30 Apr
The shelf is the original recommendation engine
Translating bookseller instinct into ranking signals without flattening it into bestseller lists.
41 min24.6k
Founder Spotlight
Southeast Asia
Mei-Ling Tan
Founder, Chapter & Co.
Mei-Ling Tan spent ten years as a bookseller before building Chapter & Co., a reader-first discovery platform now used by independent shops and publishers across Southeast Asia.
Book technologyProduct & market fitDiscovery & recommendation
Featured company
Chapter & Co.
Chapter & Co. builds recommendation and inventory tooling for independent bookshops, plus a consumer discovery app serving 1.2 million monthly readers.
View the Chapter & Co. company page- Founded
- 2019
- Team
- 34 people
- Headquarters
- Singapore
- Website
- chapterand.co
1.2M
monthly readers
Gallery
Inside Chapter & Co.
On the record
Key challenges
- 01
Recommendations that booksellers trust
Why the first algorithm failed, and what human curation contributed that the model could not.
- 02
Selling software to thin-margin retailers
Pricing, onboarding and the free tier that turned into the entire acquisition channel.
- 03
Explaining a bookshop business to investors
Four rejected rounds before a thesis that matched how the category actually grows.
On demand
Past interviews
Next on air: Sat 5 Sep · 12:00 GMT
18 Jan
Our first 100 bookshop customers
Door-to-door sales in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, and the retention lesson from month three.
35 min14.2k