Romantic business: an app for poets “Poetry”, where one can share, read and comment poems

In 2017 Vsevolod Tolkachev took a taxi home, talked to the driver Alexei Evdokimov who was an aspiring young poet trying to make money for publishing his first book. Vsevolod took a business approach, examined a “poetic” market and saw an opportunity to build a successful company.

Platform “Poetry” was created to provide an opportunity to read, publish and promote personal poems. While learning about the market, it became obvious that services for promoting authors as media persona was highly demanded. The segment in Russia grows by 9% annually for the last 5 years. Nevertheless, the niche was almost empty. With that respect Vsevolod concluded that it will take 2–3 years to establish a successful company, not 10–15 as in other segments!

In a year Vsevolod left other businesses, focusing strongly on the poetry project. Alexei was already performing at the best stages in Moscow and published two books. The duo created a concept of the platform for modern authors. Dmitriy Savvidi has entered the project as a seed investor and later became CFO of the platform.

At the beginning Vselovod was acting as a designer, developer and marketing specialist. Alexei was the creative bridge between the project and the potential audience — poet communities that he was an active member of. Alexei spread the word about the platform, asked questions and received the feedback. The journey was long and full of challenges and , finally, on March 21st 2018 at the Global Poetry Day the app “Poetry” was launched on Apple Store and Google Play.

Thanks to advertising on social media and word-of-the-mouth poets and readers started to register on the platform. The app was downloaded 1000 times during the first week. At that time only basic functions were available: user could add his/her materials as a text, place it on the main page and comment on other poems. As an alternative for the videorecords one could upload Youtube link.

It’s important to note that authors were using promotion services from the very start, even when the audience was not big. The demand was proved immediately, the profit exceeded the estimates up to 10–15%.

A year ago “Poetry” has received a grant from Yandex.Checkout and improved the platform: created a more user-friendly interface, added an option to upload videos with duration up to 5 minutes, integrated the statistics page for authors to monitor the effectiveness of ad campaigns, support department was established. Importantly, monetization feature was introduced — authors may now receive donations. “Poetry” now provides all the tools for business — ads attract more audience and attention, the authors become more well-known and can receive more donations.

In 9 months of 2019 “Poetry” has grown up to 120%, the average transaction increased by 25% — users actively donate to authors.

A lot is planned for the future — we aim at boosting awareness about poetry as an art, development of B2B solution, new market segments. The founders are sure that they have everything for that!