Techie starts Dial a Book
By Hitesh Shetty

Mayank Dhingra studied to be an electronics engineer and started his career as a software developer.  In 2009, he quit the security of a full time job to start Dial-a-Book that lets you order all types of Books over the phone.  They accept Cash on Delivery in 27 cities including NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkatta, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Hyd. TG caught up with Mayank

Techgoss (TG):  Tell us about your educational and IT Work Background?
Mayank Dhingra (MD): I am an electronics engineer by education and started working as a software developer and eventually turned into a Social Media Consultant. My first job was with Fidelity in which I worked on building and enhancing software (on Microsoft technologies) for their internal use. In my second job at Slideshare I worked on their Slidecast feature, did some work on the back end/server side and some front-end coding for a few features.

TG: How was Dial-a Book business idea born?
MD: I've always wanted to start a business around books and after some research and deliberation it occurred to us that there's a lot of scope in simplifying the process of buying books and thus Dial-a-Book happened

TG: How is Dial-a Book different from other online bookstore portals and similar business models?
MD: Dial-a-Book is a one of its kind service that lets people order books over phone, which we feel is the most intuitive / simple way of buying and we accept Cash upon Delivery. The business model is similar to online bookstore portals and we spend our money on procuring and delivering books and not on the retail space. Also, since we deal in just books we can afford to do a lot more things which others might not be able/want to.
 

TG: What is the revenue model of Dial-a-book?
MD: We work like any other online book store by procuring books at a discounted price, spending a portion of it on procuring and delivering them and passing a part of it to customers in form of discounts.
 

TG:  What are your future plans?
MD: Future plans are to tie-up with more suppliers, increase number of cities where we have cash on delivery and increase our team size
 

TG:  Dial-a-book has been nominated as a start up to watch by Inc magazine.  How did that happen?  How has it helped your company?
MD:  To be honest, I was not aware of that :) No clue when / how that happened. We are getting good reviews in media which brings its share of new customers and validation to our service.