We do that for them. And sometimes it's a company that is... you know, constantly reordering their manual for a certain product or a guide for their customers.
Acquiring Minds
A $10m Acquisition for Freedom and Family
Excerpts · 348 segments · ~1:26:03 long
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Sometimes it is the matriarch of a family that wants to put a cookbook together and order maybe 25 copies for friends and family. So we get all different types of people and we really just guide them through the process to create their own bespoke, high quality book print and run it and get it out to them so that they can get it to their customers or their family members or whoever is finally…
And the way this business is... differentiated, or maybe I should say its niche, again, is self-publishing. So it's a niche within printing.
Effectively, this is a printing business, but there's printing and binding, which is a whole other thing, right? That's about the limit of my knowledge of creating a book. But there's printing and then binding.
You do them... both, which I guess is a niche or a part of the differentiation. And then on top of that, you provide the services to kind of hold their hand through this process.
Yes. Our customer service is award-winning and I have been getting to know the customer service agents and I clearly understand why they know the industry, they know the design process, they know what's called the pre-flight process. They know all of that very well and they're really... very, very good advisors to our customers throughout the process.
So that's a point of differentiation. I would say also what customers have told me, I'm going through my initial stage of doing customer interviews, is that the quality is better than any of the other solutions out there, both for paperback and for hardcover. And also our speed. We're able to get author proofs, for example, within just a few days.
Whereas I've heard Amazon KDP will take weeks. And Amazon's a big company and having worked there, your bias for action and speed is one of their strong points. So I'm not sure why that is, but we move fast.
even with very small runs. And so that is what our customers have told us, that even though right now it's solely a print company, that the quality and the speed bring them to us rather than to our competitors. And over time, that status of just being a print company is going to change.
What I want to do being a product person is really understand our customers and understand their journey. from deciding that they want to be a self-published author to holding that author proof in their hand, and even perhaps helping them market their book after. I want to create products and services all along the way to help our customers.
And to the customer again, and maybe the broader market you described, I guess the top customer would be somebody who wants to put out their own work of fiction. But then you also gave examples of companies who might want to publish some sort of guide or manual. matriarch and the cookbook and so on.
Can you segment that for us? Is this, you know, 80, 20, 80% are the people who want to put out their own book of fiction or is it pretty diversified across those different use cases or customer segments?
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