work done while at Radolo
BetterBookClub.com is an online training tool focused on encouraging employees to read. Users can add their own books or read one of the 400 of the most renowned business books that come prepopulated. Users read the books, submit book reports, and receive points that their company can turn into cash or some other form of non-financial compensation. The main goal is to foster a culture of learning and reading that is non-centralized and employee-driven.
The Problem
The company that asked us to build BetterBookClub.com had been running its own corporate book club for years using a homegrown process. They realized that it had proven a great internal training tool and that their current platform wasn’t scalable.
The client’s current solution included various spreadsheets and word documents to document and track each employee’s progress as they read the offerings of the book club.
The Need
The client came to Radolo hoping for an easy to use tool that companies could adopt to run their own book club and easily purchase books to add to their corporate libraries. Ultimately, the client’s goal was to build a scalable cloud-based SaaS application that could be sold on a monthly subscription to other companies.
The Approach
A big part of BetterBookClub.com’s appeal is its organic nature. There’s no instructor or training manual, it’s just reading books and learning about whatever you read. A potential issue with this is incentivizing users to adopt the program. To counter this potential issue we use some gamification around earning points for each book read.
Each time a user reads a book they can submit a book report and what they took away from it. They receive a certain number of points based on the book. These points accrue and users can check out where they stand versus their peers on a big scoreboard right on the dashboard. This gives all users in the company insight into what others are doing and encourages them to keep reading.
As with many SaaS ideas, a tricky part about BetterBookClub.com is figuring out how to monetize it. It’s a really cool idea, but it’s tricky to know how many companies would be willing to pay for it. It was soon realized that charging for the service itself was missing the point as a bigger opportunity was selling the books to fill corporate libraries.
Through a partnership with Amazon BetterBookClub.com places a custom Amazon link with every book in the system and easily allows users to search Amazon’s library directly from the application. This gives the user the best of both worlds in that they can rely on Amazon’s huge inventory and quick delivery, but also not have to leave BetterBookClub.com to find what they’re looking for. This also provides BetterBookClub.com with some money to keep the lights on.
The Outcome
BetterBookClub released in October of 2014 and has had great results. Companies love the easy-to-use system and its modern take on a training platform. Check it out at www.betterbookclub.com