Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Gabriel Tomitsuka, Founder of Unconvo, a platform for book communities based in Germany.
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Here’s what Unconvo is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Covid has led to a resurgence in reading, especially for Gen Z. Sales of most fiction categories have exploded by over 50% in the last two years. However, the entire book market has been pretty much neglected by technology. The incumbent in the space is Goodreads, which has been largely unchanged since it was acquired by Amazon in 2012. There is no real way for people to connect with one another over books, except for in-person book clubs.
The Solution:
We are building a platform to allow readers to create meaningful connections with fellow book lovers. Unconvo will allow you to discover, organise, and discuss your favourite books with a wider community.
The Team:
We’re a team of three working on Unconvo at the moment. I’m a solo founder, and my background is in Computer Science, which I studied at TU Munich, and I’ve worked in technical roles on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Deutsche Börse, and Contrary Capital. I was previously also CTO and co-founder of an essay reviewing service. Sofia is a student at UPenn / Wharton, studying Computer Engineering + Business Analytics, and is an Engineer on our team. Amy is a Product Designer at Amazon Music, working on Product with us part-time.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I faced the problem myself back in 2020. I’ve been a Goodreads user for most of the past decade, and it’s consistently been the most frustrating platform to use, but there are no alternatives. I always found it so sad that the book space had been completely neglected by technology. During Covid, I got quite involved in the book community on TikTok, and started to speak to other people in the space and noticed they all shared the same frustration with Goodreads. I realised that this was a unique opportunity for me to work on, and create a better solution.
I wasn’t super satisfied with the work I was doing in finance at the time, and I really wanted to work on something meaningful, so when I realised I could work on this, I knew I had to do it.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Most social networks aren’t leveraging data as much as they can, therefore letting users do too much of the manual work. TikTok stands in contrast to this, with its incredible algorithm that picks relevant content for the user. Gen Z doesn’t want to have to put that much work into finding relevant content. So, for example, book clubs where you have to read one book a month feel more like homework than community. There is great potential to combine technology and the needs and wants of Gen Z readers.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We shipped a V1 of our product a short while back, and that was a major milestone that we worked toward for a long time. Getting this first version shipped has also allowed us to receive some great customer feedback about some of the core features, and we’ve been working hard to adapt and improve them.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
The user research and design process, from taking customer insights from the actual product to coming up with new creative ways to solve the problems you face along the way, is exciting but quite challenging. We are building something completely new, which means we have to take a few shots into the dark, which leads to some strong feedback, and iteration cycles.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
Before starting a company or fundraising, have definitive answers to these questions: why do you think you should be a founder, why is now the right time to build this, and what does the world look like when we succeed?
Clarity regarding these questions is critical so the team stays aligned in terms of what to build & prioritise. Ambiguity here blocked us fairly often early on, as we often weren’t sure what exactly we were building towards.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Start with a narrow approach, and focus on the smallest possible category you can reach.
The co-founder of Doordash once shared this advice with me, since they found out soon after their launch that their biggest customers were parents with young children. This was unexpected, but they then narrowed down and focussed on how best to get their product to this group of people.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Cultivate curiosity & work on ambitious projects/features that are not very likely to succeed, especially if you’re in a market that already has major incumbents.
Succeeding as a startup is really hard, as you usually need a product that is at least 3x better to convince users to switch. You need to take bold risks with ideas that are a bit crazy — personally, I go on long walks without my phone or music to induce boredom, as I find they are great for deep thinking.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Really obsessing over what the fastest possible iteration cycle can be, is something I would have started doing earlier. Throughout the last year, we had a big shift in strategy in that regard. It’s hard to roll out versions you’re maybe not proud of, but that is something we had to get over in order to get effective feedback as early as possible.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I’ve been obsessed with the idea that everything around us was once a concept in a human’s imagination (corridors were invented in 1597!), and accordingly inspired by the creative processes of geniuses like the Wright Brothers, Leonardo da Vinci, and Alan Turing.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love - Marty Cagan
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
Only the Paranoid Survive - Andrew Grove