Tattletech Hot Seat
Martin Ferro-Thomsen is a Co-Founder of the leading digital publishing service Issuu, a Time.com best website and twice a SXSW finalist that today serves 3,6 billion monthly pages & 47 million monthly users. He is currently Founder & CEO at Conferize, a stealth startup looking to become the main destination for all conferences in the world.
This week, I exchanged emails with Martin regarding the orgin of Issuu and digital publishing’s rise in popularity.
Tattletech: Everybody loves an origin story. How did Issuu come to be?
Martin Ferro-Thomsen: We wanted to do something around publishing. We had seen Youtube and Skype challenge the existing world in each their category. With publishing what you had back in 2006 was basically dull and heavy PDF files being emailed and downloaded. Or you’d pay a gazillion for a bad pageflip application that really didn’t look like publishing to us. So, we wanted to build the world’s best publishing solution that came as close to the real world as possible, with a few extra digital tricks up its sleeve of course. And then we’d give it away for free to empower anyone to publish online, other than just putting up blog or go on MySpace (which people did in the millions back then). We wanted to make print digital, so to speak. The ‘free’ part was hard to swallow for most investors, but eventually we found someone who shared our vision of things and they’ve backed us ever since.
Tattletech: So you killed MySpace! Did you ever think of charging for the service or was being able to offer it for free always a central part of the idea?
M F-T: I think MySpace pretty much engineered its demise on its own. Well, free doesn’t pay the bills and eventually we ended up with huge hosting costs, literally serving billions of pages. Today it’s close to four billion pages a month. Who said people didn’t read? Happily lots of people were asking for special features and we introduced Issuu Pro that is selling really well. This week we introduced Issuu Reseller so you can actually make money with us. So we do alright. We also serve ads, or, I should say, ad, singular, cause we only have one ad per publication. But without ruining the reading experience. That’s pretty dear to us (unlike some competitors we know but don’t speak of here).
Tattletech: This seems to have been a spring of really good growth for you guys. Could you explain a bit of what you are trying to accomplish with Issuu Reseller?
M F-T: Well B2B is still a valid business model in the digital publishing space. We have publishers and businesses coming to us that used to pay as much as $1,000 per publication. Not kidding. Our Issuu Pro is $19 for all you can eat, err publish. That’s an incredible margin and the creative agencies and freelancers with publishing clients of course noticed that and wanted to create a business around that. And we’re not looking to hire a huge support and sales staff because we’re all about automation and scalability. So it was a no-brainer for us. With Issuu Reseller you can manage any number of accounts on behalf of clients and even get discounts the more you use it. The reseller can bundle our service with his special talents, e.g. more customization and support than we offer, and charge whatever he likes. Everyone wins! Although the product is less than a week old, we’ve already seen twice the adoption we expected, so it’s all good.
Tattletech: There is a dangerous conception that digital publishing’s goal is to kill of traditional “paper” publication. How do you see your relationship with other method of publication?
M F-T: It’s no more dramatic than the CD replacing vinyl, and eventually MP3 and lately the rise of streaming music on demand. It’s progress and that’s a good thing. In a decade or so, only the retro fetishists will use print, like with vinyl today. We know that all media evolution happens on a cumulative basis (I still listen to FM radio sometimes!). That said though, at Issuu we’re fanatical about print. I used to be a print editor and journalist. There’s still something about print that cannot be reproduced on digital platforms. It’s tangible, it’s mobile and durable, and it smells nice. Especially if it’s your own writing you see for the first time in print. Look at Google! They recently put out their Think Quarterly in print, which is hand delivered for free to special VIPs. There’s nothing VIP about an ebook, right? It’s also out in HTML and mobile web – and on Issuu. Reading is not going away, but reading itself and it’s vehicles are changing and multiplying. But it’s not the end of print, it’s the end of out of print (to quote Finnemann). And without print, no Issuu. Let’s never forget that.
– Jason Oberholtzer
Follow Martin on Twitter and check out his brain-children Issuu and Conferize.
