Lean Publishing
What happens when you publish a book in the same way you build an internet startup?
This post was written by Asi Sharabi, our CEO. If you like the sound of what we’re making, perhaps you’d like to join our team?
Last Friday at around 4pm a small party spontaneously erupted in a recently converted warehouse office in Hackney.
Software engineers high-fived digital designers. Facebook marketeers toasted email customer support people. And I sat quietly smiling to myself shaking my head at the improbability of it all.
The reason for the impromptu celebration? We just shipped our hundred thousandth ‘Lost my Name’ book to a customer somewhere around the globe. We’re still trying to figure out exactly who it was — when you sell thousands of books a day to customers in over 90 countries it’s quite difficult to pull out a single order. Once we do I’ll give them a call to say thanks.
This milestone is all the more remarkable because a year ago not one person in the room had ever sold a single book. Instead we’ve spent the last ten years working in marketing agencies and internet startups designing digital products and communications.
The weird thing is, it turns out this is an excellent foundation for creating books that customers love in today’s networked world. We call our way of doing things ‘Lean Publishing’. Let me explain what this is, and what we’ve learnt doing it over the past year.
Accidental Publishers
First, some background. For those who don’t know us yet we publish a print on demand book called Lost my Name.
Its a magical story about a little boy or a little girl who wakes up and has forgotten his or her name.
They go on an adventure and meet a host of amazing characters, each one of which gives them a letter of their name. By the end of the story they’ve found their name — and its the name of the child reading the story.
It’s a beautiful concept that customers love. But we came across it quite by accident — you could say we didn’t start as lean publishers, but more accidental publishers.
The seed for the Lost My Name story was planted a couple of years ago when I received a personalised book for my daughter. The warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing my daughter’s name in a book lasted for around two seconds once I realised how, well, just how totally lame the book was.
Annoyed by this, I showed it to my friends, Tal a creative technologist and David, a writer, one evening at my house. (A few months later we found Pedro, the genius illustrator of our book and now a partner in the business.) We looked at it. As I mentioned, it was lame. Surely we could do something better?
Personalised books have been in the market for over forty years but have remained, pretty much exclusively, a commercial gimmick. They’ve never been taken seriously as a creative canvas for storytellers and have rarely had much concentrated technical attention.
“Personalised books have been in the market for over forty years but … they’ve never been taken seriously as a creative canvas for storytellers and have rarely had much concentrated technical attention”
Unsurprisingly, the resulting stories have been equally uninspired. And as a result the commercial impact hasn’t materialised.
So, gathered round my kitchen table, looking at this rather pathetic attempt at personalised publishing we knew we could do better.
But the question was, could we do it better than anyone has ever done it before? Could we bring together brilliant ‘old-fashioned’ illustration and storytelling techniques with the infinite possibilities that internet technology and digital design offer? Could we make something inspiring, beautiful and genuinely magical for my daughter?
We thought we could.
After that night we got hooked on the creative challenge and the commercial potential we knew had to be there. And so Lost my Name was born.
Lean Publishers
Before Lost my Name, both Tal and myself made a living at creative agencies building digital products and communications for clients. The big news of the past 5 years in digital land has been the rise of the Lean Startup movement.
The Lean Startup movement provides a simple framework for reliably creating and building new digital businesses — startups — in a world of uncertainty.
Steve Blank, an entrepreneur and engineer from California and one of the Lean Startup movement’s early pioneers states that “a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”
In the old days this often meant spending huge sums on product development and planning big marketing launches before ever coming into contact with customers.
The word Lean gives you the clue as to what’s changed. Lean Startups focus on making the “search” part of the startup phase as short and focused as possible.
They do this by getting close to customers and then cycling through product iterations very quickly, constantly gathering feedback with the aim of finding ‘product/market fit’ in the minimum amount of time. Only then do you dust off that marketing launch and start spending proper money on growth.
This approach has been trialled extensively in the context of software businesses. So we took the obvious next step and applied it to the development of our physical book.
Here are four things we learnt by treating our physical book like an internet startup.
1. We started small — with a print run of one
Books as a creative artefacts have always been developed in isolation from the reader (a.k.a the customer). The author (and sometimes illustrator) creates the book, the editor approves it, production design is done, a print run is booked and then it’s down to the sales and marketing people to sell the book. Sounds a lot like that old way of doing startups!
As a result a lot of books get printed that no-one wants to buy.
We decided to flip this around. Once we had our initial idea for a print on demand story about a child that loses their name we started by creating one book, for a friend’s child called Andrew. It was an awful prototype looking back on it — but Andrew loved it!
This gave us the confidence we needed to proceed. Seeing Andrew’s eyes light up when he realised the little boy in the story that had lost his name was him just blew us away.
2. We used data to inform decisions at every stage
In Lean Startup terms we’d built our first Minimum Viable Product (or MVP). The MVP is the artifact that sits at the heart of your startup that you use to gather real customer feedback. Seeing how your customers actually interact with your product is very different to asking them how they think they’d react in a research setting.
So, following that very positive ‘customer’ feedback from Andrew using the one book we made, we started working on more stories and illustrations to enable us to create lots more names. We crunched UK census data of over 14,000 different names given to babies in the past 5 years to figure out what order to write our segments in.
We then used some off-the-shelf web tools to make a simple ‘landing page’, where we introduced the idea of Lost my Name and invited people from our own social networks to join our beta testing group.
This generated over 300 sign-ups and as soon as we could (we were at 40% fulfilment capacity in terms of the names), we made our first 100 books using a 3rd party Print on Demand service and shipped them to our first paying customers.
Up until this point we’d written almost zero lines of application code. It was only after we sold these first books and got such incredible feedback from these early adopters and that we found the evidence and confidence to start developing our own software.
3. We never ‘finished’ anything
There’s a famous quote from Reid Hoffman, founder of the business social networking site Linkedin — “if you’re not embarrassed by the way your product looks, you probably launched it too late”.
This is not permission to launch terrible products, but rather it’s a nudge to not try to polish things at the early stage and to get the product to people’s hands as soon as possible so you can start your learning and improvement journey.
While we were very proud of our book when we launched it in beta back then, but looking back at these early editions make us cringe today. It’s down right embarrassing how crude our initial books were in retrospect. For example we sold about 500 books with major typos in including the authors surname!
But launching the books as soon as we had something to sell, even if it was only to 40% of our potential customers, was invaluable.
The direct feedback that we got, the evidence that people are willing to pay for it, and mostly, seeing the word of mouth these books generated was massively reassuring and further evidence for us to invest more in our project.
Digital product people know that their product can always be improved. Every day is a chance to refine a feature, reconsider a user flow, make a 1% improvement on a metric. Nothing is ever ‘complete’. The target is always to be better than you were yesterday.
We’ve taken this to heart at Lost my Name and as a result the books that we’re selling now on our website are already on their 5th iteration. We have version 6 launching soon, with all new typography, hardback covers and many more characters and other enhancements.
We take this principle of continuous improvement very seriously across the whole company and as a result are constantly obsessing about every aspect of our customer experience — from our marketing, through our website, our book, and our customer support.
We think being ‘full stack publishers’ gives us a huge advantage. Because we do it all in house, we can constantly make it all better, all the time.
4. We hacked our growth
The final thing we did as Lean Publishers, once we were confident we’d achieved product/market fit, was to take full responsibility for building our own distribution and growth. To do this we turned to a new type of marketing — growth hacking.
Growth hackers are generally marketeers with a strong technical background. They use their skills in software development, data analysis and creative marketing to find cheap ways to stimulate growth in a business — often by building viral referral features or by piggy backing off other fast growing internet services.
The original growth hacks used technologies like email. For example inserting a ‘get a hotmail.com account’ link in every hotmail email, but growth hackers today are generally focused on new social and mobile networks.
We had to figure out how to break through the noise to let our target customers know we have a unique product they should check out. As far as we know we’re the first team to have used these techniques for growing the audience for a book.
We tried (and tested) everything. Discount cards for future purchases or to pass on to a friend. “Remind me Later” features for people who landed on our website but might not be in the market for a gift right then. Twitter advertising. Organic Facebook. Going on Dragons Den on the BBC (and coming away with the most successful deal of all time) — and then capturing additional visitors by replaying it on YouTube!
You name it, we’ve done it, tested it, and then if it works we’re currently optimising it. The result is a hockey stick growth chart on a tiny marketing budget. With Q4 2014 upon us we’re pretty nervous, but also very excited. Just how fast can we grow?
In summary: Lean Publishing works
I’m immensely proud of the team we’re building at Lost my Name, and the amount of magic we’re shipping to children and families every day, all around the world.
As we grow (and we think we’ve got a lot of room left to grow) it’s important to me that we don’t forget our startup roots.
Startup is not just a name for an early stage business. It is a mindset. A mindset that is never satisfied with the status quo and as a result never stays still.
I look forward to bringing more of that to the world of publishing — hopefully I’ll be back here in a year telling you the story of our millionth book shipped!
P.S — If you think you can help us build a better company, we’re hiring!
