Anuradha Bajpai Co-founder of Woodpie Published On: Monday, February 22, 2016 Views 3176

"The value of a dream isn't so much the dream as the expression of potential that the dream provokes within you."

Anuradha has a never give up attitude towards life, which has been paramount to her success. With more than 12 years of experience in design and delivery of software applications across several verticals like social networking, enterprise software system as well as consumer applications, she has helped in delivering highly efficient solutions. She has also been awarded by Cisco Achievement program (CAP) for outstanding achievement and contribution to the project.

She started her career as a software engineer and gradually climbed the ladder of success. Soon she started to ponder upon the idea of launching her own startup. Woodpie was the result of immense brainstorming and bringing a conception to reality. It enables users to discover books through social experience and matches similar readers like you in your city to meet exchange and discuss books.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Woodpie.com is a social network for book lovers. Here readers can discover titles and recommend books. Woodpie.com also helps readers connect with each other. You can see what your friends are reading. You can meet up with coffee and exchange books. You save time because usually we tend to like the books recommended by our friends. You save money because you are exchanging books. In the process, you are building a new relationship too.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

Once my husband Manoj Jindal, who is also the co-founder and I saw a book in a store. The book was ‘Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps.’ We liked the title but were not sure if we wanted to buy it. We had also read ‘Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus,’ which seemed similar. So we left the book. The next day we visited a friend and spotted the same book there. Our friend highly recommended the book and lent it to us. We read it and liked it. That is when it occurred to us that we need a platform, which will help us discover books.

There are millions of books, but how do we know which is good? There are online reviews, but how do we know if the reviews are genuine, and not marketing ploys. A review from a known person always weighs higher than that of an unknown person. To meet this need we developed Woodpie.com. It is a social network which helps readers connect with each other, discover and recommend titles, meet up and exchange books. A book that you want to read may be somewhere close. You may not have to buy it but simply borrow. Woodpie.com helps you connect to the books and make a new friend.

What is your life mantra?

Dreaming is not enough. Execution is the key.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

We had outsourced the UI designing to a professional designer. We released the design in private beta, to writers and reviewers. But the users didn’t like the design. We had no money to hire a new designer. Both Manoj and I are backend developers and had no knowledge at all about front end designing. So I decided to learn designing I learnt UI designing on my own and designed the website. During that time, we had moved to the US, and my baby was just born. Unlike India, there was no help there. I had to juggle between taking care of the baby, doing the household chores, learning to design, and developing the site.

How did you overcome those challenges?

With determination, discipline and hard work. I learnt UI designing on my own and designed the website.

Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.

Ingram Content Group, the world’s largest book distributor has seed funded Woodpie.com.

How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?

We are a very small team. The problem of attrition has not risen yet. The key is to have defined roles, responsibilities and respect for each other efforts.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

Determination, hard work, focused on the goal.

Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?

Google Apps. It is free and efficient.

Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.

Time management

Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.

Being less perfectionist.

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