Nuubuu founder Ameya Bhatawdekar wants to make it simple for everyone to upload and sell their digital creations, from electronic books to designs to music to photos. There’s no shortage of places to do that now, including offerings from upstarts like Sellfy and Pulley.
Founded just four months ago, Nuubuu charges five percent, plus a 25 cent transaction fee on each sale, allowing users to upload files up to 1 GB in size.
“There are no other fees — no subscription fees, no storage fees, no bandwidth fees,” explains Bhatawdekar, who we caught up with for the latest installment of Startup Spotlight.
Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: “Nuubuu.com is a super easy way to sell your digital creations online — ebooks, music, designs — anything that can be saved as a file.”
Inspiration hit us when: “I realized that there was an opportunity when I was talking to a friend publishing an ebook. He was converting a medical book from a hard copy format into a soft copy format. It was clear that there was a large motivated customer base for that book who’d buy it regardless of which marketplace it was offered through. And, despite driving the sales of the book largely through his own marketing efforts, my friend would have to part with a significant portion of the revenues due to the transaction fees charged by the market place. Talking to a few more folks — authors and designers — it was clear that content creators were paying a hefty transaction fee even if their marketing efforts were responsible for a sale of their digital creation.”
VC, Angel or Bootstrap: “Bootstrap. Cloud platforms have significantly reduced the need for capital expenditure in the early stages of a startup. So, for the time being bootstrapping is working out just fine.”
Our ‘secret sauce’ is: “Simplicity and ease of use, from the user experience to the business model. These are early days for nuubuu.com and there are so many opportunities and so much work to do. I am sure that we’ll continue refining the secret sauce recipe, but simplicity will always to be an important ingredient.”
The smartest move we’ve made so far: “Narrowing our focus and building a solution that is simple, yet provides all the core features necessary for content creators to sell their digital goods successfully.”
The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: “Not launching publicly soon enough. The core functionality of the site was ready a few weeks ago and nuubuu.com was prime to go public, but we gave in to the “let’s work on a couple more tweaks” mentality.”
Would you rather have Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: “I’d like to have them all in my corner. Bill Gates has been my hero from the time I was in school — a platforms visionary who realized his dream of a computer on every desk and in every home. Jobs who is the epitome of fantastic and uncompromising design and an immensely successful pioneer in the digital goods market. Bezos — who built the largest online store on the planet. And, Zuckerberg — who controls the largest social network in the world.”
Our world domination strategy starts when: “nuubuu” (synonymous with “upload and sell digital goods online”) becomes a verb in the content creators’ vernacular. That will happen when the fact that you can upload and offer your digital creations for sale in less than 30 seconds on nuubuu.com becomes common knowledge.”
Rivals should fear us because: “We’re focused on simplicity; we’re more than happy to work on a short list of key features that provide significant customer value through a simple end to end experience than spread ourselves thin building a service that is long on the feature list but a doozy to use.
We are truly unique because: “We provide content creators another channel to significantly improve their revenue retention via a tool that while is simple is still very powerful. We have personal experience in the digital goods industry that helps us better understand our users and find new opportunities in the digital goods market.”
The biggest hurdle we’ve overcome is: “The initial inertia when embarking on a new project. Some projects spend far too many cycles coming up with the perfect product, the perfect plan, the perfect everything and by the time they’re ready to do some real work, some fatigue creeps in, and the project has a hard time taking off. We knocked out a prototype over a weekend and that was a great way to get started.”
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: “Less talk, more code. It is so easy to get caught up in the ideation phase that many never make out of it. Figuring out what to do, what your business plan is etc. is important, but time box that phase and start building your product at the earliest.