Entrepreneur Kashyap Juthani of BucketBolt.com on aspiring to be the one stop portal for students in India!

Tell us about BucketBolt.com

BucketBolt.com has been started for the sole reason to save a student’s time and efforts in procuring textbooks and also to provide a value education to them. We believe in bringing out our passion and strive for excellence; that’s why we always look forward for Mondays the most amongst all week days!

How do you differentiate BucketBolt.com from similar players?

Our target audience are students. We cater to the exact needs of a student in a much efficient way than any local textbook store. We provide cash back facility to students, where textbooks bought from us are returnable next year with 50-60% money back. These books are then uploaded as second hand books on our site. So to cut the story short we help students save thousands of rupees every year by our cash back facility. We not only provide books to students but also information about which books to refer and study, through our review system. These reviews are written by people who have either already used the books or are aware of the books. This makes it easier for the current students to buy the exact books they need.

How did the idea for your startup come about? How much capital was required to implement the idea?

We are engineers ourselves. We have gone through the phase of last minute study where most of the time books are either out of stock or we need to make frequent trips to the bookshops. That’s when we decided to start the company. More than the capital, it’s the time and effort which takes a bigger toll in running a company like this. Currently we are a bootstrapped company, living and surviving on our own money and putting the profits back in to it.

Tell us a little bit about your background.

All founders of the company have an engineering degree. Since our college days, we were passionate about doing something creative and unusual. Although we all had campus jobs in MNC’s, we decided to take the other route which was much more appealing. The idea about starting an online textbook store came to us when we were still in our final year of Engineering. We started validating our idea by doing surveys, asking friends, talking to vendors and by the time we completed our engineering, we were pretty sure that we wanted to do this.

Where do you see your start up five years from now?

5 years from now Bucketbolt.com would have a reach where a normal book store fails to reach. We would like to be present in 15 Tier 1 cities and another 50 Tier 2-3 cities. This is because in our opinion there are much bigger opportunities and growth potential in Tier 2-3 cities then in Tier 1. We want to establish ourselves as one stop educational book portal of India. We shall be providing the students not just books but also exam prep materials, and forum to share their academic and career oriented queries and experiences.

What is your revenue model?

Our revenue model is quite simple. We buy at higher margins from Publishers/Distributors and pass on the maximum benefit to customers.

As an entrepreneur, what are your joys? What are the challenges?

As entrepreneurs, our greatest challenge is to compete with ourselves. We need to keep trying and experimenting with various strategies and keep getting better. We need to keep raising the bar with every day that passes. For us Joy can be something as small as getting a single book delivered to new student to as great as striking up a great business deal for the future.

How big is your team? Tell us about your team? Are you looking at hiring?

Currently we are 4 founding members, who head each vertical like logistics and distribution, marketing, Operations and Technical part. Other then this we have a strong team of 10-12 interns to assist us in day to day operations of the company. Since in terms of shipping, we have our own delivery mechanism as well as tie-ups with courier services for delivery of books. In terms of hiring, currently we are looking at people on logistics side who can be useful in setting up an efficient and robust delivery system.

Let us know about your expansion plans.

Currently, we are operational in Mumbai and are expanding to Pune by August 2011. We are also looking at developing test preps for various entrance exams and looking at good opportunities in Tier 2 & Tier 3 cities. In our limited reach we have shown tremendous growth, In 7 months of our existence we have sold books to around 3000 students.

We at YourStory.in wish the entire team at BucketBolt.com good luck as they plan to expand to other cities in India. Please check out http://bucketbolt.com and do let us know what you think about this story by writing to feedback@yourstory.in