[Start人] "Decided to Start a Business After Seeing Scribbles in Used Books"... Startup 'Seosa' Delivering Books

Book-Based Content Subscription Startup 'Seosa'
Compresses Book 'Messages' into Short Videos, Texts, and Audio
Delivers the Experience of Reading Without Reading for Busy Modern People
Recruits Current Professors and Bank Managers to Write Manuscripts
Provides Customized Reading Curation Based on Behavioral Traits and Big Data

Jung Doseong, CEO of Seosa. [Photo by Seosa]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwak Minjae] "I quit Samsung Life Insurance, where I worked for 10 years, and opened a bookstore. Since I usually enjoy reading, I underlined sentences and left doodles in the corners of books. Office workers liked that it saved them reading time and kept buying these books at a premium. A used book titled ‘Genius of Differentiation’ filled with dense doodles was so popular that three more copies were sold. Suddenly, I thought someone’s doodles in a book could become content, which led me to start a business."

Jeong Doseong, CEO of the book-based content startup ‘Seosa’, said this. Seosa aims to deliver the experience of reading a book without actually reading it, catering to busy modern people. By subscribing to Seosa’s dedicated application for 5,900 KRW per month, users receive books in compressed formats such as short videos, text, audio, and card news.

App screen of Seosa.
Photo by Seosa

CEO Jeong explained, "Although our content is based on books, we differ by providing Seosa’s unique content through storytelling by excerpting parts of books or adding interpretations to provide context. Our motto is to ‘offer a sense of growth to working people’ through Seosa’s own ‘doodles.’"

Do people think Seosa’s content is worth paying for? This was the biggest concern for CEO Jeong. "The main reason office workers paid extra for the books I underlined and doodled in was because I was the bookstore owner. They trusted the doodles in the books of someone who looks at books every day." Based on this insight, Seosa secured trust in its content by entrusting manuscripts to experts in each field. For example, when creating content called ‘Sense of Wealth,’ behavioral economics books were written by a current economics professor, and finance-related books were entrusted to a manager at a commercial bank. CEO Jeong said, "We value content quality and reader trust so much that we boldly discarded about 100 pieces of content created with initial time and money when we judged they could not satisfy readers."

The appearance of the bookstore 'Seosa, Your Library' that was founded in the past.
[Photo by Seosa]

Another unique feature of Seosa is providing customized reading curation to reduce the opportunity cost of modern people wandering about what to read. Content such as ‘Book Insight,’ ‘Mindfulness,’ and ‘Sense of Wealth’ is tailored through four types of curation based on industry and job, behavioral tendencies, situations, and big data algorithms. Especially, the technology classifying content types according to 16 behavioral tendencies of ICRU (I Can Read You) is Seosa’s proprietary patented technology.

He managed corporate clients and handled large-scale transactions in Samsung Life Insurance’s corporate sales department but realized late that he enjoyed creating content. He moved to Samsung Multi-Campus, a corporate education company affiliated with Samsung Life Insurance, and eventually started his own business. "It took a big decision to move to an affiliate company where the salary was about half of what I used to earn. Still, I have no regrets because I could create content. That experience greatly helped me build Seosa."

So far, Seosa has received about 1 billion KRW in seed investment from Kim Gisa Lab and angel investors. It plans to raise pre-Series A funding in the second half of this year. Previously, it mainly supplied content to B2B companies such as university hospitals and financial firms, but since launching its application last February, it is gradually expanding into the B2C market. CEO Jeong names the content company ‘Netflix’?not ‘Millie’s Library’ or ‘Willa’?as Seosa’s competitor. His goal is to become Korea’s ‘K-Netflix’ that sparks innovation in knowledge content.