Festive Focus: Bdaily chats to Perlego's Matthew Jones

For today’s Festive Focus series, we caught up with Matthew Jones from Perlego.

Can you introduce yourself and your business to our readers?

“I’m Matthew Jones, one of the original team at Perlego - a startup that is often branded in the press as ‘the Spotify for textbooks’.

“We are essentially an eBook subscription service that was founded to make the access to any form of academic or professional content both more affordable and more accessible.

“I am personally responsible for signing on new publishers to the platform - we currently have over 1,600 publishers onboard, which amounts to over 230,000 eBooks!”

What was your company’s biggest achievement of the year?

“It’s been a great year, but the standout achievement has to be raising our next round of funding.

“We raised £3.7m from a great set of investors, led by Accelerated Digital Ventures. This allows us to really fast-track our growth across Europe and reach more students and professionals.

“It also means we’ve got a fair few more in the team, having increased from 6 to 22 people throughout 2018!”

How would you approach 2018 differently, given the chance?

“It’s been a pretty hectic year, which is of course exactly what we wanted and needed as a company.

“That being said, if we did the year again, I think we would probably make a more conscious effort to relax a bit a more often to get the stress levels down to reasonable levels!”

What are your company’s plans for the new year?

“It’s another huge year for us! We’re starting to now branch out to try to better serve our customers in Europe.

“There’s a huge demand for eBooks there, and so it’s now up to us to expand our content selection into other European languages and ramp up our marketing efforts.

“It’ll also be a big year for getting to know new colleagues names! We’re hoping to at least double in size by the end of 2019.”

What are your plans for the festive season?

“The general consensus is that it’s high time for a few days of yuletide relaxation! The team has put such a huge amount into this year that we’ll all be getting a valuable break. I’ll personally be heading away for a few days to spend Christmas with my family.”