Tag Archives: metrics

Building business

A big blow

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customer service in most copy shops is atrocious. This is a major blow to our business model

We have finally concluded, under the weight of years of anecdotal evidence and topped off with a full day in a top Stellenbosch copy shop, that customer service in most copy shops is atrocious. This is a major blow to our business model. I’d long worked on the assumption that 80% of stores would offer good service (or care about offering good service and aim for that actively), and 20% would be bad. I’ve now come to believe the opposite is true. As a result, under our current model we will never consistently create return customers. And without return customers, we could never hit the growth rates we need in order to sustain our current overheads.

We’ve tried hard to train outlets, but managers consistently gatekeep or just don’t work with us. We would only be able to tackle this problem in the long term by owning or franchising the outlets ourselves, which is beyond the scope of the project.

I have decided to cut my team, drastically cut costs, and see whether there are new opportunities for Paperight licensing to explore

As a result, I have decided to cut my team, drastically cut costs, and see whether there are new opportunities for Paperight licensing to explore during the last months of my fellowship. I’d prefer not to close the Paperight service, though it is an option. I’m also talking to potential acquirers, but an acquisition is unlikely.

For now, all discussion of Paperight’s model being flawed, reducing the team, and possible project closure is confidential and not for public consumption. We will certainly share our story in time, but right now we need to be able to craft the public story if we want to create a home for the Paperight service elsewhere and maintain the credibility of the concept of distributed print-on-demand.

Killer metrics

Our main metric is turnover from sales in dollars. We maintained our growing targets till October last year, but slipped dramatically since Nov. At the end of January, for the first time, we slipped below our cumulative ‘Mort’ figure, the minimum target for achieving self-sustainability. That’s a core reason I’m cutting the team and revisiting the core business model. I hope to find a way to keep the project going, though it may not be as an independent company (Paperight Pty Ltd) or as the service we know today.

We also track outlet and publisher registrations, top-ups (credit balances that outlets maintain in order to be able to buy books), and various PR metrics (newsletter opens/clicks, Facebook engagement, Twitter followers, website visits), but we only aim to increase these generally. Sales revenue is the key driver of decision-making.

What next for the team

Right now our team consists of:

  • Myself as CEO and CTO
  • 7 full-time employees (COO, content manager, designer, financial manager, curator/researcher, marketing manager, outlets manager)
  • Software development outsourced to Realm Digital.

During March and April we’ll reduce that by 6 people and keep only our COO, with financial management done on a part-time freelance basis by our current financial manager, Dezre, who will be employed by my other company Electric Book Works.

This is a big blow. But we’ll figure it out. I’m glad we’ve reached this point while we still have a funding runway to work with.

About Paperight, Building business, Content

Collating matric exam packs and starting to measure metrics

Michal’s internship finished in March 2012, and Nick began an internship as his replacement.

Our first priority was preparing packs of past matric exam papers. We’d started to source these as part of our initial content list creation, and these were already listed on the site, but the packs themselves had not been prepared. We needed to have them ready in case any orders came in. The primary challenge was creating complete sets of exam papers. The DBE website and WCED didn’t have all of the papers, and their online resources were often buggy or incorrect. We started by creating a list of outstanding exam PDFs, which we then used to individually source as many missing papers as we could (we called and emailed, and bought CD compilations of exams to try to fill the gaps). At the same time we started prepping the packs for those subjects which we had complete sets for.

Nick and I attended some ‘Open Education’ workshops at UCT, in the hopes that this would generate some leads for more content. We found, however, that we already knew much of what the workshops covered (but it was edifying to know we were on the right track).

The aim was that interns or new staff members could jump right in on tasks with a little training, and begin to develop skills themselves. Over the years this has worked incredibly well for the content team. It means that when we do in-person training in those first weeks, it can be much more in-depth (and is thus more valuable) than if we were to do general introductory training sessions.

I began creating and improving upon a series of wiki posts to govern things like document creation and document uploading. The aim was that interns or new staff members could jump right in on tasks with a little training, and begin to develop skills themselves. Over the years this has worked incredibly well for the content team. It means that when we do in-person training in those first weeks, it can be much more in-depth (and is thus more valuable) than if we were to do general introductory training sessions. Ops style posts that give detailed explanations of how to do tasks means that new and old team members alike have something to come back to for reference, and ensures uniformity (which is important when it comes to file naming conventions for version control).

We also began to track metrics for the first time. Our initial focus was on measuring publisher registrations, outlet registrations, and top-ups (i.e. the purchasing of credits in advance). This process of tracking metrics was one that we improved upon over time. It’s interesting how much insight our focus on these three metrics gives to our business goals at the time. We were focused on creating an outlet base, and increasing our content bank, rather than on growing our customer base. And we were more focused on the potential for sales than on sales themselves. The failure here was in assuming that these three metrics were a proxy for other things. We assumed that a wide outlet base represented more potential customers, that increased publisher registrations meant more content (and that more content increased the likelihood of valuable content), that top-ups were a signifier of outlet buy-in, and would ‘naturally’ lead to sales. The reality was that we ended up measuring the potential for success, rather than measuring success itself. It was a lesson we would learn later on.

Publishers approached

  • WITS
  • Hamilton Wende

Publisher registrations

  • Cingela (13/3/2012)