chipperowens

Mark is absolutely a machine. He gets back to any of our emails typically within 15 minutes...sometimes an hour or two. We have 24 investors behind Packback. I've never interacted with an investor that provides as much operational support in such an efficient way as he does. He's been already supporting us in some of our publisher deals, and is pretty involved through all aspects of the business.

***EDIT: just sent him this and he got back within 3 minutes: http://imgur.com/bAuPVRQ

producers did an exit interview with us, we were taken back to our trailer and then they fed us the most AMAZING bbq meal we have ever had. such a victory meal and was a great feeling i'll never forget. a psychologist came to visit us after making sure everything was ok too which is standard procedure. one of cuban's deal guys sent us an email later on to start the due diligence process

and yea haha

I just kind of stopped and smiled after Mark said "Deal!" knowing right away what happened. They actually made it seem much less dramatic on air than it actually was. Robert and Barbara jumped out of their chairs and said "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU JUST DID?!". Mike's reaction was probably the best of all. I just let him do the rest of the talking.

Students spend anywhere from $500 - $1K a year on used textbooks that are rarely ever used in the classroom as professors have been empowered by a wealth of online information they incorporate into their classrooms. Students can pay per use and rent a digital book for $3 to $5 a day and rent as needed, before exams/homework/quizzes. Books are equipped with highlighting and note taking capabilities.

If a student realizes they have a greater need for the book, they can rent it for the entire semester at a discount -- any money they spent on daily rentals is credited towards the extended rental.

So a student always realizes full value out of their expenditures. In the meantime while we build out our digital inventory from publishers, we also aggregate prices from various online retailers to help students make better decisions when buying/selling books. We've got an informative video at www.packbackbooks.com too which you can check out.

Thanks! We are extremely active on the marketing front across all of your traditional channels (email, SEO/SEM, facebook, twitter, etc). The biggest piece is our brand ambassador program which has been exploding with applicants as of late...we train student entrepreneurs what it takes to run a successful startup in a structured program. They execute a lot of our offline marketing programs for us. The product speaks for itself - it's such a big pain point today's college students can relate to that they all gravitate to it pretty quickly once they even hear about it, so there's not so much a change of behavior we need to initiate as much as there is getting the word out.