Packback is an education technology company. We rent digital textbooks, we run online Curiosity Communities, and we help students compare prices on textbooks through our Price Compare Engine.
It is safe to say that since our start, we've been a firmly "digital" company. Our products trade on their online experience and pricing value, over the smell of a freshly-opened book (which I must say, is one of the most painful tradeoffs of selling only digital books).
In other previously print-focused industries that have begun to make their move to digital, there have been whisperings made about the "Death of Print".
It's an ominous headline for sure, but is it true? Could print ever really "die"...and should it?
Back in 2012, long before my cofounders and I launched our platform, we were 4 college students grinding away (without a technical cofounder, mind you) to attempt to convince our now-partners in the publishing industry to take a leap of faith on this small startup run by first time founders. When my partners walked into their first meetings with our potential investors and publishing partners, they walked in not with a version of our app, but with a printed booklet about our business model and our vision of what the Packback platform could become.
We reflect back on that floppy booklet with that special kind of gentleness of judgement and nostalgia reserved only for past versions of ourselves (and our business).
But as funny as it is to look back on Packback version 0.1, that printed booklet allowed us to get our point across and gain a foothold in the industry long before we would have been able to build our platform. I believe that that booklet saved us from the perils of perfection paralysis; we didn't make excuses for our lack of a platform, we just made something.
Print was the medium with the lowest barrier to entry to bring Packback out of our heads and into the world.
And throughout the growth of our company, we have turned to print as a way to test, reach and touch in ways that digital cannot.
We have turned to print for lean ways to test ideas, messaging and pricing, using custom coupon codes to identify which combinations were most effective. Just as one might A-B test a landing page or email campaign, the same can be accomplished with unique physical handouts.
We have turned to print as a tangible way to track our impact through handouts for our Brand Ambassador Program. Every Ambassador was equipped with several hundred flyers and cards, and they were left to discover the most effective and creative ways to utilize their printed resources. We could track the impact of our ambassadors through the usage of custom coupon codes and visits to unique URLS. For a few dollars per Ambassador, Packback's message received thousands of views on campuses across the nation.
We have turned to print minimal ways to define our space when we subleased from other Chicago startups. We created a "responsive mural" that allowed us to rearrange and reuse its pieces as we moved from space to space. That grid of Packback's circular illustrations became so much a part of our internal identity that we ended up incorporating it into our online presence as well.
And now today, we have turned to print as a way to proudly showcase our values and the culture of our company. Take a few steps into the new Packback office and you'll be met with that same "responsive mural", which features the faces of many of our employees since we first began our company. Just a few more steps into the space reveals a wall filled with Packback's values; the operating system for our company.
Print can pose major challenges to a startup team that works primarily digitally, and we've found incredible support in a local Chicago printer, Cushing. Their team has helped us streamline the process of getting our ideas to print, found us the most affordable ways for our very tight-belted startup to print our projects and has turned around beautiful, reliable work every single time we "turned to print".
If your own digital startup is looking to put some ideas down on paper, I think Cushing is the best team to turn to in Chicago.
As a final anecdote...most recently, we turned to print to create holiday cards to send to every single one of the professors using Packback. Inside was a poem written by our teammates Tessa and Amy about the end of another semester of beautiful curiosity. That card surprised and touched the professors that received it in a way that an email never could.
Building a startup from scratch is, in my opinion, all about making connections. Connecting the right ideas; connecting the right people; and most importantly, building meaningful connections with the people who believe in your business early.
And print has helped our company create those critical connections from the time that Packback was still just an idea.
