Chegg, the Silicon Valley textbook rental company,
started as an on-campus classified service listing everything from electronics
to kung fu lessons to hamster sitting. But its most popular category was buying
and selling textbooks.
The company founders noticed that and decided to try an
experimental rental web site offering 2,000 textbooks to its users. It proved
to be such a great success that now Chegg rents millions of textbooks each year
and employs 150 people.
“We had raised $3 million and we had hired a great team
and we were sitting on a problem that was still unsolved,” said founder Aayush
Phumbhra in this FastCompany video series called “The Pivot” which looks at
decisions that helped companies turn into successes. “The cost of textbooks was
still very expensive and the market was just waiting to be disrupted.”
The message should be a powerful lesson for those in
the textbook industry in general and collegiate retailers in particular,
according to Mark Nelson, chief information officer of the National Association
of College Stores and vice president of NACS Media Solutions.
“I think the idea behind how they recognized an
opportunity and unmet need provides interesting insight into the minds of
entrepreneurs and the types of folks who are trying to disrupt our industry,”
he said. “Whether stores like it or not, our industry is viewed as one that is
‘ripe for disruption’ and we need to learn to think like these guys.”
