💸👉👨🎨 Putting Money in the Pockets of Creators
As a Product Manager at Issuu, I get to work with incredibly smart and talented people to create exciting digital products. I consider myself lucky that I get to do what I adore every day AND get paid for it (don’t tell my boss 🙊), especially because I understand how rare (and difficult) it is for creators to have the same opportunity.
For people who choose to follow their dreams and create incredible content, the struggle to make a living is all too real. Using my own experience, I want to help others make a living doing what they love.
Issuu was founded eleven years ago with the mission to empower creators to share their content — from magazines to catalogs to comic books to everything in between — with a global audience. With more than 3 million publishers and 100 million monthly uniques on the platform, we could have already said mission accomplished.
But there are still problems left to solve — the biggest, in my view, is enabling creators to build thriving businesses for their content. That’s essentially what enables creators to keep doing what they love.
A story I’ll always remember was when Upward Magazine stopped publishing one of the best indie travel magazines I’ve seen to go sell homemade honey at farmers markets. Apparently, that was a more financially secure path than continuing to create content — despite the fact they loved doing it. (For the record, I 💛 honey. But I still thought we could do a lot better here at Issuu.)
🎉 Introducing Digital Sales
In early 2017, we knew the time was right to start helping creators like Upward Magazine sell their digital publications directly on the Issuu platform. We had just re-designed and re-engineered the whole foundation of the platform and we saw other companies like Medium, Patreon and Kickstarter getting momentum to democratize monetization for writers, YouTubers and inventors, but not for independent magazine creators.
We weren’t the only ones in the world building a paywalled marketplace for digital content. And so the question for us was what was missing from the existing solutions in the market from our customers’ perspective.
We decided to invest in a few, but critical features that we believe makes buying and selling digital content effortless:
- It takes just a few minutes to get started selling –- it’ super easy.
- It works seamlessly on any device.
- Creators get paid immediately.
- Readers can browse powerful previews of the content they are about to buy, and publishers have full control over the previews.
- And of course you can sell single copies or subscriptions.
⏱ Fast & Fair Payments
Initially, we were very focused on getting a solution to the market fast. We wanted something to work in just three months. The world is never standing still and part of the product job is to ship products when the timing is right. The engineers preferred to power payments using Stripe Connect, because we were prototyping fast and Stripe’s developer experience and documentation were stellar.
As we started inviting creators to try the product in the early stages, it became clear that they really liked how quickly and transparently they were getting paid. The fast and fair payments is a differentiator for our product, and became a strong part of the marketing story at launch. Issuu doesn’t get in the way of creators getting paid for the work they do and Stripe enabled us to build a flow that lets purchasers stay on Issuu throughout their experience.
📚 Empowering Creators
We launched Digital Sales last October and since then, we’ve put real money into the pockets of our creators. We are seeing a wide variety of content thrive on Issuu and when we speak to our creators, their stories are all different. But what they have in common is a deep passion for their domain. So much that they want to share their perspective with their peers and audience around the world. Some of my favourites are The Flower Seekers, Worldwide Coaching Magazine and SOFFA Magazine. Check them out:
🔜 What’s Next?
The digital publishing market is going to grow to more than $8 billion in the US alone. Being able to win in this market will require Issuu to continue driving innovation at the intersection of creativity, content and the technology. There is no shortage of product updates we want to do. But more than any market sizing or hockey-stick-shaped SaaS revenue growth, what drives us is helping our creators thrive by putting real money in their pockets. Check out all of them here. I’m sure you’ll find something you like! 💸👉👨🎨
