About to launch - personalised children's books

[Leo Hartas]

I've been reading with great interest other contributors' ongoing tales of their fastlane business progress and thought I would put up my story so far. I can't say it could be described as 'fastlane', rather lost in the fog, traffic jams, breakdowns, collisions and we've yet to get on the slip road (onramp) to the motorway (freeway). Apologies for this being a mini novel in size.

From where we are now, I can say that had we known what were embarking on we would never have started, but perhaps not knowing was good. Because we did start and we have seen it through over the past two years and are now about to launch our business.

I'm 57 and my new partner, Amanda, is 56. I have worked all my life as a freelance illustrator and Amanda was a university lecturer. While freelancing has paid the bills over the years unless you have a very lucky breakout success it has a limited upper income level. Over the years I've tried various ventures to break away and create my own publishing system, from my pen directly to the customer. Amanda and I tried self publishing children's books on Amazon in 2017. Although we got it working it was difficult to get exposure on the platform, ads drained almost all of the profit and we had complaints about the shoddy print quality of the final product. A chance freelance job gave us another idea.

After Amazon, I went back to freelance illustration to bring some money in. Some of my work was illustrating 'vanity' books for private self publishing clients. We were amazed that one of my clients, a sweet grandmother, was willing to pay £2.5K for me to illustrate and print one book just for her grandchildren. And so we stumbled on the idea of personalised children's books, but only if we could figure out a way to automate and scale it.

The idea
Personalised children's books. A website where a user inputs their child's name, creates a visual illustration of the child (choosing skin and eye colour, hairstyle and colour), and then the book is printed with the child as the hero both in the illustrations and the text. A personalised print-on-demand system similar to T-shirt print on demand (POD), but for books. A quick web search revealed that there were already some established companies doing this and doing very well, in fact a couple of them had appeared on Dragon's Den and enthusiastically received funding.The market

At first we were disappointed. Others had had the idea already, nothing is new under the sun! However, as I have often read on these forums, it's all in the execution. We felt we could use our skills, Amanda is a writer, I'm an artist, to create original titles that would add to this burgeoning market. Also, unlike POD T-shirts, mugs, etc. the potential market is far from saturated. (we were to find out why! The 'E' in CENTS!) We did some further research and found that the market for personalised products at large is expanding. Add to that personalised books can be priced at 3-4 times that of regular books. After production costs this roughly equated to a 70% profit margin before marketing costs.

Ok, so how?
We needed a web front end where users could input their child's name, choose things like skin tone, hair style, clothing, etc. Rather like a 'dress the doll' system seen in RPG video games. Then generate a flickbook of the whole book for customers to review. On purchase their choices then need to be sent to a server where an automated system would compile a print resolution PDF of the book and send it to a POD print house. The print house then packages and posts it to the customer. Easy? Easyish? We searched about for some existing app or system that could do all this but couldn't find anything.

Ok, now how?
Amanda's son, Isaac, was half way through a computer science degree course and could take a year off 'in industry' to gain experience. We thought this would be perfect and he joined us in the venture. It was summer 2020 and we thought we could get the whole thing up and running with 5-6 books for the Christmas market. WE WERE COMPLETELY WRONG!

Realisation
It was dawning on us that we had bitten off way more than we could chew. I had only sketched a rough idea of how it could work but it was a way bigger project than we had imagined. The devil is in the detail. We were running on modest savings and could no way near afford to employ a whole team of professionals who would normally be expected to deliver a project of this size. I'd been playing around in my hobby time trying to learn game programming in a free open source app called GDevelop. I wondered if I could use it to get a prototype client side app running. The idea being to make something, anything, work as we'd already lost a year. In this time I'd been illustrating 3 titles and put a ton of work into drawing all the variations of the character as they appear on each page. Figuring out and managing the hundreds of layers and files was massive job in itself. I messed around in GDevelop and to my surprise managed to get an avatar (dress the doll) system running and a couple of pages of a book preview working.

In the cloud
The server side programming was the big issue. Isaac couldn't do it and was due to return to uni. We wondered about trying to learn it ourselves but knew now it would take us months if not years to become proficient enough. We wondered if we could find a freelance programmer who would consider taking it on. A couple of hours searching on the net and I found a hopeful candidate, Mike. To my amazement he was interested and considered our meagre funding would cover the work. Actually he thought we were mad trying to rubber band and sticky tape all these components in this way, but also thought it a clever and intriguing way to bootstrap such a large project.

More issues
We were back on the road, just. Mike was brilliant and has really put in a good deal more work than we could pay him for. (If this takes off we will reward him 10 fold!) Bit by bit he wired up the various components. In the meantime we had to make the full client side app. We realised that we had made a big error in that we had 3 books, each with different requirements on the go, resulting in the need for 3 separate apps. We should have just done one, got it working, then used that knowledge to do the others. Also one of the books had two characters that could be personalised, a father and child. Of course men can have beards, as well as hair, and in several styles. This resulted in over a thousand separate graphic files and combinations into the millions. It was so confusing!

Rocky path
At some point because I had so much work on the graphic files Amanda took over the programming with zero programming knowledge. Picture this, we work in our bedroom. Me on the desk and Amanda sitting in bed on a laptop, all day every day. We screwed up a giant white board covering the whole of one wall where we scrawl never ending to do lists. We weren't dealing with just figuring all this out but also how to work together and how our relationship works. I feared, and still fear, that I had dragged Amanda down a very rocky path, but in truth she and I have found a wonderful creative common purpose. Fortunately she is about 100 times more intelligent than me, enjoys puzzle solving and is a lot more of a perfectionist, all the attributes required in programming.

We didn't realise it, but designing the app has so many more things to account for than just the programming. The user interface went through countless changes, much optimising of graphic files to minimise the download, precise positioning of elements, on and on, and the big nasty one, mobile devices. There are no standards with mobile screen dimensions and users can turn the screen from portrait to landscape. We were still using the game making program which needed extra programming to handle responsiveness. Amanda struggled with this for ages eventually realising she could use the inbuilt way games work, with virtual targets and cameras. Still, it was complex, requiring many rewrites of hundreds of lines of instructions.

Goal?
We are nearly ready to launch. I feel that we are only just beginning our journey to the final goal. Just a minute, what is that goal? We talk about this a lot. We're both in our 50s, live modestly, happily and have no interest in the 'high life'. Aside from basic income security we want to build an automated publishing system that we fully own and control, and is direct to customer with no gate keepers. A system that we can use to publish our own original children's books, and we have so many ideas waiting this wings. Right now Amanda is sitting at her bed-desk writing a personalised novel for pre-teens where the reader is the hero, as far as we know a first and something no traditional publisher has done. Although building all this has been a massive two year mission we now have a complete system template to publish new titles with relative ease (hopefully!)

It is just the beginning, and we may get on the highway only to find we are travelling in the wrong direction, or our sticky tape and rubber band powered vehicle falls to bits. There are many uncertainties. A large corporate publisher with deep pockets to fund development may eye the personalised book business, but even so, in publishing there are many small thriving publishers. There is room. Much of this description has been about developing a system but that will be irrelevant to the kids reading their adventures in the books. That is where our mettle will be really tested in the quality of our stories and pictures.

Through trial and many errors we have effectively built a complete, customisable, scalable, publishing system from user to print with negligible overheads. We did it all ourselves, apps, website, writing, illustration, we even designed our own fonts from scratch.

Each time I say that we are almost ready to launch another unforeseen issue appears, but these are now whittled down to a few minor tweaks. We've seen the sign for the freeway and are ready to put our foot down.

You can see our website and play with customising the books at wowthatsme.com. The system is live, but we are still running final tests so please don't actually buy a book! I'll post on this thread when our 'doors' open, probably in a 2-3 weeks. At first we are only supplying to the UK but the system is scalable in that we can hook up to POD print houses easily in other territories when we are ready to expand.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts.

 

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[Kaan Gullu]

I've been reading with great interest other contributors' ongoing tales of their fastlane business progress and thought I would put up my story so far. I can't say it could be described as 'fastlane', rather lost in the fog, traffic jams, breakdowns, collisions and we've yet to get on the slip road (onramp) to the motorway (freeway). Apologies for this being a mini novel in size.

From where we are now, I can say that had we known what were embarking on we would never have started, but perhaps not knowing was good. Because we did start and we have seen it through over the past two years and are now about to launch our business.

I'm 57 and my new partner, Amanda, is 56. I have worked all my life as a freelance illustrator and Amanda was a university lecturer. While freelancing has paid the bills over the years unless you have a very lucky breakout success it has a limited upper income level. Over the years I've tried various ventures to break away and create my own publishing system, from my pen directly to the customer. Amanda and I tried self publishing children's books on Amazon in 2017. Although we got it working it was difficult to get exposure on the platform, ads drained almost all of the profit and we had complaints about the shoddy print quality of the final product. A chance freelance job gave us another idea.

After Amazon, I went back to freelance illustration to bring some money in. Some of my work was illustrating 'vanity' books for private self publishing clients. We were amazed that one of my clients, a sweet grandmother, was willing to pay £2.5K for me to illustrate and print one book just for her grandchildren. And so we stumbled on the idea of personalised children's books, but only if we could figure out a way to automate and scale it.

The idea
Personalised children's books. A website where a user inputs their child's name, creates a visual illustration of the child (choosing skin and eye colour, hairstyle and colour), and then the book is printed with the child as the hero both in the illustrations and the text. A personalised print-on-demand system similar to T-shirt print on demand (POD), but for books. A quick web search revealed that there were already some established companies doing this and doing very well, in fact a couple of them had appeared on Dragon's Den and enthusiastically received funding.The market

At first we were disappointed. Others had had the idea already, nothing is new under the sun! However, as I have often read on these forums, it's all in the execution. We felt we could use our skills, Amanda is a writer, I'm an artist, to create original titles that would add to this burgeoning market. Also, unlike POD T-shirts, mugs, etc. the potential market is far from saturated. (we were to find out why! The 'E' in CENTS!) We did some further research and found that the market for personalised products at large is expanding. Add to that personalised books can be priced at 3-4 times that of regular books. After production costs this roughly equated to a 70% profit margin before marketing costs.

Ok, so how?
We needed a web front end where users could input their child's name, choose things like skin tone, hair style, clothing, etc. Rather like a 'dress the doll' system seen in RPG video games. Then generate a flickbook of the whole book for customers to review. On purchase their choices then need to be sent to a server where an automated system would compile a print resolution PDF of the book and send it to a POD print house. The print house then packages and posts it to the customer. Easy? Easyish? We searched about for some existing app or system that could do all this but couldn't find anything.

Ok, now how?
Amanda's son, Isaac, was half way through a computer science degree course and could take a year off 'in industry' to gain experience. We thought this would be perfect and he joined us in the venture. It was summer 2020 and we thought we could get the whole thing up and running with 5-6 books for the Christmas market. WE WERE COMPLETELY WRONG!

Realisation
It was dawning on us that we had bitten off way more than we could chew. I had only sketched a rough idea of how it could work but it was a way bigger project than we had imagined. The devil is in the detail. We were running on modest savings and could no way near afford to employ a whole team of professionals who would normally be expected to deliver a project of this size. I'd been playing around in my hobby time trying to learn game programming in a free open source app called GDevelop. I wondered if I could use it to get a prototype client side app running. The idea being to make something, anything, work as we'd already lost a year. In this time I'd been illustrating 3 titles and put a ton of work into drawing all the variations of the character as they appear on each page. Figuring out and managing the hundreds of layers and files was massive job in itself. I messed around in GDevelop and to my surprise managed to get an avatar (dress the doll) system running and a couple of pages of a book preview working.

In the cloud
The server side programming was the big issue. Isaac couldn't do it and was due to return to uni. We wondered about trying to learn it ourselves but knew now it would take us months if not years to become proficient enough. We wondered if we could find a freelance programmer who would consider taking it on. A couple of hours searching on the net and I found a hopeful candidate, Mike. To my amazement he was interested and considered our meagre funding would cover the work. Actually he thought we were mad trying to rubber band and sticky tape all these components in this way, but also thought it a clever and intriguing way to bootstrap such a large project.

More issues
We were back on the road, just. Mike was brilliant and has really put in a good deal more work than we could pay him for. (If this takes off we will reward him 10 fold!) Bit by bit he wired up the various components. In the meantime we had to make the full client side app. We realised that we had made a big error in that we had 3 books, each with different requirements on the go, resulting in the need for 3 separate apps. We should have just done one, got it working, then used that knowledge to do the others. Also one of the books had two characters that could be personalised, a father and child. Of course men can have beards, as well as hair, and in several styles. This resulted in over a thousand separate graphic files and combinations into the millions. It was so confusing!

Rocky path
At some point because I had so much work on the graphic files Amanda took over the programming with zero programming knowledge. Picture this, we work in our bedroom. Me on the desk and Amanda sitting in bed on a laptop, all day every day. We screwed up a giant white board covering the whole of one wall where we scrawl never ending to do lists. We weren't dealing with just figuring all this out but also how to work together and how our relationship works. I feared, and still fear, that I had dragged Amanda down a very rocky path, but in truth she and I have found a wonderful creative common purpose. Fortunately she is about 100 times more intelligent than me, enjoys puzzle solving and is a lot more of a perfectionist, all the attributes required in programming.

We didn't realise it, but designing the app has so many more things to account for than just the programming. The user interface went through countless changes, much optimising of graphic files to minimise the download, precise positioning of elements, on and on, and the big nasty one, mobile devices. There are no standards with mobile screen dimensions and users can turn the screen from portrait to landscape. We were still using the game making program which needed extra programming to handle responsiveness. Amanda struggled with this for ages eventually realising she could use the inbuilt way games work, with virtual targets and cameras. Still, it was complex, requiring many rewrites of hundreds of lines of instructions.

Goal?
We are nearly ready to launch. I feel that we are only just beginning our journey to the final goal. Just a minute, what is that goal? We talk about this a lot. We're both in our 50s, live modestly, happily and have no interest in the 'high life'. Aside from basic income security we want to build an automated publishing system that we fully own and control, and is direct to customer with no gate keepers. A system that we can use to publish our own original children's books, and we have so many ideas waiting this wings. Right now Amanda is sitting at her bed-desk writing a personalised novel for pre-teens where the reader is the hero, as far as we know a first and something no traditional publisher has done. Although building all this has been a massive two year mission we now have a complete system template to publish new titles with relative ease (hopefully!)

It is just the beginning, and we may get on the highway only to find we are travelling in the wrong direction, or our sticky tape and rubber band powered vehicle falls to bits. There are many uncertainties. A large corporate publisher with deep pockets to fund development may eye the personalised book business, but even so, in publishing there are many small thriving publishers. There is room. Much of this description has been about developing a system but that will be irrelevant to the kids reading their adventures in the books. That is where our mettle will be really tested in the quality of our stories and pictures.

Through trial and many errors we have effectively built a complete, customisable, scalable, publishing system from user to print with negligible overheads. We did it all ourselves, apps, website, writing, illustration, we even designed our own fonts from scratch.

Each time I say that we are almost ready to launch another unforeseen issue appears, but these are now whittled down to a few minor tweaks. We've seen the sign for the freeway and are ready to put our foot down.

You can see our website and play with customising the books at wowthatsme.com. The system is live, but we are still running final tests so please don't actually buy a book! I'll post on this thread when our 'doors' open, probably in a 2-3 weeks. At first we are only supplying to the UK but the system is scalable in that we can hook up to POD print houses easily in other territories when we are ready to expand.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts.

View attachment 42291

Wow, first off what an inspiring and interesting story to read. My main thoughts would be congratulations for sticking to it and seeing it through. It seems like you've carved out for yourself a nice little niche market that has a lot of potential. The name is unique and eye catching. The only thing is the characters don't seem personalised enough I don't mean to discredit your work at all but from looking at the website I feel like the characters represent many people of a similar look rather than being fully personalised. However if this isn't possible then that makes complete sense.

 

[missinfinity98]

The energy is amazing! This is what it is about ^^ It is great that you had the experience in 2017, it prepared you to create this.

Perhaps start involving people in the process already? I mean potential customers? It creates an amazing atmosphere. And people feel more connected with the brand this way. It would suit your family business style. What does it look like? You choose what you decide to share of course. Online, either through videos or posts. You wrote that you are a graphic designer for years - have you created something that people might recognize and have a positive connection with? You could share that. Emotionally involved customers are supportive and loyal.

 

[Bbenn30]

I've been reading with great interest other contributors' ongoing tales of their fastlane business progress and thought I would put up my story so far. I can't say it could be described as 'fastlane', rather lost in the fog, traffic jams, breakdowns, collisions and we've yet to get on the slip road (onramp) to the motorway (freeway). Apologies for this being a mini novel in size.

From where we are now, I can say that had we known what were embarking on we would never have started, but perhaps not knowing was good. Because we did start and we have seen it through over the past two years and are now about to launch our business.

I'm 57 and my new partner, Amanda, is 56. I have worked all my life as a freelance illustrator and Amanda was a university lecturer. While freelancing has paid the bills over the years unless you have a very lucky breakout success it has a limited upper income level. Over the years I've tried various ventures to break away and create my own publishing system, from my pen directly to the customer. Amanda and I tried self publishing children's books on Amazon in 2017. Although we got it working it was difficult to get exposure on the platform, ads drained almost all of the profit and we had complaints about the shoddy print quality of the final product. A chance freelance job gave us another idea.

After Amazon, I went back to freelance illustration to bring some money in. Some of my work was illustrating 'vanity' books for private self publishing clients. We were amazed that one of my clients, a sweet grandmother, was willing to pay £2.5K for me to illustrate and print one book just for her grandchildren. And so we stumbled on the idea of personalised children's books, but only if we could figure out a way to automate and scale it.

The idea
Personalised children's books. A website where a user inputs their child's name, creates a visual illustration of the child (choosing skin and eye colour, hairstyle and colour), and then the book is printed with the child as the hero both in the illustrations and the text. A personalised print-on-demand system similar to T-shirt print on demand (POD), but for books. A quick web search revealed that there were already some established companies doing this and doing very well, in fact a couple of them had appeared on Dragon's Den and enthusiastically received funding.The market

At first we were disappointed. Others had had the idea already, nothing is new under the sun! However, as I have often read on these forums, it's all in the execution. We felt we could use our skills, Amanda is a writer, I'm an artist, to create original titles that would add to this burgeoning market. Also, unlike POD T-shirts, mugs, etc. the potential market is far from saturated. (we were to find out why! The 'E' in CENTS!) We did some further research and found that the market for personalised products at large is expanding. Add to that personalised books can be priced at 3-4 times that of regular books. After production costs this roughly equated to a 70% profit margin before marketing costs.

Ok, so how?
We needed a web front end where users could input their child's name, choose things like skin tone, hair style, clothing, etc. Rather like a 'dress the doll' system seen in RPG video games. Then generate a flickbook of the whole book for customers to review. On purchase their choices then need to be sent to a server where an automated system would compile a print resolution PDF of the book and send it to a POD print house. The print house then packages and posts it to the customer. Easy? Easyish? We searched about for some existing app or system that could do all this but couldn't find anything.

Ok, now how?
Amanda's son, Isaac, was half way through a computer science degree course and could take a year off 'in industry' to gain experience. We thought this would be perfect and he joined us in the venture. It was summer 2020 and we thought we could get the whole thing up and running with 5-6 books for the Christmas market. WE WERE COMPLETELY WRONG!

Realisation
It was dawning on us that we had bitten off way more than we could chew. I had only sketched a rough idea of how it could work but it was a way bigger project than we had imagined. The devil is in the detail. We were running on modest savings and could no way near afford to employ a whole team of professionals who would normally be expected to deliver a project of this size. I'd been playing around in my hobby time trying to learn game programming in a free open source app called GDevelop. I wondered if I could use it to get a prototype client side app running. The idea being to make something, anything, work as we'd already lost a year. In this time I'd been illustrating 3 titles and put a ton of work into drawing all the variations of the character as they appear on each page. Figuring out and managing the hundreds of layers and files was massive job in itself. I messed around in GDevelop and to my surprise managed to get an avatar (dress the doll) system running and a couple of pages of a book preview working.

In the cloud
The server side programming was the big issue. Isaac couldn't do it and was due to return to uni. We wondered about trying to learn it ourselves but knew now it would take us months if not years to become proficient enough. We wondered if we could find a freelance programmer who would consider taking it on. A couple of hours searching on the net and I found a hopeful candidate, Mike. To my amazement he was interested and considered our meagre funding would cover the work. Actually he thought we were mad trying to rubber band and sticky tape all these components in this way, but also thought it a clever and intriguing way to bootstrap such a large project.

More issues
We were back on the road, just. Mike was brilliant and has really put in a good deal more work than we could pay him for. (If this takes off we will reward him 10 fold!) Bit by bit he wired up the various components. In the meantime we had to make the full client side app. We realised that we had made a big error in that we had 3 books, each with different requirements on the go, resulting in the need for 3 separate apps. We should have just done one, got it working, then used that knowledge to do the others. Also one of the books had two characters that could be personalised, a father and child. Of course men can have beards, as well as hair, and in several styles. This resulted in over a thousand separate graphic files and combinations into the millions. It was so confusing!

Rocky path
At some point because I had so much work on the graphic files Amanda took over the programming with zero programming knowledge. Picture this, we work in our bedroom. Me on the desk and Amanda sitting in bed on a laptop, all day every day. We screwed up a giant white board covering the whole of one wall where we scrawl never ending to do lists. We weren't dealing with just figuring all this out but also how to work together and how our relationship works. I feared, and still fear, that I had dragged Amanda down a very rocky path, but in truth she and I have found a wonderful creative common purpose. Fortunately she is about 100 times more intelligent than me, enjoys puzzle solving and is a lot more of a perfectionist, all the attributes required in programming.

We didn't realise it, but designing the app has so many more things to account for than just the programming. The user interface went through countless changes, much optimising of graphic files to minimise the download, precise positioning of elements, on and on, and the big nasty one, mobile devices. There are no standards with mobile screen dimensions and users can turn the screen from portrait to landscape. We were still using the game making program which needed extra programming to handle responsiveness. Amanda struggled with this for ages eventually realising she could use the inbuilt way games work, with virtual targets and cameras. Still, it was complex, requiring many rewrites of hundreds of lines of instructions.

Goal?
We are nearly ready to launch. I feel that we are only just beginning our journey to the final goal. Just a minute, what is that goal? We talk about this a lot. We're both in our 50s, live modestly, happily and have no interest in the 'high life'. Aside from basic income security we want to build an automated publishing system that we fully own and control, and is direct to customer with no gate keepers. A system that we can use to publish our own original children's books, and we have so many ideas waiting this wings. Right now Amanda is sitting at her bed-desk writing a personalised novel for pre-teens where the reader is the hero, as far as we know a first and something no traditional publisher has done. Although building all this has been a massive two year mission we now have a complete system template to publish new titles with relative ease (hopefully!)

It is just the beginning, and we may get on the highway only to find we are travelling in the wrong direction, or our sticky tape and rubber band powered vehicle falls to bits. There are many uncertainties. A large corporate publisher with deep pockets to fund development may eye the personalised book business, but even so, in publishing there are many small thriving publishers. There is room. Much of this description has been about developing a system but that will be irrelevant to the kids reading their adventures in the books. That is where our mettle will be really tested in the quality of our stories and pictures.

Through trial and many errors we have effectively built a complete, customisable, scalable, publishing system from user to print with negligible overheads. We did it all ourselves, apps, website, writing, illustration, we even designed our own fonts from scratch.

Each time I say that we are almost ready to launch another unforeseen issue appears, but these are now whittled down to a few minor tweaks. We've seen the sign for the freeway and are ready to put our foot down.

You can see our website and play with customising the books at wowthatsme.com. The system is live, but we are still running final tests so please don't actually buy a book! I'll post on this thread when our 'doors' open, probably in a 2-3 weeks. At first we are only supplying to the UK but the system is scalable in that we can hook up to POD print houses easily in other territories when we are ready to expand.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts.

View attachment 42291

Great story and adventure! May I throw an idea your way? How about a where's Waldo style book but the Waldo will be the character your customer creates. I love this idea it's amazing. The POD integration seems great as long as you can find a reliable company that can print books at volume with good quality. I sell books and can say kids need something durable.

 

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[Leo Hartas]

Wow, first off what an inspiring and interesting story to read. My main thoughts would be congratulations for sticking to it and seeing it through. It seems like you've carved out for yourself a nice little niche market that has a lot of potential. The name is unique and eye catching. The only thing is the characters don't seem personalised enough I don't mean to discredit your work at all but from looking at the website I feel like the characters represent many people of a similar look rather than being fully personalised. However if this isn't possible then that makes complete sense.

Thank you Kaan for your congratulations. Apart from a handful of family this is the first place we have exposed our project to the 'outside world' and it's wonderful to have positive feedback. Regarding the personalisation. Yes, we can increase the the personalisation options but it's a 'how long is a piece of string' issue so we have had to limit it to choices that are in line with our competitors. However, from your suggestion, we are looking at adding a couple of face shape options.. so thank you

 

[Leo Hartas]

The energy is amazing! This is what it is about ^^ It is great that you had the experience in 2017, it prepared you to create this.

Perhaps start involving people in the process already? I mean potential customers? It creates an amazing atmosphere. And people feel more connected with the brand this way. It would suit your family business style. What does it look like? You choose what you decide to share of course. Online, either through videos or posts. You wrote that you are a graphic designer for years - have you created something that people might recognize and have a positive connection with? You could share that. Emotionally involved customers are supportive and loyal.

Thank you Miss Infinity. As for energy I think we have been so lucky to have two of us working together supporting each other. I read other posts and almost everyone is working alone on their ventures and I am amazed at their fortitude to continue. It shows how valuable this forum is with everyone offering help and support. Thank you MJ! I would suggest people find a partner to accompany them on the road but I understand how very difficult it is to find the right partner even in life let alone in business with it's sometimes extreme pressures.

Thank you for your suggestions regarding getting it out there. You are absolutely right and we're just starting to figure out ways to do this that suit the products. Some people do know my previous work and I have a small following amongst gamebook readers having illustrated maps in the 80s-90s for Fighting Fantasy, a success in it's time. I have a rather decrepit freelance website where you can see some of my past work.. leohartas.com (It's due for a spring clean!) One thing is that we're going to start a 'how to' You Tube channel on how to draw as this is a popular category and we can use the material across other social media and it's fun to pass on my many years of experience at the drawing board.

 

[Leo Hartas]

Great story and adventure! May I throw an idea your way? How about a where's Waldo style book but the Waldo will be the character your customer creates. I love this idea it's amazing. The POD integration seems great as long as you can find a reliable company that can print books at volume with good quality. I sell books and can say kids need something durable.

Thank you Bbenn and thank you for the idea. Yes, we have just such a book waiting in the wings. Years (too many to count) ago I did a book called Haunted Castle which was similar concept to Where's Waldo and recently the rights reverted back to me. We are going to convert it to our personalised book system and *hopefully* get it on the site later this year.

We were very lucky to find a POD print house where the quality and durability of the books themselves is top line, so hopefully we've got that covered.

 

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[Bbenn30]

Thank you Bbenn and thank you for the idea. Yes, we have just such a book waiting in the wings. Years (too many to count) ago I did a book called Haunted Castle which was similar concept to Where's Waldo and recently the rights reverted back to me. We are going to convert it to our personalised book system and *hopefully* get it on the site later this year.

We were very lucky to find a POD print house where the quality and durability of the books themselves is top line, so hopefully we've got that covered.

I'm excited to see what you come up with. I'll order a book! I have 2 nephews, one that's 7 and reads at a level way above his age and one that's 6 that can barely stand to hold a book let alone read it. But I think they'll both enjoy a personalised book.

 

[Leo Hartas]

I'm excited to see what you come up with. I'll order a book! I have 2 nephews, one that's 7 and reads at a level way above his age and one that's 6 that can barely stand to hold a book let alone read it. But I think they'll both enjoy a personalised book

Yay! Our first potential sale! Wahoo! We're only in the UK initially but hope to hook up to US later in the year.

 

[GPM]

I love reading to my kids! My daughter who is three is always picking out the characters she sees and says "that one is me Daddy". Having a personality book could make that way more fun for her!

 

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[capito]

I visited your website and played a bit with the functionalities. I am delighted with what you have done!

Yes, it takes years and a lot of effort to build it. It was 15 years ago, I was involved in an educational project with 3D videogames for children with different abilities. In a way, yours made me remember stressful but unforgettable hours, if not years of learning and work.

Thank you for sharing and keep updating this adventure

 

[Leo Hartas]

I've been reading with great interest other contributors' ongoing tales of their fastlane business progress and thought I would put up my story so far. I can't say it could be described as 'fastlane', rather lost in the fog, traffic jams, breakdowns, collisions and we've yet to get on the slip road (onramp) to the motorway (freeway). Apologies for this being a mini novel in size.

From where we are now, I can say that had we known what were embarking on we would never have started, but perhaps not knowing was good. Because we did start and we have seen it through over the past two years and are now about to launch our business.

I'm 57 and my new partner, Amanda, is 56. I have worked all my life as a freelance illustrator and Amanda was a university lecturer. While freelancing has paid the bills over the years unless you have a very lucky breakout success it has a limited upper income level. Over the years I've tried various ventures to break away and create my own publishing system, from my pen directly to the customer. Amanda and I tried self publishing children's books on Amazon in 2017. Although we got it working it was difficult to get exposure on the platform, ads drained almost all of the profit and we had complaints about the shoddy print quality of the final product. A chance freelance job gave us another idea.

After Amazon, I went back to freelance illustration to bring some money in. Some of my work was illustrating 'vanity' books for private self publishing clients. We were amazed that one of my clients, a sweet grandmother, was willing to pay £2.5K for me to illustrate and print one book just for her grandchildren. And so we stumbled on the idea of personalised children's books, but only if we could figure out a way to automate and scale it.

The idea
Personalised children's books. A website where a user inputs their child's name, creates a visual illustration of the child (choosing skin and eye colour, hairstyle and colour), and then the book is printed with the child as the hero both in the illustrations and the text. A personalised print-on-demand system similar to T-shirt print on demand (POD), but for books. A quick web search revealed that there were already some established companies doing this and doing very well, in fact a couple of them had appeared on Dragon's Den and enthusiastically received funding.The market

At first we were disappointed. Others had had the idea already, nothing is new under the sun! However, as I have often read on these forums, it's all in the execution. We felt we could use our skills, Amanda is a writer, I'm an artist, to create original titles that would add to this burgeoning market. Also, unlike POD T-shirts, mugs, etc. the potential market is far from saturated. (we were to find out why! The 'E' in CENTS!) We did some further research and found that the market for personalised products at large is expanding. Add to that personalised books can be priced at 3-4 times that of regular books. After production costs this roughly equated to a 70% profit margin before marketing costs.

Ok, so how?
We needed a web front end where users could input their child's name, choose things like skin tone, hair style, clothing, etc. Rather like a 'dress the doll' system seen in RPG video games. Then generate a flickbook of the whole book for customers to review. On purchase their choices then need to be sent to a server where an automated system would compile a print resolution PDF of the book and send it to a POD print house. The print house then packages and posts it to the customer. Easy? Easyish? We searched about for some existing app or system that could do all this but couldn't find anything.

Ok, now how?
Amanda's son, Isaac, was half way through a computer science degree course and could take a year off 'in industry' to gain experience. We thought this would be perfect and he joined us in the venture. It was summer 2020 and we thought we could get the whole thing up and running with 5-6 books for the Christmas market. WE WERE COMPLETELY WRONG!

Realisation
It was dawning on us that we had bitten off way more than we could chew. I had only sketched a rough idea of how it could work but it was a way bigger project than we had imagined. The devil is in the detail. We were running on modest savings and could no way near afford to employ a whole team of professionals who would normally be expected to deliver a project of this size. I'd been playing around in my hobby time trying to learn game programming in a free open source app called GDevelop. I wondered if I could use it to get a prototype client side app running. The idea being to make something, anything, work as we'd already lost a year. In this time I'd been illustrating 3 titles and put a ton of work into drawing all the variations of the character as they appear on each page. Figuring out and managing the hundreds of layers and files was massive job in itself. I messed around in GDevelop and to my surprise managed to get an avatar (dress the doll) system running and a couple of pages of a book preview working.

In the cloud
The server side programming was the big issue. Isaac couldn't do it and was due to return to uni. We wondered about trying to learn it ourselves but knew now it would take us months if not years to become proficient enough. We wondered if we could find a freelance programmer who would consider taking it on. A couple of hours searching on the net and I found a hopeful candidate, Mike. To my amazement he was interested and considered our meagre funding would cover the work. Actually he thought we were mad trying to rubber band and sticky tape all these components in this way, but also thought it a clever and intriguing way to bootstrap such a large project.

More issues
We were back on the road, just. Mike was brilliant and has really put in a good deal more work than we could pay him for. (If this takes off we will reward him 10 fold!) Bit by bit he wired up the various components. In the meantime we had to make the full client side app. We realised that we had made a big error in that we had 3 books, each with different requirements on the go, resulting in the need for 3 separate apps. We should have just done one, got it working, then used that knowledge to do the others. Also one of the books had two characters that could be personalised, a father and child. Of course men can have beards, as well as hair, and in several styles. This resulted in over a thousand separate graphic files and combinations into the millions. It was so confusing!

Rocky path
At some point because I had so much work on the graphic files Amanda took over the programming with zero programming knowledge. Picture this, we work in our bedroom. Me on the desk and Amanda sitting in bed on a laptop, all day every day. We screwed up a giant white board covering the whole of one wall where we scrawl never ending to do lists. We weren't dealing with just figuring all this out but also how to work together and how our relationship works. I feared, and still fear, that I had dragged Amanda down a very rocky path, but in truth she and I have found a wonderful creative common purpose. Fortunately she is about 100 times more intelligent than me, enjoys puzzle solving and is a lot more of a perfectionist, all the attributes required in programming.

We didn't realise it, but designing the app has so many more things to account for than just the programming. The user interface went through countless changes, much optimising of graphic files to minimise the download, precise positioning of elements, on and on, and the big nasty one, mobile devices. There are no standards with mobile screen dimensions and users can turn the screen from portrait to landscape. We were still using the game making program which needed extra programming to handle responsiveness. Amanda struggled with this for ages eventually realising she could use the inbuilt way games work, with virtual targets and cameras. Still, it was complex, requiring many rewrites of hundreds of lines of instructions.

Goal?
We are nearly ready to launch. I feel that we are only just beginning our journey to the final goal. Just a minute, what is that goal? We talk about this a lot. We're both in our 50s, live modestly, happily and have no interest in the 'high life'. Aside from basic income security we want to build an automated publishing system that we fully own and control, and is direct to customer with no gate keepers. A system that we can use to publish our own original children's books, and we have so many ideas waiting this wings. Right now Amanda is sitting at her bed-desk writing a personalised novel for pre-teens where the reader is the hero, as far as we know a first and something no traditional publisher has done. Although building all this has been a massive two year mission we now have a complete system template to publish new titles with relative ease (hopefully!)

It is just the beginning, and we may get on the highway only to find we are travelling in the wrong direction, or our sticky tape and rubber band powered vehicle falls to bits. There are many uncertainties. A large corporate publisher with deep pockets to fund development may eye the personalised book business, but even so, in publishing there are many small thriving publishers. There is room. Much of this description has been about developing a system but that will be irrelevant to the kids reading their adventures in the books. That is where our mettle will be really tested in the quality of our stories and pictures.

Through trial and many errors we have effectively built a complete, customisable, scalable, publishing system from user to print with negligible overheads. We did it all ourselves, apps, website, writing, illustration, we even designed our own fonts from scratch.

Each time I say that we are almost ready to launch another unforeseen issue appears, but these are now whittled down to a few minor tweaks. We've seen the sign for the freeway and are ready to put our foot down.

You can see our website and play with customising the books at wowthatsme.com. The system is live, but we are still running final tests so please don't actually buy a book! I'll post on this thread when our 'doors' open, probably in a 2-3 weeks. At first we are only supplying to the UK but the system is scalable in that we can hook up to POD print houses easily in other territories when we are ready to expand.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts.

View attachment 42291

Just a little update. The books will be sent out by the printers who are on the other side of the UK. We have to supply them with book mailers.. y'know those card packages that have a tear strip. We decided to design our own custom mailers and illustrate them in a rather unconventional way, as a colouring mouse theatre! It was a bunch of work as I had to layout exact design for a costly cutting forme and make the configuration of the pictures would work. Also, our first supplier, a national market leader, were useless and lost our instructions and designs, misquoted, a total waste of time. Eventually I found a smaller supplier just down the road from the printers (saving us carriage costs) who really got our concept and have been great. The idea for this was as marketing 'value bomb', where the customer gets a lot more value than any of the competition. The photos attached are of the sample proof, the final will be printed on matte white card.

Anyway, I just paid the invoice. Gulp! It was more than I've ever spent on a car (OK, so I've always driven 2nd hand bangers!) and a big chunk of our savings. We've worked so far on the cheap only paying for our living costs. This is where the rubber really hits the road. We are now going to paying warehousing costs at the printers. We HAVE to get this whole thing moving and money coming in. There's no backing out now. The whole thing might come crashing down and I can hear friends, family, even my Dad (rest his soul!) and pretty much everyone in the world shouting, 'You bloody idiot!'. I feel kinda sick... but super excited!

I'd be interested to hear about your 'Gulp!' moments where you really had to commit to the dream.

 

[Leo Hartas]

Just a little update. The books will be sent out by the printers who are on the other side of the UK. We have to supply them with book mailers.. y'know those card packages that have a tear strip. We decided to design our own custom mailers and illustrate them in a rather unconventional way, as a colouring mouse theatre! It was a bunch of work as I had to layout exact design for a costly cutting forme and make the configuration of the pictures would work. Also, our first supplier, a national market leader, were useless and lost our instructions and designs, misquoted, a total waste of time. Eventually I found a smaller supplier just down the road from the printers (saving us carriage costs) who really got our concept and have been great. The idea for this was as marketing 'value bomb', where the customer gets a lot more value than any of the competition. The photos attached are of the sample proof, the final will be printed on matte white card.

Anyway, I just paid the invoice. Gulp! It was more than I've ever spent on a car (OK, so I've always driven 2nd hand bangers!) and a big chunk of our savings. We've worked so far on the cheap only paying for our living costs. This is where the rubber really hits the road. We are now going to paying warehousing costs at the printers. We HAVE to get this whole thing moving and money coming in. There's no backing out now. The whole thing might come crashing down and I can hear friends, family, even my Dad (rest his soul!) and pretty much everyone in the world shouting, 'You bloody idiot!'. I feel kinda sick... but super excited!

I'd be interested to hear about your 'Gulp!' moments where you really had to commit to the dream.

Doh! I forgot to attach the photos..

 

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[Leo Hartas]

I visited your website and played a bit with the functionalities. I am delighted with what you have done!

Yes, it takes years and a lot of effort to build it. It was 15 years ago, I was involved in an educational project with 3D videogames for children with different abilities. In a way, yours made me remember stressful but unforgettable hours, if not years of learning and work.

Thank you for sharing and keep updating this adventure

Thanks Capito, So pleased to hear you got on with the app and I'm interested that you had a similar experience with all the work in the background. It's like building a house and visitors come round to say, 'Nice wall paper', when what you want them to recognise is all the tons of cement you spent months mixing.

 

[Leo Hartas]

I love reading to my kids! My daughter who is three is always picking out the characters she sees and says "that one is me Daddy". Having a personality book could make that way more fun for her!

Thanks GPM, Your comment gave me a boost. That's just what I want to hear.
We're also working on a free digital magazine as a reward for subbing to our mailing list, for kids just like your daughter. It'll be full of stories, games and activities. Once it's going you must subscribe as I'd love to hear if your daughter likes it. Here's a screenshot of some of the pages I'm working on now.

 

[GPM]

Thanks GPM, Your comment gave me a boost. That's just what I want to hear.
We're also working on a free digital magazine as a reward for subbing to our mailing list, for kids just like your daughter. It'll be full of stories, games and activities. Once it's going you must subscribe as I'd love to hear if your daughter likes it. Here's a screenshot of some of the pages I'm working on now.

View attachment 42371

My daughter is with me now and even told me which bird she is. "That ones me daddy, and this one is you"

 

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[GPM]

So my daughter liked that picture so much she took my phone from me and told me it was because she wanted to see the picture more. She zoomed in on it and told me all about each bird. She says she is the one with the pink shoes. She gave her brother and her mom and dad a bird too. She must have looked at it for 10 minutes until I finally took my phone back. She has literally never done that with my phone before.

If my three year old is any guide, you are definitely on to something here lol.

 

[Leo Hartas]

So my daughter liked that picture so much she took my phone from me and told me it was because she wanted to see the picture more. She zoomed in on it and told me all about each bird. She says she is the one with the pink shoes. She gave her brother and her mom and dad a bird too. She must have looked at it for 10 minutes until I finally took my phone back. She has literally never done that with my phone before.

If my three year old is any guide, you are definitely on to something here lol.

Fantastic! We've just been making sounds to embed in the picture so when a child presses the bird it makes a noise. We're nearly ready to put the magazine up.. can't wait to hear how your daughter gets on with it.

 

[Leo Hartas]

Update. We've been working on a free digital children's magazine and are nearly finished. Again, we're doing everything including Amanda programming some very simple games and puzzles. It's a big gamble as we've poured a lot of work into something we're handing out free, well, sort of free, it's a gift for subbing to our mailing list. Although we're planning to make it quarterly I fear that even that may be too much commitment.. I guess if so we'll just make an issue whenever and the back issues will always be available.

The idea is to draw people to our website with an outsized value offer. I've done all the art at print resolution so if it proves popular we can turn it into print books and charge for them. We also thought that we'll be building an IP with the characters so, you never know, perhaps an animation or toy company may be interested in licensing.. thinking bigger for the future I guess. From a marketing perspective it provides tons of sharable content for social media.

 

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[GPM]

Update. We've been working on a free digital children's magazine and are nearly finished. Again, we're doing everything including Amanda programming some very simple games and puzzles. It's a big gamble as we've poured a lot of work into something we're handing out free, well, sort of free, it's a gift for subbing to our mailing list. Although we're planning to make it quarterly I fear that even that may be too much commitment.. I guess if so we'll just make an issue whenever and the back issues will always be available.

The idea is to draw people to our website with an outsized value offer. I've done all the art at print resolution so if it proves popular we can turn it into print books and charge for them. We also thought that we'll be building an IP with the characters so, you never know, perhaps an animation or toy company may be interested in licensing.. thinking bigger for the future I guess. From a marketing perspective it provides tons of sharable content for social media.

View attachment 42480

I love it!!

One thing to consider, if it is easy for you to change some text in these if it is print on demand, perhaps language suited to USA/Canada for orders in the future there? I know the UK uses a ton of words that are never used here.

Just a thought. Although kids probably won't care, words are just words to them.

My favorite TV show is Top Gear, and the trio uses a crap ton of words that confuse my Mexican wife everytime I watch it. She strictly learned English from Canada, so much of their vocabulary might as well be a foreign language.

 

[Leo Hartas]

I love it!!

One thing to consider, if it is easy for you to change some text in these if it is print on demand, perhaps language suited to USA/Canada for orders in the future there? I know the UK uses a ton of words that are never used here.

Just a thought. Although kids probably won't care, words are just words to them.

My favorite TV show is Top Gear, and the trio uses a crap ton of words that confuse my Mexican wife everytime I watch it. She strictly learned English from Canada, so much of their vocabulary might as well be a foreign language.

Good point! We will be 'Americanising' both the magazine and books when we launch in the US.

We have pretty much finished the magazine which works in a browser. It needs a bit of tidying up but you can see it here

I'd love to know what your daughter thinks of it.

 

[capito]

We've just been making sounds to embed in the picture so when a child presses the bird it makes a noise.

We have pretty much finished the magazine which works in a browser. It needs a bit of tidying up but you can see it here

It is said that we all have a child's soul, so I went back to interacting with the web and I felt pleasantly happy with the sounds and children's stories.
You and Amanda are doing great! Little giant steps...

 

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[Leo Hartas]

Update. Been stumbling around The Valley of Despair today (there are no nice pubs in The Valley!) It's actually not so bad, just a tough day trying to figure out setting up the email marketing list thingy. It's a dog of program with a confusing UI that is grindingly slow in places. Or perhaps I'm just being a bad workman blaming his tools? Truth is it's big learning curve that we weren't expecting to climb as we'd paid a fat chunk of cash to a digital marketing company to set up only to find they had done the bare minimum. Their 'work' was full of basic spelling errors, uninspired writing, bog standard templates, etc. It became obvious they'd given the job to an office junior to slap together in an afternoon. We do have high expectations in that we want every bit of our output, from the products themselves to email flows to perfectly reflect our brand, style, etc. and be grammatically spot on, (even though my posts here don't measure up!). We're surprised that the marketing company are still attracting clients, I guess there are plenty of punters who are happy with whatever. It's frustrating to have lost the cash. I could kick up a stink, but instead we'll keep piling forward and leave them eating our dust!

This simple form took me ages:

The great thing, as always, is that we've been forced to learn and do it ourselves, which adds another comforting layer of skill, control and resilience.

Something to celebrate is that we finished and polished our children's magazine (see earlier posts, or see it here). Thanks to the readers of this thread and their suggestions along with some wonderfully detailed feedback on the GDevelop forum. (A forum for users of the software we built the magazine in) We are ever grateful for the help and support.

 

[Leo Hartas]

Update. Suddenly we realise we have a deadline, one of the many we have missed in our 2 year journey because our product wasn't ready. Developmentally, technically, customer experience, marketing, SEO, purchase funnel, etc. and for ourselves to some extent, emotionally. We interrupt each other to discuss a myriad of micro-decisions, each one has to be prioritised into either prelaunch or something we can finesse after launch. It's often hard. We also have to figure out if an issue is leading us down an unnecessary rabbit hole or if it's critical to the MVP (minimum viable product). (Right now it's navigating the forest of confusing Wordpress plugins to find the one small feature we need, then figuring out how to make it work.)

Anyway, back to the deadline. Father's Day. We have a book that is on point for that day in June. The whole system is now working, but testing revealed several subtle issues that need fixing. The system collates hundreds of graphic layers on the fly and is mind bendingly complex. To fix issues in it is like going into the messiest of garden sheds looking for a single No. 6 screw! The fact that the shed is a mess is because from the start we didn't know how to build this particular specialised shed and there are no instructions. But, over time, we are getting to understand the pipeline we cobbled together. This is why in the world of, 'How to start a business', it's always a generic overview. Your particular business is always going be unique and it's a mountain of totally original work to figure out how to do it on your own. MJ's books are head and shoulders above the rest. He can't solve your particular issues, but he does make sure you know it's up to you and it's going to be a hell of a rocky road!

On the issue of MPV. I've read several posts that talk about just make something and get it to market. This may well work for some industries, but our MPV has to be very advanced to a complete, perfect product. If a customer has personalised their book with brown eyes for the kid and when the book arrives the eyes turn out blue on one page they have every reason to return it. One return, with all the associated hassle, will wipe out 10 books worth of profit, time, and damage our reputation and being personalised we can't resell the returned book. I guess that's why it's taken us so long just to get to the starting line. Good as the E in CENTS I guess!

We should be excited, with launch so close, but we're both rather low. We're sick of being stuck in this bedroom working on the same thing everyday and there's a growing dread that somewhere there is a critical error lurking to jump out and bite us. I know we'll sort it, but just the thought drains any excitement.

One more push. (Hang on, one more push more, and another, and another...)

This is a photo of the whiteboard today. It's literally 2 feet from my head when I wake up in bed.

 

[Leo Hartas]

Update. Since my last post here we have solved another few million small issues with the website, book collation system and have finally run an end-to-end test. Perhaps the biggest issue was moving the website to a different host that gave us a 10x speed increase but meant we had to set up a separate system for process emails which turned out to be a bit of a confusing nightmare. I ordered 6 six books through the system, two of which arrived through the post after a long wait. (I blame The Queen for slowing up the postal system.. I shall have words!)

To our great relief the books are great.. Real quality feel, thick paper, lovely print and best of all - no errors! I was dreading opening them to find one of the characters upside down or something.. but the automatic collation system is all working like a dream.

The only issue was that the gift wrap I ordered ages ago is slightly too small for the hardback books.. annoying because I asked the printers to check my template which they ok'd at the time. I'd bought 3000! Still, we can use them for the softback. Looking back at building this whole system we made several mistakes that have cost us, but I'm focusing on the long run when they will seem like minor hiccups.

If you are interested please have a look at the website which has gone through several redesigns. For the time being we can only ship to the UK but we're hoping to expand to the US, Canada and Australia in time for Christmas. The basket and checkout works, but we plan to add more features in the near future. If you have small children or know someone with kids please join our mailing list for our free magazine. (I hope this doesn't sound too salesy!)

Now we have to keep producing more titles and start marketing in earnest. The next thrilling milestone will be our first proper sale!

 

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[Leo Hartas]

Update. We've been handing out virtual gift cards free to friends with young children. Of course this is at a loss but we saw it as a way to:

1. Gather feedback about the shopping process and the books themselves.
2. Hopefully gather positive reviews for the site. (Slightly dodgy, as we've paid for the books.. but you've got to get the ball rolling)
3. Winkle out any technical issues.
4. Seed enthusiasm for our books so they tell their friends.
5. Encourage them to post about our books on their social media.

This is costing us but we feel it's better than pouring cash into the coffers of big tech for social media ads. We will probably do this at some point, perhaps to boost sales in the run up to Christmas.

Feedback has been very useful at helping us spot many minor issues with the site, app and ordering process. The gift card plugin broke at one point allowing the system to take customer's money without handing on the product. Thankfully the plugin developers were brilliant and quickly fixed the issue. (Yith) I've been watching orders in the system, checking they get to the printer.. it's kind of scary in that I expect any part of this ramshackle contraption to break, but also marvelling that we built the thing and so far it's working. From now on we can keep improving and upgrading parts until it can fly to Mars!

Last night we got our first full price, (not a friend or any connection) order!

 

[Leo Hartas]

Update. It's been a while since I posted here.

We sent out free gift virtual cards to some people we know with small children to claim a free book for the purposes I outlined in my last post. It was interesting how we had to prod people to even bother to open the email. I suspect that for a large proportion of the public email is no longer their main communication point. I also wonder if the, 'Oh no, Leo and Amanda have written something, it'll be amateur junk I'll have to nice about', thing was at play here too. However, once people had used the card and received their book the reaction was genuine delight with offers to help, write glowing reviews, etc.

The most useful help we have received has been videos and photos of them opening the package and reading with their kids. This material has been invaluable for creating marketing assets providing social proof as they were not slick studio made but were genuine home produced reactions.

With Christmas fast approaching we had no social media reach at all and only a couple of 'proper' sales from people we didn't know. We decided to sink our last savings into Google Ads. We researched and researched and came to the realisation that we just couldn't handle this on our own. Google Ads are so complex and they seem to change and add new products daily. If we make even a small mistake we could be pouring our meagre savings down the drain. Of all the research we did we found the most compelling, up to date and genuine advice was being produced by a US ad agency called Solutions 8. As an agency they deal with big pocket accounts but as it happens they were just opening a low cost solution for small companies with limited budgets. To keep costs down they do not produce assets or do 'hand holding', instead they act more as advisors and guides. I think this is critical because every business has different marketing objectives and requirements and it's this advice specific to your business that is valuable and can't be found in general 'how to' books, videos and blogs.

We signed up! And as of today our ads are running at about £100 per day.

We had to do a ton of work to prepare the ad assets including videos, images, copy, etc. along with a bunch of other technical improvements to the website to fit Google's requirements. Some of the work was also beyond us so I employed a Fiverr to do things like speed up the website and harden it against hacking attacks. They were brilliant to work with and quick. Shout out to Kreativopro! The video ads were something, Amanda learnt Da Vinci Resolve from zero and nearly melted her old laptop producing them.

I have to say that so far it seems like the right decision this time to employ an agency. Solutions 8 have been so attentive and helpful guiding us through the process. I guess we'll only know with time if it pays off.

Check out one of our video ads I'd love to know what you think.

 

[capito]

I really appreciate everything that you and Amanda have developed in this endeavor. It is a project that has demanded a lot.

Videos are not my specialty, but I think Amanda made a nice video ads.

Great work!

 

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[Private Witt]

I don't have kids so hard for me to relate but congrats on the hard work and looks like a very cool product that will make a lot of parents/kids happy. Do you think you will get a lot of repeat orders as the kids age. Good luck with everything!

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Personalised Books | Wow! That's Me

Beautifully Illustrated Personalised Books | Free Shipping in UK | Printed in UK | Read before buying | Customise with child's name and illustration

wowthatsme.com

I don't have kids, but this sounds like a great concept that I would think would resonate with a lot of parents. The children's book space seems like a hard nut to crack, but I'm interested to see how you will fair, with your unique skew. Good luck, hope to hear some great results!