The Booklet Guy
This is the story of Amrut Deshmukh, dubbed The Booklet Guy, a social entrepreneur who turned his passion for reading into a career with his company Booklet.
He was a Chartered Accountant by training and worked as a Fund Manager for a few years before succumbing to the startup bug. His most recent project, or as we like to call it, initiative, is to “MAKE INDIA READ.”
He has an impact on the millions of Indians who desire to read books but don’t have the time. Through his app Booklet – Mission Make India Read, he develops twenty-minute book summaries and the more recent one-minute Tiny Booklet. Amrut Deshmukh is a Bollywood actor.
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So, what’s the tale behind Amrut Deshmukh, aka The Booklet Guy?
Coming from a low-income family, Amrut first encountered books through his brother, and at a young age. I used to despise my birthdays as a kid because my brother would ask all of my friends and relatives to bring me books and no other gifts. With time, literature sparked my imagination and took me to a completely different universe.
Amrut Deshmukh was introduced to non-fiction by his brother after completing his tenth grade. RICH DAD POOR DAD by Robert Kiyosaki was the first book he read after that.
“I was enraged at my family for not instilling in me the value of financial independence at a young age.”
Amrut Deshmukh went on to earn a six-figure monthly salary after completing his Chartered Accountancy. But it was the respect that he craved the most. Amrut quit his well-paying job to embark on a business venture. Amrut was completely devastated after three unsuccessful ventures on his LinkedIn page and one split on his Facebook site.
But Amrut remembered what his brother had advised him once: ‘Amrut, anytime you’re at a fork in the path, “READ RANDOM.”‘ He began with a few unopened novels that had been sitting on his shelf for years. The memoirs of renowned leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., APJ Abdul Kalam, and others were discovered.
The more Amrut Deshmukh studied those legends, the more he recognized how critical it was to shift his thinking from “What’s in it for ME?” to “What can I do for OTHERS?” And that was the turning point in his life. His next great idea would revolve around books, he knew.
What prompted Amrut to create Booklet?
Amrut had his Eureka moment soon after while watching Bahubali with a friend. Amrut began to narrate the important lessons from Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which they had arrived at the movie theatre 15 minutes ago. His companion was enchanted. “Amrut, I don’t have enough time to read,” he explained. You’re a voracious reader. Your reading habits can aid me if you can offer summaries of books you’ve read.”
Amrut was struck by the remarks. He chose Dr.APJ Abdul Kalam’s Wings of Fire as his first book and emailed a 20-minute book synopsis to ten of his close pals over WhatsApp, asking them to share it with their friends and family. Before he knew it, 500,000 people were eagerly awaiting the weekly book summaries over Whatsapp every Wednesday.
What were the main marketing methods employed by Amrut?
Amrut: First and foremost, I prefer to refer to it as “PERCEPTION DESIGNING.” I acquired all of my ideas via reading other people’s work. Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa were all legends who made little effort to promote their ideals. They were all united by a cause greater than themselves, and they made history. And I feel that I, too, am committed to the bigger goal of ‘Making India Read.’
“If you can’t be first in a category, create a new category you can be first in,” says one of the principles from Al Ries and Jack Trout’s book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. I chose to take on the persona of that category, a face that people associate with reading habits.
We inquired about Amrut’s inspiration for his “Booklet” application.
Amrut Deshmukh: I prefer to get ideas from unexpected places. I never conducted market research or investigated existing apps on the market. Whatsapp was the source of my initial inspiration. The user interface of the app is very similar to WhatsApp’s. The photographs of the books, for example, show as a person’s profile photo.
Tiny Booklet was born out of a Twitter conversation. Tiny Booklet was intended to describe a single subject from a book in a restricted number of words and time, much like Twitter’s 280-character character limit.
Download Booklet App from here : App Link
What can you expect from Booklet in the future?
Amrut: I’m working on a new feature called “Chat with Booklet Guy” that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning. By merely chatting, readers will be able to read a book without their knowledge. More information will be available soon!
Finally, we asked Amrut for his thoughts on entrepreneurship for our readers.
- Make little bets, Amrut. Continue to be enthusiastic, but don’t fall in love with your concept.
- While you may hear that motivation motivates people to take action, always remember that it is an action that motivates people to take action.
- Constraints encourage innovation. You don’t have to wait for everything to fall into place before putting your plan into action. An idea is only as good as how quickly it can be put into action.
