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Наталя ХандусенкоStartup
1 April 2025, 10:30
2025-04-01
A Ukrainian couple launched a book flea market in Poland, where they sold almost 6,000 books in a year. How BookFlea helps save on books and unites book lovers abroad
In Poland, product manager Oleksii Osynovskyi and his wife, designer Ira Polianska, launched a startup called BookFlea, an online platform where you can sell or buy used books in Ukrainian. This way, book lovers from Ukraine can read more paper books and save money at the same time. A simple post on LinkedIn about whether people are interested in the idea has grown into a project that has become a real online community for book fans. The couple has already invested $25,000 in the startup and are aiming to develop the product: Lesha left Reface, where he worked as a product manager, and is now expanding the team to implement their plans, including entering the Ukrainian market.
In Poland, product manager Oleksii Osynovskyi and his wife, designer Ira Polianska, launched a startup called BookFlea, an online platform where you can sell or buy used books in Ukrainian. This way, book lovers from Ukraine can read more paper books and save money at the same time. A simple post on LinkedIn about whether people are interested in the idea has grown into a project that has become a real online community for book fans. The couple has already invested $25,000 in the startup and are aiming to develop the product: Lesha left Reface, where he worked as a product manager, and is now expanding the team to implement their plans, including entering the Ukrainian market.
One day in March 2024, Ira and Oleksii were walking around Warsaw. Ira, who is a true fan of paper books, started talking about the idea of an application that would recommend what to read. They decided to test the relevance of this idea by writing a post about it on LinkedIn. As it turned out during communication on the social network, the main problem was what to do with already read books and how to read paper books cheaper. And within a week, they created an Instagram community where they offered people to sell and buy books. Over 1,000 subscribers joined in the first seven days.
About the founders
BookFlea was launched and developed by a couple with just the two of them:
Oleksii Osynovskyi has worked as a product manager at Welltech, Reface, and Restream for over 8 years. Before that, he was a designer and has a technical education, which helps him combine business thinking with creative and engineering approaches.
Ira Polianska has worked as a creative designer for over 10 years. She has skills in branding and marketing, which give BookFlea a strong emotional component that attracts readers.
BookFlea provides an opportunity to easily buy used books at affordable prices and sell them after reading.
In August 2024, we launched BookFlea, an online platform where you can easily list and buy books. Buyers can search for books by title, author, city, and language (Ukrainian, Polish, and English). Given the high cost of shipping, the city search functionality is something that users have especially requested.
«First and foremost, we are a community of people for whom reading is a lifestyle. We unite those who love books, appreciate their atmosphere, and want to share them with others,» notes the BookFlea co-founder.
The first audience is Ukrainian emigrants in Poland who seek to read books in their native language.
Today, BookFlea’s audience already has over 19,000 readers in three Instagram communities: books in Ukrainian, English and Polish. Over 1,400 people have placed nearly 8,000 ads for the sale of books with a total value of over $81,000.
BookFlea is still in the early stages of product development. Despite this, the site received 2,300 visits in February, and traffic almost doubled to 5,000 visits in March. In total, almost 6,000 books have already been sold through BookFlea.
The project is actively developing, so the team is expanding. The startup has now opened a vacancy for a developer who should also be passionate about books, like the founders.
«Along with active product development, we are also looking for opportunities to attract investments and receive grants to scale our platform even faster,» adds Oleksii.
The couple decided to focus entirely on developing BookFlea.
Over the course of a year, Ira and Lyosha have funded BookFlea with their own money, as well as income from commissions for placing book ads, advertising, and additional services. They have already invested approximately $25,000 in the project.
In February, Oleksii left Reface because he felt it was time to focus solely on his pet project.
«We recently made the decision to fully focus on developing BookFlea and continue to invest our own savings in the platform to accelerate its growth,» the co-founder added.
The couple has already earned about $6,000, which allows them to cover marketing costs and reinvest in growth. However, at this stage they cannot pay their salaries yet — all resources are directed to the development of BookFlea.
The startup’s biggest competitors are OLX and Vinted, but unlike them, it is maximally focused on books.
«In addition to marketplaces, we also compete with regular bookstores. However, our key advantage is much more affordable prices, because we help people sell and buy mostly used books,» says Oleksii.
He also added that there is a similar product in the US, PangoBooks. They launched 4 years ago and, according to Ukrainian estimates, have already generated revenue of about $250,000 per month.
«This proves that our model works, and we see great potential for scaling it in the European market,» notes the BookFlea co-founder.
The Ukrainian startup believes its success lies in the fact that it found its loyal audience in Poland, helped solve a real problem, and received incredible feedback.
«It’s hard to put into words — when people don’t just use the platform, but sincerely thank us for our work, shoot stories, YouTube videos, and TikTok reviews,» says Oleksii.
Now Ukrainians are expanding their product to the local Polish market by adding books in Polish. This is a new audience for them, so they are actively studying its behavior and requests.
Their main task is to change the habit of hoarding books and show that there is a convenient alternative: a simple and profitable way to sell and buy books.
The plans are to build an «independent» platform for book lovers and enter the Ukrainian market.
«We are now tightly integrated with Instagram, but our main challenge is to build an „independent“ platform for book lovers. To do this, we are actively looking for a developer to significantly improve our website and make it more convenient and functional. In addition, we need to change our marketing approaches and set up effective content work processes,» explains Oleksii.
There are plans to enter the Ukrainian market, but for this the startup needs to improve the product so that it can completely cover the main problems when buying and selling books. The founders also face the big task of forming a database of publications and authors. After that, they need to allocate a budget for marketing.
«Launching in Ukraine is very important for us, as we see that more and more Ukrainians are interested in reading and are looking for convenient ways to access books,» adds the BookFlea co-founder.
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