Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis Perlego
Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis are two rising entrepreneurial stars in the world of college textbooks. Often, students are looking to buy used textbooks at reasonable prices, and, just as often, students cannot find used books at reasonable prices. Many have attempted to solve this problem, few have succeeded. Van Maderen and Davis, however, have managed to develop a profitable company off of this problem.
Their company is called Perlego. Van Malderen and Davis both already had entrepreneurial experience, prior to their team-up. Perlego can be likened to Netflix and Spotify, but rather than movies and music, Perlego is an online platform for buying, storing, and reading educational e-books. In order to bring in revenue, Van Malderen and Davis charge a monthly subscription fee, similar to Netflix and Spotify. Their company has already grown to twelve members, and their site has already amassed works from over 1,000 publishers.
Van Malderen and Davis have shown incredible insight into how this generation is so tech-dependent. With that in mind, their idea heavily relevant to this generation. So often, people have been transitioning businesses to online platforms. As college students know, textbooks are a burdensome expense without many cheap, online options. Perlego addresses that gap in the textbook market by offering a solution that makes obtaining multiple textbooks for a low-cost, easy.
I am inspired by this innovation because it is very applicable to my own life-experience. As a college student, books are burdensome, and this solution is very practical. There is a misconception that entrepreneurs have to have a break-through, unheard-of idea. This is not necessarily break-through nor unheard-of. Van Malderen and Davis took what they were experiencing and found a practical, not too far-fetched solution. Their intuition is inspiring and has prompted me to look into my surroundings for practical solutions.
Link to article: https://startups.co.uk/young-entrepreneurs-gauthier-van-malderen-matthew-davis/
I can see this business only growing into the future because it is filling a demand in an open industry. No one else is really focusing on affordable etextbook sharing like Perlego is. It is really interesting how it fits in with the booming industries of streaming services replacing physical items. Moving more industries to entirely software based is definitely something that will keep increasing and be very foundational for the future of innovation. It was really interesting to see how textbooks have started to move in that direction even before a lot of others have.
This is defiantly going to fill a significant need in the lives of many college students. I know that the online text book industry has been big for a while as people strive to be paper free. But those books expire at the end of each semester, and are extremely overpriced. This is cool because it is now enabling customers to share their books.
I had a friend in High School do the same thing. It was quite lucrative. In a digital age where people are always looking for easy solutions, this is an incredible idea. Do you know if they had an app as well?
This is a great read especially for me being a college student and looking for cheaper options. I am going to look into this next semester, thank you for this blog post.
I enjoy the fact that they listened to what was a problem out in the world and worked on finding a solution. Setting a good example for future entrepreneurs…. listen to what is causing problems and finding a solution.