How a Mumbai founder turned a book club idea into a $2K/month publishing talent marketplace

Who built it, and what they built

Harshala Chavan is a maker, community-builder, and writer based in Mumbai, India, working in the publishing and content industry. She runs Merrative, a community of more than 5,000 readers, writers, journalists, and scholars who discuss and create literature together.

Merrative operates as a community-led marketplace where brands, creators, and publishers can hire publishing talent for books, articles, and research papers. Members can also build engagement around published content through recommendations, meetups, workshops, and discussions.

Where the idea came from

After a stint in the cleantech industry, Harshala wanted to build her own business. As an avid reader of newsletters and online content, she noticed there was no dedicated space for people to discuss literature.

The idea clicked at a book club meetup where she met three people who had read the same book she had, and the discussion revealed shared interests and professional overlap. She wondered whether that experience could be brought online at scale, matching people who had consumed the same content.

She had prior community experience from college, where she ran a small chemical engineering community built around a Blogger site and roughly ten WhatsApp groups. To validate the new concept, she entered several business plan competitions, reaching the finals of one run by IIT Bombay among more than 10,000 startups, and built an Instagram page to 1,000 followers as an MVP.

Early monetization came from promoting authors' books at about USD 5 per post and managing authors' Instagram accounts for around USD 200 per month. To support herself, she freelanced as a content writer, then began subcontracting work to a team of ten freelancers — an arrangement that later became the basis of Merrative's talent marketplace.