Q.Please tell us about yourself
So I’m Sambhav Ratnakar. I’m 15. My debut book, The Covert Perspective released last year, in 2015, published by one of India’s largest publishers. I’ve worked on a number of start-ups/projects.
Q. When and How did you think to launch Woju.ws?
Book promotions in the Indian literary industry are tricky. Authors are often tangled in a never-ending loop of reaching their audiences through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. According to research, only 34% of writers in the industry have admitted to have found book promotions on social networks effective. That leaves 66% of writers currently unsatisfied with their current viral marketing methods. Of course, if you’re Durjoy Datta or Chetan Bhagat, there’s nothing much you need to worry about, but for the ordinary debut author – of which the numbers are increasing drastically – book promotions are very precarious. Woju.ws was built to solve this problem. It was built to make viral marketing less problematic. The end goal, of course, is to have a platform through which you can tell hundreds and thousands of readers about your book at the click of a button.
Woju.ws is catering to two very different types of people and the reader (consumer) is one of them. The growing literary industry of India is giving birth to a new generation of readers. These readers need writers who are approachable, these readers want to ask questions, they want questions to be answered and to not only read, but know their favorite authors. And that’s what Woju.ws is attempting to do; it’s attempting to connect the reader and the writer – the consumer and the manufacturer and by doing so, it’s catering to both.
Q. Introduce your Co-Founder/Team.
I’m currently a one man army!
Q. Explain more about Woju.ws, what makes you special and how is it different from competitors such as Facebook and Twitter. Can you give us a glimpse of the scale. Some insight, please!
When Mark Zuckerberg went on to make Facebook, he used a $85 dollar hosting account. In less than a year, that numbered increased to $3000 and by 2006, it was $10 Million per month. Thanks to Facebook’s rapid growth, today, they pay a whopping 30 Million dollars monthly. That’s approximately 1 million a day, $42,000 an hour, $700 every minute. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is only for hosting. If you’d went out to build yourself your very own facebook, it’ll probably cost about $500,000 (hosting for a billion users not included) and 9 months in development. We’re talking about 60 million lines of code, people! However, the numbers may fluctuate, depending on the skills of the developers you hire. Regardless, that’s a pretty high price, compared to the estimated cost of building twitter – a few hundred dollars and only about 10 hours. Yes! 10 hours. You can make your very own replica of twitter using Ruby on Rails (what Twitter was built on initially) Needless to say, the makers don’t use ROR anymore. But if you wanted to launch a market-ready, intuitive, consumer-friendly and relevant version of twitter with a usable interface, be prepared to shed nothing less than $50,000.
Facebook does have a very high maintenance cost. In fact, Facebook’s maintenance cost is higher than what it took to build it. And considering its enormous scale, Facebook’s now started operating power plants to run their servers.
Although I haven’t spent millions of dollars on hosting or nine months in development, I launched my very own social network Woju.ws. Check it out! I’m looking for new ideas and suggestions so if you’ve got any, shoot me an email at sambhavratnakar@gmail.com or hello@sambhavratnakar.com