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YourNextRead.com is a website dedicated to discovering your next book. Reading a great book has always been a unique and captivating experience. Discovering books can be fun and enjoyable but can take a lot of time. Even with reviews, opinions and book clubs finding a great book can be hit and miss. YourNextRead makes book discovery simple.
YourNextRead is uniquely powered by our users. YourNextRead combines simple one page navigation with multiple book reviews and user recommendations. YourNextRead goes beyond simply collecting reviews to actually summarising group opinion. YourNextRead makes recommending simple.
INTERVIEW
How did you decide to start it?
We’ve always been motivated to start our own business. Running something of your own, where the work you put in really affects what you get out gives a kind of satisfaction we couldn’t find in a normal desk job…
The team behind YourNextRead came up with this specific idea because we love to read but don’t always have lots of time to search for their next book. We found the enormous volume and choice of books online and on the high street to be a bit daunting. Online reviews and social book websites could be useful and sometimes pointed us towards other interesting books, but in the end we would often ask friends and family for a book recommendation.
Then we went travelling and found a lot of strange and interesting books which had never been on our radar before. We asked ourselves why we had never come across these books before? After a bit of digging we found that, while most online book stores proudly offer in excess of 2 million books, browsing and searching for a book without a title or author in mind is very difficult. In fact trying to find different authors is currently a difficult task. So we started YourNextRead to make discovering, buying and enjoying a book as simple as finding your next film or game.
What were your toughest challenges?
Everything. Being an entrepreneur means you are wearing every hat in a typical business, every day. Doug Richards points out there needs to be three main personality types in a business; sell, deliver; and plan. Understanding you will most likely need a support network and finding suitable help to form your company is very important and can be challenging. Values such as insight, introspection, intelligence, motivation and passion are vital to get through some of our toughest challenges.
For example one of the most difficult tasks has been the self-motivation required to really push the business forward. Especially when you hear challenging feedback and doubts from people you talk to. After all you’re not getting paid, and you don’t have a boss standing over your shoulder. You need to really believe in your idea and work hard to make it a success.
What advice do you offer to fellow entrepreneurs?
Being an entrepreneur is not the easy choice but it is really really fun! Every day is as challenging as you choose to make it. You will have to be very demanding of yourself. You will need to understand your flaws and either improve them or learn to successfully delegate and seek advice. Most of all you will need to have the motivation, passion and perseverance to grow your business.
What sites do you recommend?
There are many website offering great advice on forming and growing your business. The more general being an entrepreneur and growing a business websites we recommend are:
http://www.google.com/ – quite an obvious one
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/
http://techcrunch.com/
http://onstartups.com/
http://hbr.org/
http://www.paulgraham.com/
You will also need several sources of news to keep up to date with the world in general.
Which entrepreneurs do you admire most?
We don’t have a specific entrepreneur we admire but we admire anyone brave enough to launch their own business.
Acclaim/Awards
YourNextRead are finalists in the 2010 Cambridge University Entrepreneurs challenge. They have been mentioned on BBC 6 Music, as well as positively reviewed in numerous web articles.
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