Marketing, Economics, and the Web 2.0

Last year I was blessed with the birth of my daughter (now 9 months old), and I wanted to come up with a special gift that both she, and her immediate family could enjoy for years. Given that I was working on some wikinomics-related research, I sat down to think about how I could put some of the principles into play to create a unique and interesting gift. What I came up with was a story book about the first two months of her life – and I thought I’d post the process here for others that might want to do the same. Here’s what I did – it’s fairly easy, and can be done at quite a reasonable cost.

Like a lot of new parents, I had a huge number of digital photographs of my daughter over the first two months of her life. While I was originally thinking of a simple picture book, I’ve always liked the look of sketch drawings – but I’m not really a great sketch artist. However, I stumbled upon a very cool site called befunky.com, where any photo can be turned into a sketch using the cartoonizer. I did about 40 of them, saved them to my hard drive, and I think the results were pretty impressive. Here’s an example of the output from my daughter’s first few minutes of life:

For my next step, I copied each of the pictures into a Microsoft Word file, and added some captions under them (with a page break in between each one, text centered on the page right under the picture). For example, the caption for the above picture was And then I got to meet my Dad! If I dare say so myself, he seemed awfully proud of both me and mom. The entire story was written from my daughter’s perspective, and covers major events of her first few months, and importantly pictures with almost every family member who came to visit (and a couple of friends as well).

With this word file in hand, the next step was quite simple as well – I went to Lulu.com, created an account, and uploaded the file. I chose the hardcover version ( more specifically, 6″ x 9″, casewrap-hardcover binding, white interior paper (50# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (80# weight), full-color exterior ink). The file was uploaded in exactly perfect format, I chose a green cover (where I threw on the title My First Two Months of Life), playing with it all until I had it exactly write. I could have put an image here as well, but opted for the simpler version:

So now I had it – a very professional looking, hardcover storybook covering the few first few months of my daughters life. I then purchased 20 copies for my daughter, close friends and family for a total cost of $272 – $237 for the books (or $11.85 each), $22.39 for shipping and handling, and $12.98 in taxes. They arrived at my door a few weeks later, and I can tell you for certain that everyone loved it – with the fact that most of the people who received the book also had a picture in the book with my daughter as an extra benefit.

So just an idea I thought I’d toss out there for people that might want to come up with a special gift for a child, loved one, etc. As an extra bonus, quite a few people that didn’t know very much about the wikinomics-related research I’d been doing started to understand it a little bit better… and having my daughter be a published author at two-months of age isn’t half-bad .

(and note: if you’d like to do something similar and need some help, just drop me a line).