, and then you can look at what's available in the genres you want to work in.
One of the really important things about our system is that nobody's assigned.
If you're going to work ahead of a paycheck, you need to be able to doing to be able to do the work that A, you want to do, that you find fulfillment in, and B, analyze whether or not you think that genre, that author, that prospect, is going to give you what you need, either from an emotional fulfillment perspective, if that's most important, or from a monetary perspective, if that's what's important for you.
And lastly, time.
Most of the people in our system are freelancers.
And so editors, for example, might be looking for a project that will fit within the window of time they have available in their schedule at this moment.
Omer (09:54.130)
And so let's say I was an editor, so I would basically just be able to go into your platform and look for projects which maybe I felt were a fit for me.
And then.
And then basically, do I go through some kind of application process to get onto that project?
Katherine Sears (10:15.870)
Yeah.
So all everybody has gone through an application process to get into the system.
So the basics are already in place.
When you're speaking with somebody in our system, you know that they are in fact a qualified editor if they say they are.
Right.
So you don't have to, as an author, go through that type of interview with this person.
But nobody works for one another.
It really is a team.
We call it team publishing for that reason.
So the author's talking to the editor about how they like to work.
The editor would be speaking to the author about what their goals for their book is.
So they'd have a conversation.
Whether that conversation happens, you know, naturally, as we're doing now, or over email or chat, is really up to them.
And then we give each team a team room.
So it's sort of like a private group, only the people working on that team would have access to it.
And the team room allows them to collaborate on the project, collaborate on marketing.
And then each book is actually a project and we've built a workflow.
Everything that's needed to take the manuscript to finish project is built into our automated workflow.
So just like any workflow, only steps that are doable at this moment in time are unlocked.
So for example, you wouldn't be able to upload the proofread manuscript if you haven't first uploaded the completed edited manuscript.
You can't upload the completed cover design until you've gotten that design approved.
So that's what allows teams to keep moving forward at the right pace in the right order.
And it's what allows Booktrope to maintain a quality standard without having to have 50 people on staff at any given time managing all of our projects.
And that's really how we scale.
If we were to have to use bodies, as the traditional publishers do, we wouldn't be innovating, we wouldn't be creating anything new.
But that's also what allows the teams to move forward efficiently, is that they have that guideline.
They know what comes next based on what the system tells them comes next.
I don't know if that made sense.
Omer (12:27.240)
Yeah.
So let's say, okay, I've gone through the process, I've got my manuscript approved, I've got this team formed.
It's the right team, we work together and we end up creating this book and we're ready to publish.
So then how does booktrope help this team to get, get, get the word out there?
I guess.
Katherine Sears (12:50.690)
Yeah.
So BookTube has relationships right now, I think we have 13 different retail outlets that we push things to, and those are things like you would expect.
Amazon, Nook, itunes.
But we also make our books available in print.
We call ourselves format agnostic, meaning I don't care how you want to read your book.
My job is to create the best one possible, make it available at an affordable price and put it where you want to be interacting with it.
So we also have our books in library systems.
Bookstores can order our books just like they would any other publishers titles.
So Booktrope handles all of that.
So as far as making it available, that is done for the authors in our system.
We have great relationships with those vendors.
Amazon in particular, we have a really terrific relationship with them.
And of course we're on a lot of the new subscription platforms like Oyster and Scribd and Kindle Unlimited.
So part of it is solving the problem for an author is that availability piece.
And then I spent a lot of time understanding how books should be marketed.
My background is in web services, search engine optimization, things of that nature.
It's actually not in books.
And so when I first started Booktrope with my co founder, we were really looking at what is the traditional publishing industry doing with respect to marketing and how should that be changing?
And if you think about it, a book is really content.
And services like Amazon are really databases full of content with a really sophisticated search algorithm on top of them.
So if you view it from that perspective, rather than a physical book sitting on a shelf, it really changes the way you market that material.
And so the marketing methodology that I developed and subsequently wrote a book on and train our teams on is really much more classic.
Web and search marketing, more so than product marketing, as you would think of a book classically.
Omer (15:05.640)
Okay, so how did you come up with the idea for this business?
Katherine Sears (15:12.200)
The first time I met Ken Shear, and that's one of my co founders, he had the nascent idea for what became team publishing.
He had this idea of almost a co op, if you will.
And I thought that was a great idea and I was motivated to change, but marketing, because I had a friend, somebody I've known since college, Tess Thompson, who is, who has since become a best selling author.
And she had said to me, you know, I've written this book and once I get it published, you can help me market it.
And I said, well, gosh, isn't that the publisher's job to market the book?
And she said, well, you would think so, but that's not the way it works at all.
And I said, well, okay, I can probably help you, but I've never marketed a book before.
I've marketed lots of things, but never books.
And this was back in 2010 or so.
I started looking into it and I was absolutely shocked that at the time, the best practices for book marketing were things like physical bookstore tours, where marketers advised you to print up flyers and shove them under hotel room doors, because business travelers often had nothing to do with.
And I was like, oh my gosh, what is this, 1990?
You've got to be kidding me.
And so I went back to her and I said, well, geez, I think I can help you, Tess, but I gotta be honest, I think everybody's doing it wrong.
And that was pretty much what I said to Ken when he and I first spoke.
I said, well, I think I can do this, Ken, but I think everybody else is doing it wrong.
And he said, well, that's great because I think they're all doing it wrong too.
And so we started looking at what was working in traditional publishing, what was working in self publishing and what was not, and what was working in traditional publishing was they were turning out great books and they were getting those books in front of consumers.
They were doing it strangely, but they were doing it.
They were getting Thousands of books to thousands of stores.
What was working in self publishing was they were a much more open system.
They were allowing people in that were being kept out by the gatekeepers of traditional publishing.
But what wasn't working was they weren't doing anything to manage quality.
And pricing was all over the map, standards were all over the map, and consumers were increasingly getting confused and inundated by poor quality books.
So that was kind of the starting point is both Ken and I thought people were doing it wrong.
And so we test drove what we thought would work for about a year and a half until we met our co founder, Andy.
And he loved what we were doing, but realized pretty quickly that Ken and I working on email and spreadsheets was not going to scale.
And he said, well, I think I can make this work as a platform.
And that was how we ended up with TeamTrope and more of where we are today was once we met Andy, who is our cto.
Omer (18:22.000)
So for a year and a half, the business was basically operating as a service, which you were doing without software.
Katherine Sears (18:29.520)
That's right.
That's right.
It was Ken and I and a lot of people and a lot of spreadsheets, all of whom believed in what we were doing, thankfully for us deeply enough to stick with us through a slightly, occasionally bumpy ride.
And while we figured out what worked and threw away what didn't.
Omer (18:51.880)
Now, looking back at those early days, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Katherine Sears (18:59.080)
So early on, Ken and I both had an idea that giving away our books for free on our own website would be a great way to generate readership and buzz.
And I still believe that giving away books does exactly that.
And we often do free book giveaways.
We encourage our authors to use websites like wattpad.
And in fact, in fact, we've gone on record several times as not doing much to fight piracy.
In truth, books that are pirated quickly seem to sell better.
So in that regard, we still believe in free books.
But where we made a misstep was in believing that we needed to be the person putting that material out there, that we needed to have our own website with our own research reading platform and our own ability to interact directly with our readers.
And so we initially had a website called Libertary, then we had a website called Open Reads.
And that was what those platforms did, is they allowed readers to read our books directly.
And the reason this was a mistake was that we drastically underestimated the level of technical effort to get those books available in a functional way.
And so as we grew, that really became a business in and of itself.
And in fact, that is the foundation of what wattpad really is.
And so we ended up closing openreads and stopping that side of the business because it just.
We had to make a choice.
We had to decide which thing were we.
Were we a reading platform where authors and readers interacted with, or were we a technology that produces books?
Omer (20:52.970)
And you had your own challenges anyway because you're trying to build a marketplace here within the platform, so it's not like you didn't already have enough to deal with here.
Katherine Sears (21:04.329)
That's right.
That's right.
And it really wasn't until Andy was working with us that Ken and I were able to kind of give up this notion.
And I think that's a really common thing for entrepreneurs, is you get so passionate about what you're doing that it's really hard to see the forest for the trees and to give up a piece that has stopped making sense.
And once Ken and I kind of came to that moment, we both went, wow.
We were passionate about giving away books.
Our mistake was thinking we had to do that ourselves on our website.
Omer (21:48.150)
Okay.
So it took.
So Andy came up with this idea to build this platform.
And how long did it take for you to have the first version of that product up and running?
Katherine Sears (22:01.990)
So the very first version really only took a few months.
We're very much about, we create the minimum vial product and we go from there.
So the first version was pretty ugly and didn't do a whole lot aside from give people a place to interact.
And that happened.
I want to say that was 2012 or so, and that was really around the same time that booktroit participated in the first look forum, which is at the time was the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, which has since been rolled into the WTIA and still exists.
First look is a great way to figure out how to refine your company pitch and really forced us to take a good look at what the business was and what it wasn't.
So that was all happening right around in that same timeframe.
Omer (22:58.190)
Okay, so you've got the product up and running.
You've been running the business for about a year and a half without any software product.
How did you start to get customers?
Did it change?
Or did you already have customers that you just started to transition over to this.
This software product?
What was the process?
Katherine Sears (23:25.990)
Well, it's actually both.
So this entire time we were producing books, so we never actually were in a situation where we weren't.
We didn't have something for sale, if you will.
We had revenue coming in, just not as much as we needed.
Our business is really about scale, so we aren't bestseller dependent.
But that means that we need to produce a large quantity of books, which meant that we had to go from the number of authors and other team members that we could handle on a manual basis to one that had to be systematized and managed by technology.
So we had to go from needing a dozen people to where we are now, which is more than 900 people working on the platform.
And that all came about initially through social media.
And social media is what I believe is the best way to market books.
And I really believe it's the best way to market just about anything.
And the bonus is for listeners of this session is that most of it's free and so anybody can do it.
Twitter was a big one for us in the early days and still is.
I like to say that, you know, if you break down the social, the main social media sites, you can break them down into parties.
And I do mean that in the festive sense of the word party.
So you can look at Facebook as a block party and a family reunion.
You can look at LinkedIn as business networking or business drinks, and you can look at Twitter as an explosion of both of those things.
It's a concert, it's a festival, it's.
It is a way to interact with strangers who are like minded.
So if you want to interact with people you don't know and have any sort of meaningful discussion, Twitter is a great place to do that.
And so, you know, when I first said to Tess, I think people are marketing books wrong, I had never been on Twitter, I was not using it.
And I said, we have to get on Twitter.
And she said, my God, what am I going to tweet about that, that I just put in a load of laundry, that I had a cup of coffee, I mean, nobody wants to hear that.
And I said, well, the good news is your readers, the readers of your type of fiction do actually want to read that, because that's what they're doing at that moment in time.
But she's right in that you can't just get on there and start talking about what you're doing.
You have to get on there with a plan.
You have to get on there with an understanding of who you want to talk to, what you want to talk about, and what do they want to talk about.
And that's the more important piece is not what do you want, but what do they want and what can you do to give them something that they want?
So that's what I did.
I got on Twitter and I started talking to authors about book marketing and I started talking to other book marketers about book marketing.
And ultimately that was how I met my co author.
And how we ended up writing a book about book marketing was because of that.
And so my biggest suggestion for anyone trying to figure out how to find customers is figure out where they are, which social media platform is their preference, and what do they want or need that you can give them.
Omer (26:50.820)
How are you finding these people on Twitter?
Katherine Sears (26:54.900)
Hashtags?
Honestly, the number of hashtags that authors, in particular writers and book marketers use is pretty spectacular.
So finding the ones that properly identify the content that you want to interact with and that they're looking for is kind of your primary step.
And it's just as simple as getting on there and doing some searches and reading what comes up.
I mean, it's really not wizardry.
It's just nuts and bolts.
What are people talking about that I should be talking about?
Omer (27:31.430)
Okay, so you're using these hashtags to find these conversations, and then how are you starting to engage with these people?
And the reason I ask is because I think a lot of the times people look at Twitter and they'll say, okay, I'm just going to start tweeting a bunch of stuff.
Katherine Sears (27:51.460)
Yeah, right, yeah.
And I think like anything else, I really recommend when you're getting started, having a plan.
I'm a big fan of checklists because there's a certain satisfaction in crossing things off or checking them off.
And when you're trying to form a new habit, whether you're a Gladwell follower and you think that takes 10,000 hours, or I think it was Covey that said 21 days, you need to do something to make yourself.
And so when I was first starting on Twitter, the easiest way to start is two ways.
One, retweet things that are interesting to you and secondarily answer questions.
So for me, I was answering questions about the publishing industry.
I was answering questions about book marketing in specific.
I answered a lot of questions about some of the nuts and bolts about how do you create an ebook?
How do you, you know, what's the difference between Kindle and Nook?
Which platform should I start with?
And most people starting a business are experts in something.
That's the core of why you're starting a business.
And so answering questions is a great way to not only help other people who will then want to help you when you're ready for help, but to be known as someone who knows what they're talking about.
If you become an expert in your field, when you do launch your business, when you do launch a product, people will believe you, people will agree with you when you say this is a good thing because they've come to trust your opinion on that subject matter.
So that's what I did.
And for example, when I first got started, there was this whole movement where self published authors would price their books much less expensively than the big publishers.
And this is still true.
So I wanted to see whether or not the quality of the book was really comparable.
So I put out every day on Twitter a call for people to recommend to me books that were $3 or less and I would read them and review them.
And that was one of the ways that I started interacting with these authors and other people who were part of this kind of.
At the time it was really a movement, this self publishing movement.
Omer (30:05.180)
And so you weren't.
Were you selling anything at that time?
Katherine Sears (30:08.780)
No, no, no.
I didn't have anything to sell.
Booktrope barely existed.
I was trying to become known in those circles as somebody who was sympathetic to people wanting to do something different, known as someone who was interested in pushing the boundaries of.
Of traditional publishing, that I didn't believe books had to be expensive to be high quality.
And I just spent all my time on blogs, on Twitter, anywhere these people were, and gave them everything from reviews to advice.
And so when we really got rolling with booktrope, I had already kind of become known in those circles for those things.
And that's really, you know, still what booktrope is about.
We're perfectly happy to be known as different and unusual and not like other publishers.
Omer (31:05.950)
Were you going on Twitter as your own profile or as booktrope?
Katherine Sears (31:11.950)
Myself.
So the.
And I've been lazy about Twitter lately just because of being in Y Combinator.
You don't have time to do much else besides grow your business.
But I was on as KCIR's books and I'm still on as KCIR's books.
There is a booktrope stream, but that is managed by a couple different people, not just myself.
I have a lovely woman named Emily Clanton who manages that for us now.
But it is still about giving.
We don't sit there even on the booktrope stream saying buy books, buy books, buy books, buy books.
Because very few people buy anything because they're told to.
So social media doesn't work very well if you tell people what to do.
Omer (31:58.880)
And so how were you getting customers?
How were you attracting people to come and use the webtrope platform when it was available?
Katherine Sears (32:10.080)
So really we were looking for people who wanted something different.
So we attract a lot of people who have previously self published.
Self publishing is great for entrepreneurial people, but a lot of authors get into it because they think it's going to be easier and it really isn't.
It's actually much harder because you have to be a business person.
So we tend to attract people who have at least self published one or more books.
And so interacting with that group of people and explaining to them what, what it is that we took off their plate was a big part of how we attracted early adopters.
We offer a sense of community and when you are an independent professional, whether that's an author, a marketer or an editor, one of the things that's hard is you really are just sitting at your desk alone.
And so that community aspect was very appealing and that's very demonstrable online on Twitter, Facebook and other places.
So really interacting with people and explaining how we were able to help them was the easiest way for us to attract users to our platform.
Omer (33:23.270)
At what point did you feel like you were getting meaningful traction with this business?
Katherine Sears (33:29.590)
So honestly, I felt like things started to really gel last year and that was largely due to building enough technology that we didn't have puppeteers, if you will.
A lot of times when you start with a lean model or minimum viable product, it looks smooth and seamless from the top, but there's somebody underneath the puppet making those things happen, toggling those switches on and off.
So it really was when we built the platform out to the point where that was less the case.
And I think really the biggest turning point for, for us actually came just this past couple of months when we were able to turn on our application system for all of the different roles, because that was the most labor intensive part of the process was screening everyone and every book and everything coming through the doors.
So automating a huge portion of that process process really allowed us to scale 10% a week starting mid January.
Omer (34:40.660)
Got it.
So let's talk about the business today.
What sort of revenue are you guys doing?
Katherine Sears (34:48.740)
So we're on track right now to be a million dollar annual run rate this year.
And our growth plans have us achieving a $3 million run rate by the end of the year.
So we have big momentum going right now and our challenge is keeping it going is scaling at the rate that we intend to.
Omer (35:12.660)
Yeah, when did you apply for Y Combinator?
Katherine Sears (35:16.180)
So we applied last fall and the vetting process starts with an online application, which is a largely written application form.
And then it goes to an actual in person interview process.
And that was in, I want to say that was in November and we actually flew down to California for that.
And part of it is you have to relocate.
So my two co founders, Ken and Andy did and still are in Mountain View as part of that process.
I went back and forth.
As I mentioned, I'm a mother, so relocating full time wasn't possible for me.
But I went back and forth a lot.
So.
And we got in, we were one of, I think this the batch we were in the winter 15 batch was 106 companies and I'm told several thousand apply for each session.
And it's intense.
It is an intense period of focus on the business.
For a lot of businesses, it's when they kick off, it's when they launch the business.
For, for us, as I mentioned, it was about scaling, it was about going from MVP to full blown business.
And that's exactly what we did.
Omer (36:31.380)
But you already had a product and revenue and customers before you got into Y Combinator, right?
Katherine Sears (36:37.260)
That's right.
That's right.
But we went from having, as an example, we went from having a couple hundred books in our pipeline to having well over a thousand.
So the exponential growth in that three month period was pretty huge.
Wow.
Omer (36:54.270)
What do you think has been the most valuable lesson that you've learned from that experience of going through yc?
Katherine Sears (37:03.870)
The thing that took me by surprise that I heard and dismissed until I internalized and understood it was do things that don't scale.
And I assumed that meant do whatever it took, be scrappy.
And that is part of it.
But what it really means is just because you're doing something today that doesn't scale doesn't mean it won't scale later once you have gotten to a stage down the line of development for your company.
So in early days for Ken and I, spreadsheets and email, that that would not have scaled.
But at the same time we would not have gotten off the ground if we hadn't done that first.
Or last year when we were still trying to bring manuscripts and authors in, reading every book and talking to every author, that wouldn't scale, but we wouldn't have gotten to where we are now with our logic trees if we hadn't done that first.
So sometimes doing things that don't scale deliberately and just taking that leap of faith that they will Once you.
You figure it out, it's scary, but darned if it wasn't.
Some of the best advice I've ever been given.
Omer (38:11.460)
Yeah.
I think a lot of people have read Paul Graham's essay about doing things that don't scale.
But I think you're right.
It's a very different experience when you have to actually figure out how you're going to apply it to your own business.
Katherine Sears (38:25.940)
And I think people get sucked into, especially engineers.
I'm happily married to an engineer, so I say this with love.
It has to be perfect.
I can't let anyone use it until it's perfect.
I can't let it out of beta until it's perfect.
And, you know, Ken always says perfection is the enemy of the good.
And I think he's right.
It's not going to be perfect.
It's going to be perfectly imperfect forever.
That's the nature of life.
It's the nature of technology as well.
Omer (38:58.500)
I love that quote, actually being perfectly imperfect forever.
Katherine Sears (39:02.180)
Yeah.
Awesome.
Omer (39:04.580)
All right, Katharine, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Katherine Sears (39:10.900)
Sure.
Yep.
Omer (39:11.620)
Great.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Katherine Sears (39:16.260)
I just shared it.
Do things that don't scale.
Omer (39:19.620)
What book, and only one book, would you recommend to our audience?
And why Blink?
Katherine Sears (39:26.170)
By Malcolm Gladwell.
Because people make decisions without consciously thinking about them.
Omer (39:33.930)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Katherine Sears (39:39.290)
Flexibility.
It's never going to go the way you think it will.
Omer (39:44.570)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Katherine Sears (39:49.050)
It's actually a new one.
It's a company that launched with us in the same Y Combinator batch called called Work Life.
And it is a dead simple tool for managing meetings for your company.
Omer (40:02.620)
Is that@worklife.com?
Katherine Sears (40:04.380)
yep.
Omer (40:05.020)
Okay, I'll have to put that in the show notes.
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business or market or problem would you want to go and solve?
Katherine Sears (40:18.060)
Wow.
Good question.
Because this is sort of my dream problem to solve right now.
The only other thing I would like to solve, I don't think that we've solved the connection to readership problem.
I think there are a lot of companies trying to solve that.
Wattpad is, Amazon is.
But I don't think it's really been solved yet.
I don't think we know how to interact with consumers when it comes to books.
In the most effective way possible.
Omer (40:48.510)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Katherine Sears (40:56.300)
I speak French and I have French bulldogs.
Omer (41:00.300)
French bulldogs.
Katherine Sears (41:01.420)
I do.
Yeah.
Omer (41:03.740)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Katherine Sears (41:10.860)
You know, this is going to sound ridiculous given what I do, but reading.
And it's important because I have to remind myself to read for fun, that if I lose that, I've lost a huge, huge part of what's been an enjoyment for my entire life.
And so I have to remind myself, and I do read non book trope books for fun.
Omer (41:37.250)
Awesome.
Those are great answers, Katherine.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Booktrope, they can go to Booktrope.
That's Booktro P E.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Katherine Sears (42:00.640)
They can reach out via email, which is all on that site.
And I am ridiculously easy to find on just about any social media platform you would care to use.
And you are more than welcome to tweet me or message me, whatever, ever, wherever.
Omer (42:15.530)
Awesome.
Catherine, thanks again and I wish you and Booktrope continued success.
Katherine Sears (42:19.610)
Thank you so much, Omer.
Omer (42:21.010)
Take care.
Cheers.
