OTER, Insights & Wisdom from 17,000+ MicroBooks

Story

After we wrapped up Tutubi, we were left with a world-class remote team of engineers and designers. I knew my strength lay in building high-quality tech products. As a reader myself, I often found it difficult to read as much as I wanted. This sparked the idea to create a platform offering people insights, highlights, and life lessons from books—primarily non-fiction. While there were a few products in the market doing something similar, I believed we could do better. And that’s how OTER was born.

Timing, Strengths & Clarity

• Gen AI tools like GPT, Claude, and Google TTS became mature in 2023. I saw an opportunity.
• Strength lies in good UX, strong tech, and a talented team.
• Existing platforms offered book summaries, but with a limited dataset of books. I wanted to offer deep learning and insights using the power of AI, which would allow access to a vast dataset of books.

Microbook & Microlearning

Oter offers insights and lessons from books, which we call Microbooks. A lot goes on behind the scenes before we deliver content from the book to you. We process book metadata, carefully craft insights using AI, rank them with our in-house algorithm, and provide a recommendation engine to help you find the best match. Not only that, we also offer Audio Microbooks. With just 10 minutes a day, you can learn a lot from Oter—boosting your productivity, confidence, positivity, and gaining practical advice from books.

Content is cheap these days, we do not charge for content. We charge for the experience

Outcome

• Oter is a mature platform offering insights and wisdom from 17,000+ Microbooks, available in both text and audio formats.
• As of Mid 2024, Oter has over 150,000 downloads and maintains a healthy rating of 4.6-4.8 on app stores. I would not call we have found PMF, but I believe we will.
• The shelf life of Oter is infinite—our grandkids can learn from the same books that our grandparents did.
• We have pivoted to focus primarily on B2B microlearning, and we are receiving positive feedback from the early adopters.

Highlights

• Successfully managed a remote team of 6+ people across the globe.
• Delivered very high-quality consumer apps on both Android and iOS platforms.
• I was involved in every step of the process. I believe practical and seamless UX is essential for Oter, and I’m proud of what we’ve built.
• We have a very lean team, focusing on providing value to our users.
• I introduced the Oter corporate gifting concept—a perfect gift for curious minds.
• Built with users—from customer complaints to feedback, always put consumers first.
• Structured Learning, Powerful Recommendation Engine, Gamification in place.

Learnings

• Part-time people are often not motivated enough—have clear goals set in place.
• Take hard decisions early. If you need to fire someone, do it sooner rather than later. Hard things against hard things.
• We wasted a lot of time building in-house tech that could have been delegated to open-source tools. Avoid the build trap.
• As a founder, be involved in everything. Sometimes it might seem like micromanagement, so make sure your team understands your vision and point of view. Being involved in everything is a must.
• Build hacky customer service toolkits alongside the core product. In our case, we built admin tools to offer customers free microbooks.
• Adapt to feedback and make data-driven decisions.
• Let users experience the core of your product as soon as possible. We learned this too late.
• Be honest with customers. I openly share technical limitations when they ask. They respect honesty.
• Have a strategy, go all-in, listen to your guts and be open to feedback.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Winston Churchill