When did you create YouScribe?
YouScribe was created in late 2010, early 2011. After working for some time in publishing and e-commerce, I wanted to stay in the world of reading and create a digital platform, a streaming "library" model. YouScribe's ambition was to be a streaming library accessible in France via a subscription model. This initial vision has been maintained but has evolved considerably since then.
Can you describe your activities?
YouScribe is an open digital library, based on the YouTube model, where you can publish your own works to build up a catalog alongside publishers' publications.
We began to recruit subscribers gradually, year after year. However, our main difficulty lay in our ability to expand our catalog to include more and more publishers and recent works. At the end of 2016, we asked ourselves the question that many startups ask themselves: how can we move to a faster, bigger, and more interesting level of growth?
What is your development strategy in Africa?
While France has an extraordinary offering, with 20,000 bookstores, large specialty stores, digital players, and a large number of libraries (one library for every 7,000 inhabitants on average), the same cannot be said for the African continent. We therefore decided to rethink our model to facilitate access to reading in Africa, where there is an average of one library per million inhabitants.
So in 2017, we chose to take a new direction: to focus almost all of our development efforts on French-speaking African countries. We remain very present in France, but YouScribe is most useful in countries where there are no bookstores or libraries and where there is a high demand for access to books in the education and leisure sectors.
What is the model?
We have deployed two models: a B2C model where we sell access to individuals, and a B2B model where we sell access to businesses. For individuals, we offer daily or weekly subscriptions (100 CFA francs per day and 500 CFA francs per week), and for B2B (businesses, schools, partners), we offer annual access.
We pay 60% of our revenue to authors and rights holders.
We entered into a partnership with the International Organization of La Francophonie in early 2019, as well as with other key players who confirmed our belief that our markets on the continent were the right direction to take.
What were the main difficulties you faced?
To succeed in B2C, we had to resolve two key issues: how to reach a large number of individuals at an affordable cost to the population? To do this, we were fortunate to form a strategic partnership with the Orange Group (the Orange Content division). This contract enabled us to launch the "YouScribe offered by Orange" service in four countries where the operator has subsidiaries committed to promoting access to reading.
The second challenge was payment. To address this, we formed a key partnership with Digital Virgo, a leading French company in the field of mobile payment and digital marketing, specializing in particular in the development of mobile money on the African continent. Thanks to this partnership, we are able to offer direct payment for our subscriptions by phone.
We started in Senegal in July 2019, then Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso, and we plan to expand into three or four other countries with Orange and Digital Virgo in the coming months.
Local content is an issue on the African continent. How did you choose to address it?
We had to deal with this issue quickly. So we moved quickly to expand our catalog of local content. We now have more than a million titles: books from publishers, press titles, audiobooks, comics, and educational books.
We regularly add to our catalog of works from African publishers and press titles from different countries, and we also produce our own content, particularly audiobooks narrated by Africans.
In the B2B sector, players such as Société Générale in Senegal and Majorel in Morocco have ordered annual access to our services to reward students who open a bank account or employees to promote professional training. We also launched a great initiative with CANAL+ in 24 African countries in May 2020 to provide a simple and caring reading solution for people in lockdown.
How many subscribers do you have today?
In terms of subscriber numbers, we started very small (a few hundred) and now have 500,000 subscribers. Our goal is to reach one million subscribers by the end of December 2020.