Solving problems for students

I had a track record of launching student-focused businesses. Whether this was selling hoodies, travel tips for students, or free notebooks with banner advertising, I was fascinated by the opportunity to tap into the student market and solve unique problems for them. 

It didn’t take me long to see the problem facing practically every student regarding the cost of academic textbooks. Speaking to my fellow classmates in the lecture hall, it was astonishing to me just how accepted it had become—simply because there was no alternative. 

Through some simple desk research, it quickly became clear that this wasn’t just a problem for students. Publishers were suffering too, losing $3.5 billion to the secondary resale market, and around $1.2 billion to piracy. On the latter, extraordinary traffic was going towards well-known book piracy sites—around 135 million unique visitors a month. 

I considered whether there were cues from other industries that I could take inspiration from. Look at the film and music industries—how did they address huge piracy problems? In short, they had to adapt, seeing the rise of platforms like Spotify and Netflix. Not only have these widened access to vast volumes of music and film, they’ve made them considerably cheaper.

I wanted to build a platform that could do for academic textbooks what Netflix had done for films and Spotify for music. And thus, Perlego was born. 

How technology can transform the world of education

As we’ve grown Perlego, I continue to see new frontiers where we can transform not only who can access top educational material, but also around enhancing the educational experience they are receiving. After all, why should you need to go to Harvard in order to study from Harvard professors? 

Firstly, Perlego is moving towards a marketplace vision, to become a place to have all of your learning content in one beautiful place. This means that we’re not just books but also audiobooks, lecture slides, podcasts and lecture recordings, and so on. On top of this, bringing more collaboration into your learning materials will enhance the way people engage with education.

Of course, AI has transformational potential here. Not only can this streamline the day-to-day operations for educators (grading, syncing, etc), it can make education really exciting through things like personalisation and gamification. We have three new things that we’re launching in the very near future in this sphere. 

1. Study tools—the ability to add new learning tools on top of the content layer, such as flashcards, quizzes, and tests within the content itself. 

2. Tutorbot—enabling learners to ask questions directly in books. One of the most used plugins for ChatGPT is uploading PDFs and talking directly to that content. Through Perlego you can now do this automatically with over 1 million books. 

3. Semantic search—whereas previously you’ve had to search by chapter or page, this allows you to search across all our content and take your directly into themes. We’ve done this by creating a vector model, indexing every single word, allowing search to take you directly to the passage itself. This is transformational for essay writing and referencing

I believe impact should sit at the core of any technology business. I don’t believe that you’ll succeed if you’re doing it just for financial outcomes. For Perlego, this all leads towards our mission of making education more affordable and accessible.