by greenie_beans | 2025-07-23 18:13:54+00:00
great question! still figuring that one out. very glad you asked this. dunno if you are a bibliopolis spy but i will be transparent and open.

it's a similar product (right now) and definitely a very crowded market. i only need a small sliver of the market to sustain the business, so i think there is room. there are a lot of other similar products too, like booktracker. some of the book point of sales have the inventory syncing built-in, at least for some platforms. bibliopolis is built on wordpress so that gives them technical limitations (at least from an outsider - i could be wrong about that). i'm not even sure if they can sync from a point of sales onto their platform because i've seen bookstores manually enter all of their inventory from ibid into bibliopolis (which now i gotta go fact find that because now that i write this out, this seems like the greatest value-add to your question). i'm not sure how coupled bookrouter is to wordpress. i don't think they support integrations with shopify or squarespace or square etc. bookhead is platform agnostic but "platform agnostic" is too developer-y to the average bookseller so the pitch is more: "this will work with your existing tools and connects everything together" which is a pitch we are always refining.

i have a different overall vision than those products, and it's built with a more modern tech stack and design considerations. i have an ai prototype for appraising books that i've successfully used to appraise and list my own collection. and i plan to build in some automation tools that would be useful to a bigger brick & mortar, like "order me 5 more copies of 'as i lay dying' when inventory count gets down to 3" and other ways a savvy bookseller could hook into automation that could help them with their work. and for the non-technically savvy users, i'm hoping to have great customer service to help them with some automation. i think this might end up being a core part of the product but only time will time. i also have some marketing tool ideas that nobody has built, based on some past experiences working in library tech and my time doing marketing for a bookseller.

also, most of the incumbents don't have the greatest reputations but stores have no choice to use them. there is no reason that a store needs to go through customer support to set up an integration (which is the norm), though support will always be there to help if a customer struggles with that. there is also no reason that your product should have a waiting list, but this is common, too. bookhead is designed to be self-served.

one thing i've found weird: being able to sell "new" and "used" books has been a differentiator for some incumbents, which is strange and suggests to me that these apps have a bad data model. so i'm hoping to change that. it's awkward to communicate this in marketing.

aesthetics and design matter to some people, too. most bookselling software is ugly and hard to use. think about drip or basecamp — those products were in crowded markets but they were still successful because they took their own approach and it fit some people but not everybody.

but of course, the market will have to decide.