Our busiest week yet

Friday, May 11th 2012

As anyone who’s shipped will know:

Shipping digital things is hard, shipping physical things that get delivered on vans is harder.

Making customers happy is hard, delighting them is harder.

Twitter is a very real, raw, place to receive feedback.

Last week was our busiest week ever, and this week looks like beating that. So it’s been incredibly satisfying to see some lovely comments about the thing we ship on Twitter.

Credit for this feedback goes to Anne, Emily and Silje in Glasgow. They are the people who work hard to respond to all the emails we get, answering the many questions we get asked. They are the people who work hard to get orders rushed through for that last minute deadline.

A good week for Newspaper Club. Thank you.

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File under: running a business

There is no new news now, there might be some later

Tuesday, May 10th 2011

Newspaper Club Away Day

We had a big meeting the other day. A proper meeting with an agenda with eight items on it.

We have these approximately twice a year to check on how we’re doing as a business, check all the team are happy and suggest ideas for the future.

The big news is that there’s no new news at the moment. There is some very exciting stuff we’re working on, stuff we’ve been wanting to do from day one, but it would be foolish to announce that until it’s all finished. But rest assured that there are good, exciting developments planned for the rest of the year.

Newspaper Club Away Day

Personally these meetings always remind me how good everyone else in the team is. Hiring Anne Ward has been the best decision we’ve made. Our customers are very happy. Here are some recent tweets from actual customers.

For the blog

For the blog

And as we tweeted last week. “we have more customers than we did”.

For the blog

That’s not because of our multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, that’s not because of my award winning design, that’s because Newspaper Club is a well built product with a delightful customer experience all wrapped inside a well run business. The delightful customer experience is all down to Anne. She’s our delighter. She’s also the closet person to the actual business and therefore is able to offer fantastic insight into what further developments customers would like to see. Her ideas are invaluable.

Newspaper Club Away Day

The well built product bit is down to Tom (obviously). Newspaper Club is a towering technical achievement as recognised in the Special Technical Achievement Award from the BIMA’s last year. But more than that Tom is a powerhouse development team of just one. Sometimes we forget how good he is when we’re saying, how about we just incorporate that, or we just do this and he just nods and says, yep, yep. I’ll stop now, I’m probably embarrassing him.

The well run business bit is down to Gary, our CEO. Unlike most Start-Ups™ we have hired someone far better and far more experienced than us to run the business. This has been another key decision. I’ve personally seen lots of start ups fail because the owners are too close to the business. We’re trying to be as far away as is healthy.

Lastly, if you think this blog post is a bit silly, you are mistaken. If you’ve ever shipped you’ll know this stuff is a big deal.

Posted by Ben | Comments (2)

File under: art,developments,running a business

Newspaper Club Evening Class

Tuesday, March 15th 2011

Mr Taylor

If Newspaper Club had an official strapline, it would be something like “helping people to make their own newspapers”. It’s not snappy. It’s not punchy. But it’s true.

One of the main goals of Newspaper Club is to help people get from having a great idea for a newspaper, to having the confidence to hit ‘print’.

We try and provide useful information on the site, and we’ve put a lot of effort into making ARTHR, our online layout tool, into something that lets anyone have a go. We answer hundreds of enquiries a week, helping people with anything from margins to finding a designer to delivery & subscription services.

But sometimes nothing beats meeting people face to face; explaining and answering questions when everyone involved can point at the same piece of paper.

With this in mind, last week, Art and Engineering had an outing to our friends at the School of Everything, just up the road in Bethnal Green, London. We ran an evening class called ‘How to Make Your Own Newspaper‘.

Twelve people attended for a couple of hours. We talked through a brief history of newspaper design, how the printing works, how to use ARTHR, and some design tips and tricks that we think work well on newsprint. And we answered lots and lots of questions, gave out sample papers, and had some jaffa cakes.

Here I am explaining, how the printers work through the medium of overly complex diagrams. Don’t worry, this was brief.

Inside the classroom

As the old cliche goes the teachers learnt as much as the students. It’s always great to meet your customers. We got a clearer understanding of what we’re explaining well and what we’re not, as well as just finding out more about the background of people.

And we had a lot of fun. And not only that, but it was sold out. It sold out very quickly. Which got us thinking. Maybe we should do it again?

If we did, would you be interested?

Posted by Tom | Comments (7)

File under: developments,running a business

Fictional News and Friendly Service

Thursday, March 3rd 2011

Service

There’s a lovely post here about someone who’s used Newspaper Club to produce a ‘prop’ paper – a fictional newspaper for an interesting looking film. It’s a good looking paper too. We do quite a lot of these – papers for film and theatrical productions – it’s not the world’s biggest market opportunity but it’s always good to find another niche.

But what’s especially pleasing is to read positive things about our service because, well, that’s almost entirely Anne and I’m sure we don’t say enough nice things about her.

So let’s fix that now.

It’s Anne that keeps us going. Tom lashes the code back together periodically, Ben and I occasionally do talks for people and organisations, Gareth strategically strategises at a very high level, but it’s Anne that makes the whole business actually work. We’re an atoms business, we ship physical stuff to real people and inevitably there are questions and occasionally problems with the supply and shipping of those things. In our early days Ben and I would respond to those emails but it soon became clear that grumpy sarcasm wasn’t an effective customer service model – Anne has replaced it with energetic, helpful niceness.

That’s probably why we now get emails that say things like:

“just a quick email to say a huge THANK YOU. We are really happy with the finished product, and the service you have provided us with has been fantastic. Thanks also for your prompt responses to all of the emails I sent you.”

and

“May I congratulate you and your team on a most professional service. You “do exactly as it says on the tin”!!!—not to be taken for granted indeed. I am very happy with the product.”

That’s good isn’t it? We don’t say thank you to Anne enough. So – Anne – Thank You.

Posted by Russell | Comments (0)

File under: running a business

Where we’re at

Wednesday, June 23rd 2010

Tom, planning regional offices for Newspaper Club

The sun is streaming through the windows, Mr Scruff is on the stereo, the England game is this afternoon, it seems like a good time to tell you all how we’re doing.

Good. We’re doing good.

More specifically, we’re doing the following things;

Tom is sitting next to me, he’s currently talking to a printer but he’s also writing code so we can offer international shipping. We’ve got a delivery company lined up, we’ve done a few test shipments, we’ve sorted out the pricing, we’ve just got to get the website working so y’all can order and pay. Which isn’t that easy. Each different order is a different weight which costs a different amount to ship to each country so making that intelligible on the website is a bit of a challenge. Seems to be coming together though. Tom reckons it’ll be finished this week. We’ll have an announcement on here when it’s up and running. Please note, it won’t be the whole world just yet. Just North America and Western and Central Europe for now. Details to follow.

Anne is up in Glasgow answering emails, taking orders and dealing with printers and customers. Getting her involved was one of the smartest things we could have done. Every time Ben or I are inclined to issue sarcastic advice to troubled customers she’s there just in time to stop us. Behind the scenes we’re also working on adding a bunch of community features to Newspaper Club – that’s where Anne will really come into her own.

Gareth’s doing all sorts of CEO stuff at the moment. (He’s not the CEO yet, but we’re hoping he will be soon.) He and I have been preparing investor documents so we can talk to people about raising more money for TOP SECRET PLANS. They must, of course, remain top secret but do not, as heavily rumoured, involve buying the Daily Mail. Gareth’s also been talking to printers up and down the world and we’re getting closer to our holy grail of being able to offer runs of just one paper, in colour. It’s not far now. Maybe a couple of months away.

Ben has mostly been doing designing – he made our lovely new front page. And we’re talking about getting some new templates done and we have a TOP SECRET PLAN to get a font made that’ll be specifically tailored to Newspaper Club purposes. That, of course, is TOP SECRET.

And I’ve been doing all sorts of TOP SECRET THINGS involving getting people to do new and interesting things with newsprint. And if you were to imagine that I was using TOP SECRET THINGS as a cloak for NOT DOING ANYTHING you’d be very wrong.

Posted by Russell | Comments (7)

File under: engineering,investors,running a business

Introducing Gary and Anne

Monday, April 26th 2010

We’re half way through a two day Newspaper Club Away Day session.

Newspaper Club Away Day

We have all come together to discuss how we improve Newspaper Club. Things that have arisen from the Beta, working out what features we should add and just generally discussing what we do next. It’s nice to pause and take stock.

New Newspaper Club hires

When I say ‘we’ there are five of us now as we’re pleased to introduce two additions to the Newspaper Club team. Anne Ward and Gareth Williams. Anne might be familiar from I Like, she’ll be handling Customer Relations. Gareth has a background in finance and running a large successful business and he’ll be handling Business Development.

Often as a business grows the founders find out very quickly where their skills lie and where the gaps are. A mistake people often make is thinking they can do everything themselves. That’s a trap we’re determined not to fall into. Anne and Gary have already made a significant difference to our small team and we’re excited about working with them on the stuff we’ve been talking about today.

Posted by Ben | Comments (2)

File under: running a business