By Sheraan Amod
URL: http://www.personera.com/

I'm the Co-Founder of Personera, a personalized publishing service offering useful print products enhanced with Facebook content. As a member of ISLabs, we often meet budding entrepreneurs eager to learn local stories of idea incubation, development and launch. In sharing our story in this blog post, I hope that we inspire other young upstarts to become bonafide startups!

I've always been passionate about the Web, and back in 2007, the social network space was heating up due to the game changing release of the Facebook Developer Platform. I attended the Brightest Young Minds conference in July of that year, where I happened to meet a bright, entrepreneurially minded guy named Jaco de Wet. It turned out that he was an industrial engineer with a family background in publishing. After several vigorous conversations at the event (while everyone else was in session), we stumbled onto this remarkable idea: what if Facebook content was integrated into normal, everyday print products? What if the calendar on our walls actually showed us who's birthdays were coming up?

The idea of producing calendars and other popular products upgraded with a person's existing social data (such as relevant birthdays, photos and events) was compelling, and impossible to shake. We knew our girlfriends, and their friends, would love it (and when we launched, they did). While still post-graduate MSc students, Jaco and I co-founded Personera early in 2008 with the backing of Van der Spuy Brink, an experienced business executive who eagerly joined the project as a seed investor. Michael Champanis (a software engineering star) joined us as well in this "founding" stage. Working part-time, by the end of 2008 we had built a proof of concept demo, and also entered the FNB Enablis Business Launchpad competition (which we later won).

In the beginning of 2009 I approached Vinny Lingham (CEO of Yola.com and World Economic Forum member) to pursue his involvement in Personera. Keen on investing, he brought in additional investors Michael Leeman and Tomas Van den Berckt (all investors in Yola, ChessCube and SkyRove). Their angel investment allowed us to focus on the company full-time. In July 2009, we launched a closed product pilot at the Brightest Young Minds conference, which was ironically once the birthplace of the idea behind Personera. On 11 November 2009, with the announcement featured on TechCrunch.com, Personera launched it's public beta, with the world's first print calendar fully personalised with a user's Facebook friends' birthdays, upcoming events and photos. Personera was also the first startup to launch under the banner of the Silicon Cape Initiative, a local movement to create a global Silicon Valley style startup culture in Cape Town.

Personera is different for the following key reasons:

• Speed. Due to the instant availability of a user's Facebook content, a product can be customized and ordered in under 2 minutes, which is much faster than other companies offering personalized print on-demand services that usually require manual uploading of data. The fact that Personera is intimately tied to Facebook also makes the company's products highly viral in nature.
• Data and design. The print products contain data that reaches an unmatched level of personalisation to the individual user, all carefully placed within professionally designed layouts and themes, produced with high quality ink and paper.
• Efficiency. Using a sophisticated variable data publishing process, Personera is able to easily scale it's operations to multiple print sites around the world while still being run out of the Cape Town office.

Since launching, we have made sales to customers around the world, including the USA, UK, India, Australia and South Africa, and most of our users are American. We're constantly improving our platform and preparing for new, exciting product releases in 2010.

With our background now covered, you can look forward to some lessons learned and "best practices for upstarts" in a future post.