How NeoBook was born
Our glorious programmer wrote a cool article on how he programmed the NeoBook application. I want to tell about this application, so to speak, from the beginnings and from the “bell tower” of the general director of the company that created it.
So, we, the Neolayn company, being a traditional content provider, decided to develop our business towards the development of applications for iOS, Android, etc., at the end of 2010. In early 2011, we started writing the first application, visited MacWorld in Barcelona at the MWC, and generally thought what to do.
And we thought that at that stage we were not able to do cool cash apps and games from scratch. No experience, no people - there was nothing. Therefore, we decided to go through the creation of applications for the sale of content - videos and books. Having created high-quality engines, it is theoretically possible to produce many applications for selling typical content through appstor / google play in a short time, raise your level to begin with, and then, you see, we will reach the next level.
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So did. In August, we released our first “blockbuster” - the Masha and the Bear app for the sale of the same-name set. (If you look at the iPad App Store, Entertainment category, you can see this application in the first position and now). In parallel, we took up the book. Released the first application for Android - Pushkin Poems. At some point, it seemed to us that books would not bring money. Indeed, total piracy, on the one hand, and guarantee payments + royalties to the rightholders, on the other. In addition, being a novice in a long-trodden area is not cheap. From all this blew despondency.
An unexpected decision was needed. Then the idea was born to consider books as a platform for monetization, but with the rights of the authors. And what does any site need first of all? Of course traffic. And how to monetize it is a matter of technology. Books, it seemed to us, very well can solve the problem of surging traffic (looking at pirates such as filibusts, the ability of books to generate traffic is beyond doubt). Actually, we still consider this approach the most appropriate answer to the pirates.
It remained “only for everything” to persuade the right holders to give us books for a non-standard model - the purchase of books for a certain period with the right to distribute them for free and the possibility of including ads in them and disconnecting them for money. You can imagine that not all publishers immediately perceived our thoughts and innovations "with a bang." Nevertheless, "the world is not without smart people" and in the end we managed to collect a completely sane catalog.
In parallel, we worked on creating the application. “Council of Four” - Technical Director, Head of Application, Team Leader of the group of designers, your humble servant - worked according to our general assessment quite effectively. Each of us has our own experience in different areas and the combination of different competencies allowed us to design a really cool product. Remove any of the four from the process and the product would be much weaker.
Separately, it is necessary to say thanks to our team leader Pasha and the programmer Vitalik. Without them nothing would have happened. We had to work a lot with our two testers and our copywriter. Just imagine: test hundreds of epubs, fill in, reload, subtract descriptions, remove / put commas - people spent the night at work!
When ten people turn into a single team that breathes what it does, the result will be excellent sooner or later. We all burn with this work, we are really interested in creating this product. This is the case when a person works and does it not because of money, but because of a higher order of motivation — the desire to create.
Now we are creating other applications that will also be interesting, but NeoBook is our favorite product, which we are actively developing. Wait for new releases!
So, we, the Neolayn company, being a traditional content provider, decided to develop our business towards the development of applications for iOS, Android, etc., at the end of 2010. In early 2011, we started writing the first application, visited MacWorld in Barcelona at the MWC, and generally thought what to do.
And we thought that at that stage we were not able to do cool cash apps and games from scratch. No experience, no people - there was nothing. Therefore, we decided to go through the creation of applications for the sale of content - videos and books. Having created high-quality engines, it is theoretically possible to produce many applications for selling typical content through appstor / google play in a short time, raise your level to begin with, and then, you see, we will reach the next level.
')
So did. In August, we released our first “blockbuster” - the Masha and the Bear app for the sale of the same-name set. (If you look at the iPad App Store, Entertainment category, you can see this application in the first position and now). In parallel, we took up the book. Released the first application for Android - Pushkin Poems. At some point, it seemed to us that books would not bring money. Indeed, total piracy, on the one hand, and guarantee payments + royalties to the rightholders, on the other. In addition, being a novice in a long-trodden area is not cheap. From all this blew despondency.
An unexpected decision was needed. Then the idea was born to consider books as a platform for monetization, but with the rights of the authors. And what does any site need first of all? Of course traffic. And how to monetize it is a matter of technology. Books, it seemed to us, very well can solve the problem of surging traffic (looking at pirates such as filibusts, the ability of books to generate traffic is beyond doubt). Actually, we still consider this approach the most appropriate answer to the pirates.
It remained “only for everything” to persuade the right holders to give us books for a non-standard model - the purchase of books for a certain period with the right to distribute them for free and the possibility of including ads in them and disconnecting them for money. You can imagine that not all publishers immediately perceived our thoughts and innovations "with a bang." Nevertheless, "the world is not without smart people" and in the end we managed to collect a completely sane catalog.
In parallel, we worked on creating the application. “Council of Four” - Technical Director, Head of Application, Team Leader of the group of designers, your humble servant - worked according to our general assessment quite effectively. Each of us has our own experience in different areas and the combination of different competencies allowed us to design a really cool product. Remove any of the four from the process and the product would be much weaker.
Separately, it is necessary to say thanks to our team leader Pasha and the programmer Vitalik. Without them nothing would have happened. We had to work a lot with our two testers and our copywriter. Just imagine: test hundreds of epubs, fill in, reload, subtract descriptions, remove / put commas - people spent the night at work!
When ten people turn into a single team that breathes what it does, the result will be excellent sooner or later. We all burn with this work, we are really interested in creating this product. This is the case when a person works and does it not because of money, but because of a higher order of motivation — the desire to create.
Now we are creating other applications that will also be interesting, but NeoBook is our favorite product, which we are actively developing. Wait for new releases!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/145006/
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