How I Built My Small Business

Andy Hunter - Saving Indie Bookstores: The Innovated Model Behind BOOKSHOP.ORG

• Season 2 • Episode 3

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Andy Hunter is the founder CEO of bookshop.Org 
In todday's episode, he talks about his innovative solution to save indie bookstore.

Quoting the New York Times, “The rapid rise of Bookshop.org during the shutdown has been hailed as a boon for independent stores.” B-Labs announced the company as one of the “best for the world,” and in the top 5% of all B-Corps.

The business model is brilliant on so many levels, and I can’t wait for you to hear what he has to share.

Andy is also the co-creator of the websites: Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Crime Reads, and BookMarks - combined annual readership of about 30 million people. And, worked as an independent publisher at Catapult, Counterpoint and Soft Skull Press.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to how I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McEntee, your host, and today we have Andy Hunter, the founder CEO of Bookshoporg, on the show to talk about his innovative solution to save indie bookstores. Quoting the New York Times, the rapid rise of bookshoporg during the shutdown has been hailed as a boon for independent stores. B-labs announced the company as one of the best for the world and in the top 5% of all B Corps. The business model is brilliant on so many levels and I can't wait for you to hear what he has to share. Andy is also the co-creator of the website's Literary Hub Electric Literature, crime Raids and Bookmarks, with combined annual readership of about 30 million people.

Speaker 1:

Andy has worked as an independent publisher at Catapult, counterpoint and Soft Skull Press. You can find a link through to his business in the episode's description. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen to podcasts and please share it with a friend to help me reach more listeners' ears. Let's get started. It with a friend to help me reach more listeners' ears, let's get started. Thank you to our listeners for being here today. Hi Andy, thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2:

Hi, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

So can you tell us what the moment was?

Speaker 2:

or maybe the collection of moments that inspired you to start bookshoporg. Yeah, sure, it was definitely a collection of moments. I was in the book industry, doing publishing and doing like book websites, and I watched as Amazon grew from 15% of all books sold to over 50% of all books sold, and I watched as about half of the independent bookstores in the country went out of business during those 15 years and the whole time I was like why doesn't somebody do something to help these independent bookstores, like sell books online and fight against Amazon? People buy more and more things online. That's not a trend that you're going to be able to stop. So you got to build something that allows independent bookstores to sell their books online to their customers and so their customers can support them instead of going into the waiting arms of Amazon for all their book purchases. And after waiting for somebody smarter and better than me to do it for about 12 years, I finally decided to try to do it myself, and the rest was history.

Speaker 1:

Once you decided that you were going to try to solve this problem, what were the first steps that you took to turn this idea into a reality?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, the very first step was to buy a six pack of beer and stay up for six hours one evening writing down every idea that I had. I didn't, I don't think I finished the six pack, so I would say it's a probably a three beer idea, but for whatever reason, it just got the juices flowing. I played loud music. I just wrote my way to a solution. I started with, like the problems. I started with some basic ideas, but I didn't have the full idea for the platform until the end of that night. And at the end of that night I had a plan that was very, very similar to what I ended up launching with. Once I had the plan all written down, I edited it, I passed it to a friend whose wife was a designer. They worked together on transforming it into a deck, and then I started the arduous and incredibly difficult and depressing phase of fundraising for it.

Speaker 1:

Can you tell us a little bit about what that was like?

Speaker 2:

Well, it was a tricky experience because I was asking, I was trying to raise $1.2 million and that sounds like a lot of money. But if you're saying I want to compete with Amazon and I'm going to do it with $1.2 million, most investors don't think you havea chance Because, as one investor said to me, competing with Amazon is not a business plan. Another investor said American consumers only care about two things they care about price and they care about speed. And unless you can beat Amazon on price and speed, you don't have a chance. And this guy was actually representing a whole group of investors and they all dropped out after they heard him say that Not only was I trying to compete with Amazon, but I was also doing it with a kind of everyone take all model where, like, the profits are shared around with all the different stakeholders. So I wasn't offering an opportunity to like, oh, you're going to get a hundred times return because we are going to dominate the book market and we are going to win. It was more like we're going to save independent bookstores and we're going to give away most of our profits to them, and investors aren't like sign me up, take my money. That sounds great.

Speaker 2:

It was tons of rejection, but I did manage to cobble together a group of about seven or eight investors who loved local bookstores, who thought that this was worth a try. And it took me about a year and a half and there were definitely times where it was felt like very lonely and like I should just give up because at that point it was just me and my deck going to meeting after meeting after meeting. But it finally worked out and I raised about $775,000, which wasn't quite $1.2 million, but at that point I felt like, well, this is just barely enough that I think I can build it for this amount. And so we did.

Speaker 1:

And once you got that funding, how did you get to work?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I found some freelance engineers, a dev shop called Happy Fun Corp who employed some friends of mine who were willing to build it for me, and I felt like I had the right sensibility and came up with a plan to use an open source platform to build it. And I hired my first employee, this guy, david Rose, who was very well-connected among New York City publishers and also had like a great sales mind, and so I had a partner in crime, which is really important. It's really important for morale and to kind of keep going every day. You've just got someone to talk to and somebody that's in it with you. It's easier.

Speaker 2:

So the process then became like, on one hand, building the platform making sure it works, building it as fast as we can, and, on the other hand, building the platform making sure it works, building it as fast as we can, and, on the other hand, building support for the idea in the publishing industry and with booksellers, because I had to get the trade organization for booksellers to embrace the idea and support it, because we didn't want to go into the world of bookstores and say, hey, we want to help you and have them all be like, well, who are you and how can we trust you? So we had to build trust, and that took a long time too.

Speaker 1:

And what did you find were the most effective strategies in building that trust?

Speaker 2:

Going to trade shows and meeting key players, finding out who the influential voices were in the community and getting to know them, putting in a lot of face time that was really the most important thing and engaging with skeptics head on. The moment I would hear somebody was skeptical, or the moment that I was in a group and there were skeptical questions being thrown at me, I would just rush into it. I really believed in what we were trying to do. I wanted to answer all their questions. I wanted to hear their skepticism and let them know why I thought it wasn't justified and why I thought we could win together. And so really confronting it head on, being as transparent as possible and just being genuine and putting in the face time, not being afraid of conflict.

Speaker 1:

I love your business model. I admire it. I think it's very innovative and it solves a real problem. I mean, all of us want to save our indie bookstores, but you are the first person I've heard of who is actively doing anything about it. So thank you.

Speaker 2:

Thank you?

Speaker 1:

How? Now is bookshoporg competing with Amazon? How are you taking that market share?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, you know it's. It's a number of things, but I think the most important one is through the power of small communities. So a story that I sometimes tell is about six weeks before we launched, I woke up at three in the morning with the burning urge to figure out how many customers I needed in order to break even. And so I started doing the mental math and I realized I needed 375,000 customers to break even, and I had about six months of runway to get there. And that moment was like crushing, because I was like, oh my God, like I'm a fool, who am I kidding? Where am I going to get 375,000 customers from? Like a start of zero in six months? Like where are they going to come from, et cetera. Now what I realized is that I could approach communities that could all bring their followers, they can bring their fans, they can bring their customers. So creating 375,000 customers is a matter of getting you know 3,000 communities that have an average of 125 customers each right. And so getting independent bookstores to use the platform was a major one, because the independent bookstores would tell their customers hey, shop for us at bookshoporg. Also, getting news organizations and media organizations to sign up for our affiliate program so that, like Condé Nast, magazines now link to bookshoporg, new York Times links to bookshoporg when they write about books. It's right next to the Amazon buy on Amazon button, this buy on bookshoporg button. They bring customers in Organizations and they bring customers in organizations literary magazines, arts organizations, book clubs, like.

Speaker 2:

We pay a 10% affiliate commission for everybody that brings in a customer. So even podcasts. There are podcasts out there that make thousands of dollars a year by using bookshop links when they promote books on their podcasts and so just by doing a ton of outreach to communities and having those communities bring in their customers. That was the biggest impact and that continues to be how we grow. Because we rely on a lot of word of mouth. We don't have any real money for serious direct to consumer advertising, like a lot of direct to consumer brands do a lot of Facebook ads and Instagram ads. We don't have the money for that because we remit our profits to local bookstores. So we sent $34 million to local bookstores. That's $34 million that we couldn't spend on digital ads. So we rely on word of mouth.

Speaker 1:

Very grassroots approach. I like it Gets everybody involved. So what are the challenges that you have faced in uniting independent bookstores under bookshoporg's mission?

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, I alluded to the biggest challenge in the beginning, which was getting booksellers to trust us and, like bookstore owners, did not get into the business because they love the internet and they want to be selling books online. Right, they want to be handing people books, they want to be browsing and perusing books, they want to be arranging their shelves. A lot of them don't really like the internet and don't like online shopping. They consider it a threat, right, they want to have real world connections with people in their communities. So getting them to believe that actually having a online sales strategy was important to their businesses and could help them. That was a huge hurdle, but we could succeed by making money for them. It's easier to convince people that what you're doing for them is good if you're sending them checks for like $3,000, $5,000, then they start to say, actually, maybe this isn't such a bad thing, maybe this is good and we launched during the pandemic, or we launched six weeks before the pandemic. So when the pandemic happened, a lot of the stores need to sell books online, so they really jumped on board. On the customer side of it, we have to tell customers that there's something more important than like paying 50 cents less or getting a book same day delivery and waiting two days Like. We deliver books really fast. Most of our books get to customers within three to four days, but Amazon is faster. We discount our books and some of them have really good deals, and occasionally we beat. Amazon is faster. We discount our books and some of them have really good deals, and occasionally we beat Amazon on price, but most of the time books on Amazon are a little bit more expensive.

Speaker 2:

So why? Why shop at bookshoporg? Answering that question is a major hurdle, but there are a lot of people that buy organic groceries, they buy from local farms, they buy power for their homes that is generated from renewable resources. There are a lot of people who are socially conscious, that understand that the money that they put out in the world, how they purchase, how they consume, is actually setting the stage for the world that they're going to live in, the future that the children are going to live in, and so if they make socially conscious choices, then they're helping pave the way for a better future, and for me that's a future where you can go downtown and go to your local bookstore. So getting consumers on board and getting them to be willing to make some sacrifices and getting the bookstores on board, making them embrace e-commerce. Those were the two biggest turtles.

Speaker 1:

And I think that you're right, though, that there's a large enough percentage of the population that cares about keeping communities small and local and keeping our bookstores open as well. Can you share some insights into the backend of what it's like to operate bookshoporg's business structure?

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, we try to be really lean, because the more bloat we have, the less money we can actually send to the bookstores. So we have only 40 employees. We earn more than a million dollars in revenue per employee, which is very rare for companies to have that kind of ratio. We're fully remote. We started right before the pandemic, so we were subletting some office space. We let that sublet go, we started hiring people from all over the country and by the time people started going back to the office, we had a team that was spread out everywhere. We even have an employee in Barcelona, so we're never going back to an office.

Speaker 2:

So we do a lot of work on Slack and we are scrappy, which means that, like people don't have very well-defined roles. They help out where they can. You know, we have like a lot of work to do at all times. Unfortunately, it's not like an easy job. Nobody's coasting but it's also very rewarding, because we're constantly hearing from stores that are very grateful for our existence and so many stores, like every week, some store will say like thank you so much, like we wouldn't have made it through the season if it hadn't been for you. That kind of thing really motivates us and energizes us. So we're all just kind of working asynchronously and trying to come up with clever strategies that we can grow, and grow organically. What was it like for you finding a distributor to?

Speaker 1:

partner with. What was it like for you finding a distributor to partner with?

Speaker 2:

Well, that was easy, actually, because, for better or for worse, in the US there is really one big direct-to-consumer book distributor, which is Ingram. Now, amazon, of course, has their own warehouses and they're shipping books to customers all the time, but Ingram is by far the largest book distributor in the US that isn't Amazon, and they supply to independent bookstores, they supply to libraries, they supply to Barnes and Noble. So I already knew about them because I was in book publishing and so I was able to go there make a presentation. Fortunately, they were really receptive to the presentation and got on board right away. It was easier to get Ingram on board than it was to get my investors on board, for example, so they were very supportive and they've been a great partner since, and they have warehouses all over the country.

Speaker 2:

That's one of the things that allows us to be competitive with Amazon is like a small bookstore might only have 1500 books in stock, so we can't rely on the inventories of small bookstores to satisfy the whole country. And right now I talked about 375,000 customers before. Now we have 3 million customers and they all want different kinds of books, right. So we have six warehouses through Ingram, and now we have other wholesalers too. So it's not just Ingram now, and we're shipping books to people every single day. We're shipping tens of thousands of books every single day from all these wholesale partners.

Speaker 1:

What an incredible journey this has been for you. So for consumers who might not know, and a lot of listeners might not know, and I love to just have transparency that is helpful for learning. Can you break down the typical profit margins for a book and explain how the sales price is distributed among the author, the publisher, the distributor and then the platform?

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

So there's three different ways that you can sell a book on bookshop and they each have different splits. So number one is if a bookstore sells a book, so let's say you're on your bookstore's mailing list or you're following them on Instagram and they're like buy this book, and they put a link out there In that case we don't take any money at all. So the entire profit margin goes to the bookstore, because that's our mission and we're a mission-based business, so we're not in it to, you know, make a big profit for ourselves. We try to keep the bookstores in business. Now, the second way that you can buy a book is if you buy it through an affiliate link, and that could be if you go to the New York Times or the Atlantic Magazine or your local book club, or if an author has a bookshop affiliate page, et cetera. In that case we will give the affiliate 10% and we will give 10% to the bookstore and we will keep 10% for ourself and then we have a seven or 10% discount and then the remaining 60% goes to cost. It pays the publisher pays for the shipping, pays for Ingram, et cetera. So the profit margin is basically divided evenly three ways, because we're rewarding everybody in the process.

Speaker 2:

If a book club is like we want to support local bookstores, we're going to use bookshop links instead of having our members go to Amazon, we want to help them out. So if they become affiliates even if it's just to pay for their pizza when they have meetings like, we'll kick them back something. We're kind of spreading the wealth around all the different players. If New York Times or the Atlantic Magazine is cool enough to want to use bookshoporg links on their pages, we want to help support their books journalism, so we'll give them a 10% kickback. And Amazon has an affiliate program for books, but it's only four and a half percent, so it's better for them.

Speaker 2:

Now there is a third way you can buy a book, which is if you just go straight to bookshoporg, don't choose a bookstore and buy a book and then leave. In that case, a third of the profit goes to the independent bookstores through a profit sharing pool and two thirds of the profit goes to support bookshoporg, and that's kind of how we pay our bills. Is those direct sales. So it's really three different ways. If you buy from a bookstore, they get all the money. If you buy from an affiliate, we split it three ways. If you buy directly from bookshop, we give a third to the bookstores and two thirds go to keeping bookshop going.

Speaker 1:

It sounds like a very comprehensive plan that you've put together In the five years or so that you've been running this. What are some of the mistakes that you've made along the way?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a good, really good question. I mean, I think in the beginning we weren't ready for our growth. We had four people on staff and me and I had a full-time job at the time and we grew very, very fast. So in the beginning it was you know, it's a nice problem to have, but we were really understaffed. We basically never slept and had to work out all of our customer service issues and kind of what they how they say build the plane while it was in flight. That was really tough.

Speaker 2:

Not investing in things like setting up sales tax in 50 states, because I was like, well, it's going to be years before we have to do sales tax in all 50 states, but it turned out to be six weeks before we get to do sales tax in all 50 states, but it turned out to be six weeks before we had to do sales tax in all 50 states.

Speaker 2:

Investing in a professional customer service platform so that our customer service was well organized and we could onboard new customer service reps, et cetera All the infrastructure stuff that I thought wasn't important enough to do right in the beginning ended up being very important to do, and so, yeah, a little bit more preparatory work would have been nice and I think in general, one thing that is very important, that is perhaps more universal, is like finding the right people for the roles. You want to start your business with the people who you want to work with for the next 10 years, who you have got a great communication relationships with and who are hungry and ambitious and want to learn and want to grow and are committed. So there's a temptation, when you're growing fast or when you're just getting started, to just like fill the role so you can move on, and generally I think that's a mistake. Like you have to be very, very careful who you bring on, because that team is going to be the team that either makes you successful or not.

Speaker 1:

And that is so relevant to the episode that's dropping just a couple before yours, because I interviewed Jeff Smart, who is known as probably the world's top expert on hiring, and he also says it's not really the what of the company. More often than not it's the who problems and it's getting the team right. So it sounds like you figured that out earlier than a lot of other people do so. With such a comprehensive experience in the publishing industry, what are your thoughts on the current state of publishing? What are your thoughts on the current state?

Speaker 2:

of publishing. Well, it's a super interesting time. I think the good news is that a lot of people are still buying books, people are still reading, and the evolution of things like TikTok and the huge demand for books through things like BookTok have been really great to see. So it's a really strong industry and it's remained strong and there have been like, for some reason, everybody always wants to say like nobody reads anymore and like the book industry is on the precipice of disaster, and I've been hearing that for 15 years now, and so I now take it with a grain of salt. I think people love storytelling, they love books, a lot of people love to read, and it's moving online, like the culture of reading is going online in a way that I think is definitely more positive than negative.

Speaker 2:

The dangers that I see are that Amazon is still super dominant in the space they sell probably seven out of every 10 books in the US are sold by Amazon and I think books are something that are so important to culture and so important, ultimately, to humanity and the evolution of our consciousness and our society, and to have one company in charge of them all, having kind of almost a monopoly on them, is dangerous, because of course course they decide what books have put in front of people. You know, I don't think that they're benevolent in how they promote books, but all they care about is money. They don't care about the content of the books, they care about selling as many as possible and it's all algorithmic. So we're trying to push for a more human version of bookselling that is in the hands of people In this, and they do a much better job of bringing important new books and book discovery than big e-commerce retailers. And then I think the other thing that makes me a little nervous about the way the book industry is evolving is that it's becoming more of a hit-based business.

Speaker 2:

There used to be what they call a mid-list author, which is like a whole ton of books that would sell in a mid range of 10,000 to 100,000 copies, and that has kind of been hollowed out.

Speaker 2:

And now, I think, because books go viral on the internet and get so big on the internet, like everybody is reading the same books, which means that there's less room at the top. The books that are doing really well have a ton of readers, and you have some authors like Colleen Hoover that dominates seven out of 10 bestseller slots when they're popular. So the problem with that is that it crowds out a lot of worthwhile books that also deserve to be read. So I think that that's a problem that we still have to solve is how to help with book discovery, how to help books that are really worth reading surface to the top and create a more diverse discussion around books, rather than like TikTok driving like another mega book that sells a million copies every month. Like I, would much rather have a healthy environment where there were 100 books each selling 10,000 copies in a month, that were filled with diverse voices and really interesting ideas and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, quality over quantity and I think with the increase in AI, we're going to continue to have to figure out how to filter through all of this noise.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think we're on the cusp of like a giant kind of gray goo of AI generated books that are good enough to like for no one to kind of understand that they're AI, and a lot of people are trying to game the system. Luckily, most of that's happening on Amazon, not on bookshoporg, so Amazon can try to solve that problem first, but it is something that we're worried about.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So, speaking of worthwhile books and maybe some that are not on the bestseller list, what are some of the best books that you've read recently and what makes them stand out to you?

Speaker 2:

Well, I read a book called Hum by Helen Phillips, which was you know, it's set in the future. It's and what makes them stand out to you by walking around and kind of acting like traffic cops and nannies and shopping assistants and all kinds of things and it's about a Brooklyn mother who is trying to make the best decisions for kids in a world that is like all digital marketing and facial recognition technology and no escape from always being on and always being connected, and she's trying to break her kids free of that. But in doing so she ends up making them vulnerable to this kind of horrible disaster where her kids get lost and then she goes viral for having lost her kids and is shamed. And it's an intense book, but it's often funny. It's really really sharp, super interesting.

Speaker 2:

Again, it's called Hum. I love that one, and right now I'm reading a book called Liars by Sarah Manguso, which is a book about a failed marriage that is incredibly riveting and impactful. It's definitely like it doesn't reflect well on the guy in the marriage and so if you don't like, if you are feeling defensive about your role in your marriage, then it might not be a good book to read, but it's like, really on point, really, really gripping book about kind of dissolution of a marriage that has a lot of universal truths in it.

Speaker 1:

Well, it sounds like both of those have some overlap to lives that many of us may be living, so I'll have to check those out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think parents trying to navigate shared responsibilities and usher your kids into the future in like a safe, positive way. It's tough and obviously we look to books and literature to pass forward and to increase our understanding, you know.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. Yeah. I've got a stack of about 20 books on my nightstand and it looks like you've got I don't know how many hundreds of books there behind you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, too many, too many for me to ever read, I think.

Speaker 1:

So I'm curious to know I know you recognize the problem with e-commerce negatively impacting indie bookstores. Have you noticed any other problems like that in the world that maybe someone listening in might be inspired to try and solve?

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, I mean, I think in general, we're talking about the need for human community in an age where we're all sort of having our brains hijacked by some of the smartest people on earth who understand behavioral psychology and understand electronics, and they're all trying to build addiction machines for us.

Speaker 2:

And it's very easy to be like, oh well, I want to build the next addiction machine, like I want to have a viral app or I want to have something that everybody like, that has the highest usage rates, et cetera, everybody that has the highest usage rates, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2:

And so what I encourage people to do is embrace the countertrend, which is about forging real human connections between people, whether that's by helping real brick-and-mortar, small local businesses like bookstores, that bookshoporg is, or just helping people find connection with their families, with their friends, helping people find local activities, charities, group activities, things that make people feel less lonely, less isolated, things that build social bonds and kind of tap into what actually makes humans happy, because the thing about like our modern era is that like it seems like we're a lot less happy, like even the more convenient things are, the more we don't have to leave our houses to get our groceries and we don't have to like, actually interface with actual human beings.

Speaker 2:

Every little little convenient moment that we have adds up to a life of disconnection, and so we need to consciously decouple from that, and we need people to come up with innovative ways to not like say all technology is bad, because I'm a firm believer you can't fight the trend. You can't say the answer is to not have a phone or the answer is to throw away all your technology and go off the grid, because most people can't do that. Maybe that's the answer for 1% of people, but for the other, 99% of people, find ways that technology can constructively help them and kind of lead people back to a saner and happier way of living. That's, I think, the biggest opportunity that I want a new generation of entrepreneurs and creative thinkers to come up with.

Speaker 1:

Well, and let's say that that just sparks an idea for somebody. What are some lessons that you've learned from your entrepreneurial journey that you also think that they could benefit from knowing?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I think one thing is like start, like don't wait for all the stars to align. I tried to raise $1.2 million. I couldn't raise it. If I had decided that I wasn't going to start until I raised the amount of money I thought I needed, I never would have started. I just started with what I had and that means, like tomorrow, start working. If you have an hour, you can start working, whether it's on a prototype or an idea or a pitch, whatever, or your new website, just start, just start working. It all gets so much easier once you start, and the conditions are never perfect, so you kind of make your own conditions by just getting started.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes people they get nervous or fearful. It feels so big to go from not having a business to now launching bookshoporg. I mean that seems like a giant step. But it's like what you're saying. Just if you have an hour, move a little bit towards the direction of where you're going and not to stress so much about the big leap you're trying to make.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and part of that is about embracing the possibility of failure. Like you have to be ready to fail. When I first started it, I was like, well, this is like taking a shot of the Death Star. Like, of course you'll probably get blown up, but you have to try to take a shot of the Death Star. If nobody does, then the Death Star is going to win. And so, like we're going to take our shot and see what happens.

Speaker 2:

Failing is really an iterative process. Right, you want to fail over and over again, because every time that you fail, you learn a little bit more and you get a little better. So you want to give yourself the room to fail. If you're so afraid of failure that you can't get started or you can't ever like go public with whatever your idea is, then it's really going to hinder you. It's going to keep you from ever making some of your dreams real. So you have to understand that, yeah, you're going to fail and you're going to move on and you're going to overcome your failures. And every successful person you see out there, every person who has, like done all the things that you want to be able to do, I guarantee you they went through failure after failure. They were embarrassed at certain points, they were humiliated at certain points, but they kept going and they got better. And so, like understanding that that's part of the process and embracing it, that's another big lesson.

Speaker 1:

It's so important to normalize failure. It's not even failure, it's like a mistake, it's a stepping stone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I like one thing when bookshop launched, I decided to put the amount of money we raised for bookstores at the top of every page on the site. I was inspired by sites like GoFundMe where you can see oh, they've raised $25,000. And if I add $100 and I can see the amount go up. So I wanted that on Bookshop. But I understood that that meant that if we did poorly, everybody would know If we weren't selling any books, and that number was like we raised $150 for bookstores. It would be embarrassing, but we did it anyway and in the first month it was kind of an embarrassing figure. It was $50,000 at the end of the first month and there was a podcast about the book industry where they went on and they were like, yeah, bookshoporg, it seemed like a great idea, but it doesn't seem like they're doing that much because they only have raised $50,000. I was like, oh my God, it's been one month, but this is exactly the nightmare that I thought would happen, where people think we're a failure, they haven't given us a chance yet.

Speaker 2:

When we started really taking off, we had people sharing on Twitter and social media all the time like, oh my God, Bookshop has raised a half million dollars. Oh my God, Bookshop has already raised a million dollars and people got really excited about that number. Keep going up and going up. When we hit 10 million, when we had 25 million, there were so many people celebrating us hitting those milestones. So putting that on there did expose us to lots of embarrassment and made any failure that we had very public, but it also gave the public a chance to rally around us and when we started doing well, it was a huge motivator for people. So putting it out there and exposing ourselves to potential embarrassment was like a really key part of something that ended up being a big success driver for us.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, people love transparency.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

It's like a point of real connection. So just for a closing question here, I've got so many more questions that I'd like to ask. But I also know that listeners, they really only have a certain amount of time before they have to move on to the rest of their lives. So as a closing question here, if you could go back and talk with yourself when you were in your early twenties, what life wisdom would you give yourself unrelated to business?

Speaker 2:

The most important thing I would say is like, stop being intimidated by people and go and do what you think you're capable of, or what you want to be capable of. Make it happen. I think I wasted a certain amount of time because I went to state schools Like I didn't come from you know any money and I didn't have a great education and I wanted to go into media but I would never have like applied for those jobs or gone for it because I felt like, oh, those you know that's people who have gone to Harvard would get that job at Condé Nast or whatever, whatever my dream would be. And it took me a long time to get that kind of confidence. To start, like, I created my own magazine.

Speaker 2:

I was, I guess, 25 when I did that and I started building up confidence by watching it succeed. But it was still about 10 years before I realized, oh, like there aren't a whole ton of people who are much better at this than I am, like everybody is just struggling along with some successes. They all have to learn, they all are going through the similar challenges as you are, and so to kind of just give yourself permission to be ambitious and not undercut yourself, and understand that you're capable of doing whatever you want to do, no matter where you came from or what you've done up to that point. I think that was that would be the most important thing. It would probably save me like a decade of noodling around.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's incredible advice. I think a lot of people, especially now the younger generation, as they enter the workforce, they're feeling a bit lost and the opportunities that they thought would be there for them are not necessarily so yeah. Yeah Well, andy, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. It is a real inspiration and your solution is so innovative. Love the business model and I'm very grateful for your time, so thank you for coming on.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

Today's key takeaways. If there's a problem in the world that really needs fixing, don't wait for someone else to solve it. Consider the possibility that you could create the solution. Successful businesses solve problems, so start noticing them, write them down, then brainstorm steps you could take to build solutions. If your idea requires funding, prepare for a journey, create a pitch deck with the help of a designer and be ready for rejection. It's part of the process. It took Andy a year and a half to cobble together a group of investors who believed in his mission and invested just under 65% of what he was hoping to raise. If you need help developing a site for your innovative business idea, check out Happy Fun Corp, the company that helped Andy build out bookshoporg.

Speaker 1:

Having the right partner in crime, so to speak, is really important for morale and forward momentum. Build support for the idea in the related industry and start establishing trust. Go to trade shows, meet key players and influential voices in the community and put in a lot of FaceTime. Be transparent and genuine. There is power in small communities and, when it comes to growth, think small to go big. When faced with the daunting task of finding 375,000 customers within six months, andy decided to focus on building 3,000 key relationships with indie bookstores, media outlets and organizations and book clubs, who would then share bookshoporg with their about 125 customers. Each Spend time finding the right people for the roles, because it's your team who is either going to make you successful or not. Team who is either going to make you successful or not.

Speaker 1:

There's a current problem in the book selling marketplace, and that's that only a handful of books make it to the top selling spots. So there's a need to help with book discovery, to help books that are really worth reading surface to the top. Maybe this is a business for you. There's also a need for human community in the world. Embrace the counter trend and look for business opportunities that could help people feel less lonely and less isolated in an increasingly digital world. What makes humans happy? What can be done to bring people back to a saner and happier way of living?

Speaker 1:

Don't wait for all the stars to align before you get started. Tomorrow, for example, start working. If you have an hour, start working. Have an idea, start working on it. The conditions are never perfect, so make your own conditions and get started. Be ready to fail over and over again and learn Every person who has done all of the things you want to do. They've gone through failure after failure and probably a moment or two of embarrassment. Welcome the failure, welcome the embarrassment. It's part of the process. Don't be intimidated by people. Go and do what you think you're capable of, or what you want to be capable of. There are not a ton of people who are better than you, so don't fool yourself into thinking so. Lastly, you're capable of doing what you want, no matter where you're starting from, so go, make it happen. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.

People on this episode

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Anne McGinty

Host
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Andy Hunter

Guest