To infinity and beyond: An interview with Lostmy.name Making a startup success from a humble quest to make a personalised book that doesn’t suck.

How a passion project turned startup success got £100k investment for 4% of the business

Personalised tech & storytelling startup Lostmy.name is one of those rare success stories: a passion project that rapidly grew to exceed its creators’ wildest expectations.

Their clever products weave personal details like the recipient’s name and address into the story itself, creating unique experiences that really bring the narrative to life. It made history by receiving the highest valuation of all time on ‘Dragon’s Den’, with Piers Linney investing £100,000 for just 4% of the business.

What ends up as a seamless, organic feeling children’s book is actually powered and shaped by some incredibly clever coding and tech, and what’s all the more impressive is that the burgeoning London-based Lostmy.name team handle every single element of their product’s life-cycle.

Despark asked one of the four co-founders, Asi Sharabi, to tell us more about the company’s genesis and about their forward-thinking business model.

Key takeouts from this interview:

• Expect product personalisation to become a growing industry that works in ever-more sophisticated ways
• Being in control of every element of your product’s lifecycle can make it a much stronger, more authentic proposition
• Involving your users in product development from the early stages can make for a much stronger end result

How did the founders of Lostmy.name meet each other?

About four years ago now, I got a little gift for my daughter — a book with her name in it — and I wasn’t aware of the category of personalised books before that. I was quite underwhelmed by everything about that book apart from having my daughter’s name in it… but something resonated.

I called up [co-founder] Tal Oron. We know each other from way back in Tel Aviv, and we called [co-founder] David who I used to work with in advertising land, and we just sat around my kitchen table saying: “hey, surely we can do something better than that?”. That’s really how it all started: a humble quest to make a personalised book that doesn’t suck, basically.

So your backgrounds are all in advertising and design?

The founding team have quite eclectic, interdisciplinary backgrounds. I’m coming from more marketing and digital, Tal is coming from technology and product, David is a lifelong writer, Pedro is a lifelong art director and graphic designer, and we started it just as a side-project. It was never really meant to be what it is now. It took off in ways that we never really dared to imagine.

“It’s about making a product that will need a customer’s input in order for it to be created, to come alive.”

From that seed of an idea to getting your first orders in, what was your timeline? What were the different stages?

It was about a year to 18 months before we got it to market. I guess by the nature of it being a side-project, we took time. It took us six months to find Pedro.

At that time, both Tal and I were very much hooked on everything lean startup. It was just that time when Eric Ries’ book came about and the whole philosophy of the lean startup emigrated from Silicon Valley to Tech City in London. Back then in our day jobs, we were part of that community. We were very interested in this idea of ‘lean physical’: of applying lean principles and methodology to a product that lives on the intersection of digital and physical. It was never really a publishing pet project; it was pretty much a startup pet project, because we knew that by the nature of it, it’s not just about making a book. It’s about making a product that will need a customer’s input in order for it to be created, to come alive.

From the very early days, we knew that we had to crack the creative challenge — but then by the nature of it, it’s not an off-the-shelf that you just go and get a book deal from a publisher. It’s a product that has to be created, and for that you have to create an environment where people will be able to create the book and then buy it. Then, of course, you have to form the supply chain for the books to be made. Because we’re selling direct to customers, we have to learn how to drive traffic to a site, how to generate awareness. Then we also had to do all the customer support.

So from the early days we figured out that there’s quite a complex full-stack operation to create here. We were very much interested in the idea of — this is our startup now, so how do you make sure that you’re not over-investing in any part of the journey before you know that there is a market for it?

Tell us about the experience of going on ‘Dragons’ Den’. What advice would you give anyone who wants to go on there?

It started with a boozy dinner party and someone saying “hey you should go on ‘Dragons’ Den’!” I got my mobile and applied in five minutes and completely forgot about it. Then 3–5 months down the line we got the phone call from the producers. We went and they absolutely loved the idea. The funny thing is that at that time we’d already sold about 22,000 books and realised that — OK, this could be much larger than we initially thought, let’s turn it into a business. So we were in the middle of raising a seed round and we had most of the money confirmed and therefore there was a valuation for the business. We asked the producers of ‘Dragons’ Den’ many times: “are you sure we can actually go on the show? We cannot really negotiate with the Dragons.” And they just said: “number 1 rule: it’s your business. You can do whatever you want.”

We asked for £100,000 for 4% of the business, which is completely unheard of. We were under no illusion that we would get the money — but if the BBC call you, you just go. It was a very positive experience. No-one trashed the product. They were all very supportive, and it ended up with investment.

What challenges did you face in cracking into the children’s book market itself?

I think we were never really in the children’s book market per se. That market behaves in a very specific way: there are publishers, there are retailers, there’s Amazon, there’s bookshops. Our product has always been a unique, personalised keepsake that happens to be a book. I guess that because it is personalised in a very unique way and because of the price point of £19.99, we’re very much in the gifting market. It worked really well because culturally books are perceived as a wonderful gift. We still have tremendous word-of-mouth from people who discover the book. So we still consider ourselves as accidental publishers.

So does that hint at a more diversified future for Lostmy.name?

What we’re trying to create here is a whole new category of products that only come to life at the meeting point of what we call a customer IP — child’s name, gender, where the child lives, their interests, their family relationships — and our own creative and technical and emotional IP. And it’s only at that meeting point between these two that the product comes to life.

We have some really interesting ideas in the pipeline around card games and wall art and obviously more books, which I think will always be the flagship product that we lead with. We’re working on at least three new book propositions. One is around a child’s birthday; another is around a child’s interests and passions; and the last one is around family relationships, which we are hoping will be the very first time that we are bringing not just one child into the book but the whole family.

That intersection — was that a gap in the market before you came along? If so, why do you think it was there? Lack of technology or something else?

I think that the gap in the market was around a beautifully executed personalised book for children, because personalised books have been around for over 50 years now, but they were always treated purely as a commercial gimmick, just as a novelty item. There is not really anything that is genuinely about that child in the book; you just become the hero or the protagonist.

We genuinely believe that we haven’t really scratched the surface of the creative possibilities that you can do around personalised publishing and personalised narrative. We think that it’s a gap of creativity rather than anything else.

Do you think there are other sectors or industries that could take inspiration from that approach to personalisation?

It’s more around the full stack or vertically integrated operation model. We are proudly part of these emerging startups that operate in sectors that are historically very retail-led and are very fragmented. The manufacturer is different from the marketer; the marketer is different from the seller; as are the wholesaler and the retailer, and if you look at businesses like Warby Parker in the eyewear space or Dollar Shave Club which just exited to Unilever for $1 billion and if you look at us… we and these guys just took this concept and built businesses that have 100% ownership of the customer journey.

It’s very complex to be very good at different things but I think we’re gonna see more and more business like that which are just selling directly to customers. They own the customer relationship; they’re not restricted by anything apart from creating great products and being able to tell people about it. And that’s it. The web completely democratised distribution and I think that more and more businesses will take advantage of that.

You have a blog and run inspirational events about storytelling. Why are those extracurricular activities so important to you as a company?

Work is where you spend most of your waking hours and I think we were extremely fortunate to accidentally create a lovely company with a product that people genuinely connect to and love. I think that just sticking to the pure business side of things would be wrong and boring in a way, and just like in the way that we creatively innovated around the actual product, we just like to innovate around anything else.

I think that it was Tim O’Reilly who said something like “great companies are those that generate more value than they extract”, and I deeply believe in this idea. If there’s any way that we can grow the community of like-minded people who are interested in storytelling, technology and creativity, that’s really how you build your talent pipeline and how you generate and deliver more value to your customers beyond just selling [a product].

“The biggest thing we’ve done is sending our latest book to space–quite literally. We sent it to the International Space Station”

Can you tell us about some of things you’ve done on the PR and marketing front?

The biggest thing we’ve done is sending our latest book to space–quite literally. We sent it to the International Space Station and it was read by Tim Peake to one very lucky child, Roraigh, who’s 7 years old and lives in Yorkshire. That was, I guess, pure luck. We created this new book [The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home] and it’s an epic personal journey of a child from the depths of outer space all the way to their real home. When we started to think about what we would do for launch, because quite a few of us are coming from advertising agency backgrounds, it was almost inevitable that at some point someone would say “hey, we should send the book to space!”, just as a joke.

And then literally two weeks later we learnt about these lovely people from Story Time From Space who are ex-NASA. They send picture books to space and get them read by astronauts. We immediately reached out to them and told them about our book, and they absolutely loved it. And because the book is personalised, we ran a nice competition around it. Again, we like to go the extra mile to make stories even more special — and there’s very few occasions where you can make a story that special.

How do you go about testing your new products with your audience?

We have quite a robust process of creative development where we involve customers — kids and parents and gift-givers — from very early on. From concept to then having some kind of a storyboard to them being able to actually create a very a rough draft version that is actually printed.

With ‘The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home’, in the early days we sent 25 books to children in the UK and US with GoPro cameras and we asked the parents to read them a couple of times to the child and report on that. Then we had a researcher here who analysed hours and hours of video footage in trying to help us ‘optimise for emotion’ — so it’s decoding what the moments are that the child is getting really hooked on. What are the elements in the book that creates this magical connection between the reader and the child?

We were surprised by things that we thought would be some kind of epiphany moment that weren’t as such, or some other elements that kids went absolutely bananas over that for us felt quite trivial. This idea of treating the book not in the traditional way where there is an author/illustrator working completely remotely from the ‘user’ and being able to tweak the book and to make it better based on early customer feedback is a way for us to de-risk and to make sure we make products that people love.

What are the main challenges you face in what you do?

Every month or every quarter there’s a new set of challenges that come with growth. Because the success of the book in the early days took us completely by surprise, being able to print 22,000 books wasn’t really in our plans, and we had to make sure we were scaling as quickly as the demand. More recently, it’s the challenges of actually running a business. It’s about 75–80 people now. That brings a completely different set of challenges to it. When it gets that big, you have to treat it like an organisation and be very mindful about how you communicate.

Also, having 100% ownership of the customer journey means that we have to be very good at lots of different things. So scaling that — learning how to build these relatively complex systems that all run on software that we develop in-house — came with a lot of challenges. There was nothing off-the-shelf that we could just say — hey, this is our solution for an API between us and the printer. We had to write it.

Do you have a great business idea that you need help developing and bringing to life? The Ideation service at Despark can help your idea evolve into a successful product — get in touch to find out how.