Entrepreneurs of Budapest: Kinga Jentetics, PublishDrive

Kinga Jentetics of PublishDrive, along with co-founders Róbert Csizmár and Ádám Rendes are demystifying the world of online book publication and distribution, and taking her business from Budapest to Estonia to London.

Tell us a bit about PublishDrive and where the inspiration came from to start a startup?

The idea came when we wanted to publish my thesis from the university and realized, it’s just not that easy. So if you want to publish your own work, you have to create different accounts and you have to have technical skills as well in order to go to different stores, and in many cases, you don’t have actual access to those stores either. So we saw that there was a need.

That was the point when we realized, OK we should build something. We spoke to many publishers in many countries, not just Hungarian publishers, and we started to conceptualize the whole idea of PublishDrive. Of course, it pivoted a lot. In the beginning, for example, we were into publishing itself as well so we had printed books, just to get a feel for how the whole industry works. It’s very traditional. All the guys that are on the executive level of publishing industry companies, they are very traditional, they are artistic people in many cases because they’re authors as well.

When did you go from seeing this need, making the product for yourself, to the moment when you said ok let’s take this product and start a startup?

I always wanted to get involved in something, to create. Not just to work at a company or get a regular job, but to make a difference. And then when I saw that this idea came from my own need, and I met other people at other companies with the same struggle with ebook publishing, I saw that there’s a market and we can make a difference with a good product. That’s how we got the whole idea of creating the ebook publishing platform.

You touched upon this when you were speaking about creation — could you expand on this idea? What inspires and motivates you? What drives you on an everyday level?

I was always in love with publishing and literature. When I was a grammar school student I was writing my poems, and always passionate about books. Besides that I always really liked music as well, so all this artistic stuff I was always really into it. During university, I was working in the music industry, and I realized that the same things are happening now in publishing that had happened in the music industry before, with a few years delay. And I saw where I could apply all the knowledge from the music industry in the publishing industry as well.

I believe that every industry has to be innovated. And the publishing industry hasn’t been innovated in the last decades.

That’s why I think there’s a need, not just from our side but for all the authors and publishers in the world. And that’s what keeps me up at night. To create something which can be used by 1 or 10 or 100 thousand people, that keeps them global at a low-cost, reaching new audiences, new readers, and of course producing much happier readers who can now find books which weren’t available before in stores.

Where do you see PublishDrive a year or 5 years into the future?

PublishDrive won’t just be an e-book distribution firm, but more like a publishing company. We are working on different new features enabling publishers to go beyond distribution. We can help them in terms of marketing their book — that’s another aspect that could be very well used by publishers.

Right now we solve the problem of reaching more people with new stores worldwide. But we want to go beyond and give them the opportunity to get noticed in these stores. There’s another aspect that can be discovered by PublishDrive — how to create translations, which could create new content globally and could ease the whole system behind the industry. Right now it’s really costly or bureaucratic if you want to have your book published in another language by another publisher.

So that’s how we see ourselves, to be more like a publishing company in the end.

Taking a more narrow lens — I’d be interested to know for you personally, working with PublishDrive, this is your first startup, could you give an example of a really interesting obstacle or challenge?

There are always many challenges, that we need to overcome basically every day.

But…Well, when to say NO. In many cases you have to work with people, work with partners, you have to find your focus and find your team. And then you have to trust those people who you are working with 100%. If at anytime you feel, OK there’s something wrong or I don’t have time for that, or I don’t feel that it’s in our focus right now, then you actually have to say no and learn how to say that.

I spoke to a lot of people who say, yeah, I want to be an entrepreneur because then I will manage my own time and I’ll be my own boss. Then they realize that it’s not that easy at all. You have to wake up really early, or make your 24 hour day stretch, and you have to manage your time very well. You have to find people to build relationships with, but of course, you also have to find the people who will become your team and who you can work with. Then you do business development, then you do financials and there are so many tasks. You realize that 24 hours is not enough.

There’s a flexibility where you can manage your own time, but if you’re a bit lazy some days, then you’ll see that the company doesn’t go in the right direction. If you don’t take yourself seriously this way, many companies can fail. I can see these kinds of examples as well. You have to be very disciplined, which is not easy when you’re running your first startup. You really have to build your own culture, your own team, your everything, and it’s not easy.

Of course being a female entrepreneur isn’t easy either. Especially in the startup world, talking to investors and so on, it’s very male dominated, which is a global problem. When you look at the majority of companies, all the execs are males, only a few percent of the execs are females, it’s a global problem. Still if you’re involved in this world you have advantages as well — you’ll stand out from the crowd.

When you go to a party, and you want to talk business and you realize at a point that it’s not really about that anymore :). You have to find your limits. And you have to take yourself more seriously if you are a woman in this world. Just to make sure that everyone else takes you more seriously too.

As a female you have to be more self-disciplined, and louder.

A lot of people, when they think about female entrepreneurs or women, they think they’re softer, nicer, friendlier, whatever, they don’t make tough decisions. You have to go beyond this and show them that, yes, I can be tough if it’s needed and I can make decisions which are not easy at all.

So you have to prove yourself to people which is tough in the beginning, as a first-timer. But I think it’s going in the right direction. I’m getting to know more and more female leaders, and I was involved in some female entrepreneur and female leadership workshops as well, which was very interesting because I could meet more women globally who are really talented and amazing. And I think that’s the future, that more women will be involved in all kinds of business or technology industries.

Is there any advice you would have loved to give yourself?

Yes! Everyone should start thinking big.

Last year we were involved in one accelerator program, Startupwiseguys in Estonia. During this whole ‘small MBA,’ where we met mentors and professionals who helped develop our product, we met a lot of investors as well. We thought, OK we should think big. We need a global perspective, and try to focus on things that can be scaled at a global level as well. And I would give this advice to every startup. To think big from the very beginning.

Of course, when it’s about building the product and the team, you have to hire the right people. It’s always a struggle, as a startup, you can’t hire someone wrong to the team because then all the intellectual property or know-how will leave the company if you have to part ways with them.

The whole startup world involves a lot of uncertainty, so there should be people who are willing to take this kind of risk, who can enjoy uncertainty and can move fast and pivot fast as well.

One thing that has come out through these interviews is that team is everything, at the end of the day.

Another thing is, there are a lot of startups building the product, the product, the product, and that’s all they do. Then they don’t show the customers. What we did is we started really lean. We didn’t have a product yet. We were basically selling human work.

We had our first customers in this way, there was no product, no platform no anything, but we had students who could do the manual work.

When we saw OK, these are the manual processes, these are the customer needs, then we could build something that would actually solve those needs in a way that was most effective.

From the perspective of PublishDrive as a Budapest-based startup. What’s your opinion on the local startup community and what you see happening here? Where is it developing?

Basically, last year I wasn’t in Budapest but for a few weeks. Last year I was in Estonia and in London too. I think the Budapest ecosystem is evolving of course. There are more startups who are trying to develop cool products, and I can see that there are more investors who are searching for good products as well.

Compared to, for instance, the ecosystem in Talin in Estonia, I think we still have a lot to improve. Especially in the way that the more developed startups, like Skype, Paypal, Transferwise and so on, how much they give back to the community.

They really try to give back, not just to the whole country, but to the startups themselves. They really mentor them, they give packages to the startups as well that they can use for free, and of course the knowledge as well, that they can use to build successful startups. And I think that’s one thing that we can improve. Of course, the whole government supports startups in Estonia very much, which is still lacking in Budapest.

Compared to London it’s really well-developed in terms of all the events where you can go as a startup. Of course, you really have to find the best events for yourself. But what’s still missing is this global perspective.

In many cases I can see that many startups think really in the Hungarian market. Which we were doing as well. There is a point when you have to realize that Hungary is not the world, so if you want to build something really big, then think big. Then you have to go global and in this case you can’t just be in Budapest.

You have to go to the market, you have to go there, you have to meet the people there.

As far as I could see when I moved to London it opened a lot of doors for us because they could see ok, this startup is not just talking about doing something, but they’re here. They really made an effort to come to London, to meet customers and to meet all the people there who could actually be involved in the company. I think that’s really important for all the companies here in Budapest, to think globally.

There’s a classic construction of organizing a development team here and when you get to a certain point to branch out and meet your customers with a satellite office elsewhere. At what point did you guys decide to branch out from the Hungarian HQ and start meeting customers? Was there initial work in Budapest?

We did a lot of work first in Budapest. We had a lot of customers here, we built our product, and before we moved to London we did a lot of research, just to make sure that we could meet the relevant people there, and decide whether there is enough customers or potential partners there of course.

How realistic is it to prototype something in Budapest?

It really depends on your product and customers. if you’re building an online product, it’s possible to do some prototyping and beta testing before going out and meeting customers in-person. Because of course it’s much more costly and you have to have the resources at hand. So if you want to just validate something in Hungary, it’s a good way to do it.

In Hungary, it’s not the most startup friendly ecosystem, it’s not that easy. If you have a business here that’s profitable or break-even, or there are people willing to pay for it, there will be other people and companies around the world willing to pay for it.