Category Archives: Personal

So long and thanks for all the fish

My last official day at Paperight was the 15th of April 2014, but after a glorious week in Tankwa Town, I returned to do some freelance jobs that Arthur needed to be done.

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I was most happy to be able to be part of choosing and announcing the Cover Art Competition winners, finally. The winners are:

1st place: Neill Kropman (21) of Red & Yellow School of Magic for Robinson Crusoe, Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness
2nd place: Lucelle de Villiers (21) of Stellenbosch University for To the Lighthouse
3rd place: Ivan de Villiers (21) of Stellenbosch University for Walden

We’ve Tweeted, posted on Facebook and released a blog post about the results here.

Then I put together a press release to send out to local media. Most media outlets have been chomping at the bit for WDCCT stories so the story has gained some extra interest. The World Design Capital marketing team has also circulated the news. They were particularly impressed by the quality of the designs. As if we would have chosen duds though, really?

I have also had the opportunity to work on the Textbook Database. A new project for Paperight, but by no means a great change of tack, the Textbook Database will be a complete list of prescribed books for all courses across all major South African universities. Tedious though the data capturing may be, this kind of comprehensive list doesn’t exist and will have extraordinary value. This list adds to Paperight’s goal of inclusivity within the book trade and increased access to books. It also falls neatly under the banner of the #textbookrevolution.

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If I could say one thing that I have learned during my time with this dynamic team, it’s that start-ups are not for sissies.

In other news, I am emigrating to France on the 17th of June so my time at Paperight is drawing to a close for good. If I could say one thing that I have learned during my time with this dynamic team, it’s that start-ups are not for sissies. I am immensely grateful for the chance to test myself and learn from an impressive group of young people who have already proved themselves in a tough industry.

And to think that major industry players are reluctant to hire young people, even though the quality of young professionals in South Africa is mostly untapped, for whatever reason. I found Paperight after being told by three major publishing houses in South Africa that they did not offer internships for graduates (paid or unpaid) and that as a rule they do not hire young people because the book trade, in their words, is a dying industry. Well, with that attitude, they’ve struck the last nail in their own coffin.

One day I hope they will see the mistakes that they’ve already made and realise that books will never really go out of fashion. With approximately 48 million people who don’t buy books in South Africa, there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure that everyone has equal access to such a simple resource.

I am very proud to have been part of a project that has already gained incredible traction in changing perceptions about the culture and benefits of reading. Paperight has also served to expose the negative attitudes and influences that exist within the book industry, as well as highlighted certain shady practices that perpetuate a system of exclusion.

Everybody should join the Paperight party. They always have cake. Ciao for now.

OpenAIR and Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest

In December 2013 I was really lucky to be able to attend the OpenAIR and Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest, a 5 day conference held at the UCT Graduate School of Business, hosted by the UCT IP Unit. I was really excited to meet a group of people who were talking about intellectual property in a way I hadn’t previously experienced. The attendees were mostly academics and Creative Commons affiliates. This group is opposed to maximalist protection of intellectual property rights, and they are all about open access and sharing culture. It was certainly a stark contrast with my experience at the US Copyright Office, and made me seriously consider doing an LLM in intellectual property law.

Lessons learned from distributed in-store advertising

We discovered soon after we began to create outlet- and product-specific posters and send them out via our newsletter that they made a difference to sales. In fact, a survey done by Yazeed at one point showed that outlets that advertised with posters had more success than others. (This, in retrospect, is incredibly obvious, but we thought people might have been driven to stores or to buy products by being encouraged to do so by… well, I’m not sure, actually.)

When Marie arrived in April 2013, it freed me up to do more material design work. Marie set about calling outlets to find out more about them and to make sure they were on board with our system. We made sure that, when she called an outlet, she asked if they wanted any materials made for them for the upcoming matric exam season. As part of our offering, we would design posters and flyers. These materials included price lists on them for up to 50 of our matric products, which we could change for every outlet that wanted them. There was sound reasoning behind this, initially: we assumed that, if we did the heavy lifting for outlets and gave them something specific to them and ready-made for them, they would take to using materials with more enthusiasm, and would get some outlets that didn’t have design capabilities to be able to engage with and to advertise Paperight better.

This was a pretty disastrous idea, for a number of reasons:

  1. The amount of requests for materials that we got was overwhelming, and we only had one designer: me, who had many other responsibilities to take care of.
  2. Outlets sometimes weren’t even too sure of their own pricing structures, or would arbitrarily change things, and so would ask us to make multiple revisions to the same materials because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us what their prices were and, even if they did, tended not to stick to them.
  3. Manually changing 50 or so prices for every flyer and poster, and copy-pasting logos and contact details, was mindnumbing and uncreative work. I felt like I missed a month of my life around July, as every day was the same task, in a sense.
  4. Outlets didn’t buy into the materials as much as we hoped. Some never printed them, effectively making the work a waste of time.

These problems piled the misery on me, with the result that I entered into quite a deep slump for a few weeks. I began to resent my work and what I was doing and, even worse, the people I was supplying materials for. The work was repetitive and seemed to have little effect on sales and/or engagement with products with outlet owners. I realised that something drastic had to change.

Reading Ries and Christensen

I’ve done some fascinating reading recently, too. The most influential books I’ve read recently are The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Both have left me reeling from ah-ha moments. Chief among these:

  • Ries’s explanation of how a startup’s product — what it aims to produce in its early stages — are not the things it sells, but the lessons it learns. The faster, cheaper, and more specific you can make what he calls ‘cycles of validated learning’ (build, measure, learn), the faster you can produce something that people want.
  • Ries’s description of vanity metrics vs cohort matrics. Vanity metrics are simple growth curves: ‘we signed up 10 free users last month, and 100 free users this month; 1 user upgraded to a paid subscription last month, and 10 this month’. These metrics always look good, because they show growth in every area. Here, tenfold growth in users and paying users. But they aren’t valuable metrics, because what matters — what tells you whether you’re *getting better as a business* is not growth in users or paying users. It’s how fast you’re increasing the *proportion* of paying users to free users. Cohort metrics are more valuable: ‘what percentage of users are paid users, and how fast are we growing that cohort?’ This totally changes the focus of a sales team.
  • I wish I’d read Christensen ten years ago. Big aha: established companies don’t invest in new approaches (like Paperight) not because they’re stupid or evil, but because they’re fundamentally unable to do so, even if they’re the best-run company in the world. Christensen describes how. This totally changed the way I approached large publishers.

Very few people get through a business conversation with me without hearing about these at least once.

The personal impact of a fellowship to build Paperight

The last nine months, for me personally, has been a ride of epic proportions. The opportunity to build a dream business with generous resources – alongside fellow Fellows who are constantly amazing and inspiring – is a kind of exquisite torture.

I’ve grown and learned as an entrepreneur at a rate I didn’t think possible a year earlier while running Electric Book Works. I’ve had to learn to let go in many ways, too: my role has transformed in the last three months from doing the work of Paperight to driving our team’s work, and making sure each individual is equipped and confident enough to deliver. I’ve learned new levels of focus, too, and have been forced to perfect time- and task-management skills. I’ve always been an efficient person; I reckon I’ve doubled that efficiency. I’ve always been a good public speaker; I’m ten times better now and still improving. I used to be a poor salesperson; I’m miles from that now, and know where I have to keep working to be better.

The Fellowship is not just a great way to build and nurture valuable projects. It’s a personal- and professional-development drag race that produces tougher, smarter, more effective people. As I prepare to apply for another year, I realise it’s also kind of addictive.