Noteworthy business

It was August 2010. Sitting in his hostel room at IIT-Roorkee, Shubham Agrawal was wondering that if a newspaper could be sold for ₹2 when its actual cost was ₹20, why couldn’t notebooks be subsidised. He knew the answer too — advertisements. In newspapers, ads bring in far more revenue than what the circulation and cover price generate on their own.

Determined to extend this model to notebooks, Agrawal talked to manufacturers in Roorkee and learned that they charged ₹30 for a 120-page notebook. “After a couple of days, it occurred to me that there were a lot of paper mills in neighbouring Saharanpur. So the overall manufacturing costs would be less,” he recalls.

In Saharanpur, Agrawal found a manufacturer who could make a 120-page notebook for ₹18. Then began his hunt for advertisements. Along with friend Anubhav Goyal, he spent the next month-and-a-half trying to convince shopkeepers in the vicinity to advertise in the new notebooks.

Fabco, a local luggage-maker, was the first to agree followed by a garment store, a computer stationery outlet and Café Norma. “We collected ads worth ₹22 per notebook. So, after paying ₹18 to the manufacturer, we still had money left for transportation and logistics. We broke even in the first attempt itself.”

The duo placed the first order for 1,500 notebooks in Saharanpur, brought them to Roorkee, and distributed them free to poor students in the city as well as their college-mates. And thus was born Adister — advertisements+register.

With two more college years ahead of them, Agrawal and Goyal could not take up the business full time. They manufactured about 5,000 notebooks during that period. “While in college, we used to go for business competitions. The prize money helped us sustain the business, which was very small at that time.”

When they graduated in May 2013, Agrawal and Goyal had already generated profits and bootstrapped the business for the coming year. In July 2014, Adister raised ₹25 lakh from a Mumbai-based high networth individual. The company has not looked back since.

Currently, it sells about one lakh notebooks a month. “The number will go up to three lakh from January,” says Agrawal. He is expanding rapidly, thanks to his two-pronged business model. One, Adister outsources manufacturing to notebook makers, gets ads and sells the books under its brand name.

The second part involves partnering with local manufacturers that sell under their brand name. Adister brings in ads and the manufacturer displays a ‘powered by Adister’ tag alongside the brand name. Agrawal ensures these notebooks have the high paper quality and rounded page corners that he considers the hallmark of brand Adister. In Delhi, for instance, the company has tied up with Aniket, and more tie-ups are expected.

Adister comes out with a new edition of notebooks every month, featuring fresh ads. Bewakoof.com, HCL Technologies, Oxigen, Money on Mobile, Voonik.com, Boxit restaurant chain and a smoothies chain in Mumbai are among the advertisers. “Our ad revenue ranges from 30 paise to ₹2.5 per ad per notebook and this ad revenue is our profit,” says Agrawal. The monthly profit currently hovers at around ₹3-4 lakh. “We are targeting ₹10 lakh per month by January,” he says.

Thanks to the ads, Adister is able to sell a 180-page notebook for ₹35 when it costs about ₹55 elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, Adister notebooks are the highest-selling items in the books and stationery section of online shopping site shopclues.com. “We sell through more than 200 retailers at the moment and will later expand our online presence.”

That’s not all. Adister has developed a mobile app that can digitalise the notebooks. With the app, students can create a PDF (portable document format) file from their Adister notebooks that have four pointers on the corners of each page. “Our partners’ notebooks are also compatible with this app” says Agrawal. The app will go live in January and is expected to further boost Adister’s sales. Time for the business to turn a page again?

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