How PageCub Started

PageCub did not start as an idea for a children's-book company.

For a while, I had been spending some of my free time building small-business tools and automations. I was learning a lot. Some of the things I built worked quite well.

There was just one problem. Nobody seemed particularly interested in using them.

Around the same time, my daughter was entering the age where childhood problems start becoming very real problems to the child experiencing them. Monsters were scary. The dark was scary. Being away from us was hard. School brought its own worries. Sharing with her brother and cousins did not always seem like the brilliant idea the adults around her thought it was.

Nothing unusual. Just the ordinary work of being little.

I had also noticed something about the books we read together. Like a lot of children, she went through phases. For a few weeks she might want the same handful of bedtime books every single night. Then some new fascination would arrive and completely replace the old one. Dinosaurs. Monsters. Animals. Whatever had captured her attention at that particular moment.

And that gave me an idea.

What if I could make a story specifically for her? Not simply put her name into an existing book. Make the adventure about something she currently loved, make the character feel a little like her, and quietly fold in whatever she was having trouble with at the time.

So I made one.

It took a while. There was a story to write, pictures to make, pages to assemble, and a surprising number of little decisions involved in turning a collection of ideas into something that actually felt like a book.

But eventually I had one. Then came the important test. I read it to her.

She loved it.

That was interesting. More interesting was what happened afterward. She wanted to hear it again. And because the problem in the story was connected to something she understood from her own life, we could talk about it afterward without turning bedtime into a lecture. The story gave us another way into the conversation.

So I made another book. Then another.

The problem was that making them manually took a lot of time, and I have an entirely separate profession that occupies most of my week. I could make books for my daughter this way. I could not realistically make very many of them.

Fortunately, I had just spent a lot of time learning how to build workflows and automations for businesses that did not particularly want them. So I pointed those tools at a problem that did.

Breaking the process apart

I started breaking the process apart.

How do you take a parent's description of a child and turn it into a useful character? How do you make the child's interests actually affect the adventure instead of merely appearing as decorations? How do you weave a lesson into the events of the story without making the book feel like homework? How do you keep ten chapters coherent? How do you create twenty illustrations that feel as though they belong to the same book? How do you assemble all of that automatically into something a parent can simply open and read?

Eventually, I had a workflow.

So I made my daughter another book with it. She still loved it.

That was the point when the project changed.

If it was useful here, there was no reason to keep it there

If these stories were useful in our house, there was no particular reason they had to stay there.

Other parents have children afraid of the dark. Other children struggle with starting school, sharing, confidence, moving, new siblings, or simply whatever strange difficulty happens to be enormous when you are four years old. Grandparents know the peculiar little details that make their grandchildren laugh. Aunts and uncles know the current obsession. Families have inside jokes, favorite animals, imaginary monsters, bedtime rituals and adventures that belong specifically to them.

I had already built the system. So the next problem became figuring out how to let other people use it.

That meant turning a private workflow into an actual product. A creation form. Book generation. Illustration. Payments. Delivery. Printing. Error handling. And all of the other decidedly unmagical machinery required to make the magical-looking part happen reliably for someone I have never met.

That process eventually became PageCub.

The same basic idea

It is still built around the same basic idea as the first book I made for my daughter:

Tell us about one particular child. Tell us what they love. Tell us what they are working through. Then build an adventure around that child, rather than trying to fit the child into a story that already existed.

PageCub began because I wanted to make bedtime books for my daughter. Everything after that was just figuring out how to make the process work for everyone else.

You can see what the finished books look like in the sample library, or go straight to the creation form when you're ready.