Jannatul Choudhury, PosterBooking

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Jannatul Choudhury found his way into the digital signage software business out of frustration - writing his own cloud-based platform because the one he was under contract to use and maintain gave him endless headaches. The Manchester, UK software developer wrote the code and is now growing out the functionality and installed footprint of what he and a business partner then launched as PosterBooking, a SaaS digital signage CMS aimed at the small to medium business market. The goal was produce something that was easy to use, and met marketplace needs. One of those big needs was minimal cost - which steered Choudhury to offering a freemium model. Offering the base platform for free to end-users also allowed him to spin up PosterBooking more quickly, because that eliminated a big chunk of work needed to develop a payment gateway. I had a good chat with Choudhury about his boot-strapped start-up, his love of coding, and how his business operates when the code product is free. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Jannatul, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the background on what PosterBooking is all about? What would be your elevator pitch if I asked you that?  Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me on your podcast. I love what you're doing for the digital signage industry. It’s phenomenal, without a doubt. I think I started following you about a year ago on LinkedIn. I was thinking to myself, I'd love to be on your podcast in the near future so thank you for making that happen. A little background on what PosterBooking is: PosterBooking is a free cloud-based SaaS platform for digital signage. We make it really easy to display images, videos, webpages, and other content on any device like tablets, TVs, LED screens,s and so on from your computer or your smartphone. The platform can be white labeled and is available in seven different languages.  So how did we start PosterBooking? Me and my co-founder, Monsur, we've known each other for quite a long time now, we've had various startups along the way. We were managing some screens for the NHS in the south of England and we were using an existing digital signage platform and every now and then, we used to have some issues and we'd have to travel down there. It was like a six-hour round trip just to make some changes or if the screen was down, we didn't have any playback on what was actually happening. We'd have to go down there with our laptop, keyboard, and mouse just because it was like a Windows machine. And from that we thought, yeah, let's look at alternatives. See what's there, are there any cost-effective solutions? And it has to work on mobile. So we were looking through a handful of them and we couldn't find exactly what we were looking for, like we were looking for a solution that could either be free for a couple of screens so that we didn't have to exactly pay, we don't mind paying for add-ons, et cetera, if it benefits us, and is something that's solely usable on mobile.  Obviously at the time, I don't think that there were many platforms out there that provided that so we thought like, how hard could this be? I've got a tech background, so I thought why not give you a crack? And that's how PosterBooking started.  So you're a coder, right?  Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah. I graduated in 2016 with a software software engineering degree. So I've got quite a bit of a background in tech, especially SaaS as well. And you're based in the Manchester area?  Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, that's correct. Manchester, England.  When you were servicing this NHS install any of coming to grips with this not being the solution that you needed, I'm curious if you canvased the marketplace and looked at the options out there because there's a whole bunch of “easy to use, affordable” all those kinds of terms CMS software options out there.  Did you half pause when you'r