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Here’s the program.
Andrew: Hey, everyone. I’m Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. How do you get thousands of apps in the App Store and partner with brands like Esquire magazine, Jim Henson Company and Hearst? Joining me are John Lema and Josh Koppel, founders of ScrollMotion, which is a company that makes mobile applications. Guys, welcome to Mixergy.
Josh: Hi, thanks for having us.
John: Thanks for having us.
Andrew: How many apps now in the store?
John: Up to maybe 10,000 or 12,000. It changes all the time. We have new apps coming up, other apps coming down. So it’s hard to say at any given one point, but . . .
Josh: I think at the top we had about 12,000 apps at one point in time, yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. All right. And the interview was originally supposed to be with one or the other of you, and then I asked a question about profitability. I said, “Are you guys profitable?” You conferred for a little bit. And then you said, you know what, why don’t we both come on the interview here together? So what’s the story behind there? And now that we have you both here to make sure that we get it out exactly right, who wants to say it?
Josh: We’re the right and left brain.
John: Yeah.
Josh: You need them both at the same time to answer a question like that.
John: And profitability could be a slippery slope right, because you want to make sure that you’re constantly investing in new products and serving your customers at the same time. And the whole point of a company is to be profitable. So, you know, there’s different definitions of profitability probably is probably maybe the best way to phrase it.
Andrew: Okay. You know what, and the truth is at this stage it’s not that important. The only reason that I thought to ask it as a question at all is you guys got here without any outside funding, and you got here with thousands of apps, partnering with incredible brands, not throwing out shoddy apps. When I first heard thousands of apps, I figured these guys are just tossing anything in the store to see what sells. Then I looked at your stuff. In fact, I’d been using your stuff. I didn’t know your name until I started researching this interview and realized you guys are the ones who created the Esquire app and all the others. So tell you what, let’s find out how we got here. Where did the idea come from for the company? What was the original idea?
John: So one quick correction, we did take some outside funding. We took, I guess about a year ago, maybe 15 months ago, we took some angel financing. So but there’s probably even a longer story. We ran the company for almost a year before we took any money, and Josh probably initiated this idea almost two years before that. I mean before there was an iPhone, before there was the App Store and all this other stuff, before there was iPod Touches and iPads, Josh was walking around New York City and the whole world telling everybody that all the media in the world was going to be sold one more time. He would follow me around with little demonstrations on BlackBerrys and all these different things and little iPods. And all of a sudden . . . I mean he was saying this back when it was impossible to do.
Josh: You know, I came from a world of working for big media companies and really in promotion, right. I worked for people like Comedy Central and Walmart and MTV. My job was essentially to make the commercials that made you want to watch “Animal House” for the 58th time. My job was essentially to tickle your heart with media and make you want to reengage it. So it was clear to us that music had gone digital, video had gone digital, but print media had never really gone digital. We had never really seen an experience that was comparable to print ever. And so I spent a lot of years imagining what that could be and building little demos on things like little iPads, I mean little iPods, you know building examples of how media could live in new ways, in ways that you hadn’t seen before, ways that weren’t just ASCII texts. Right? And because the experience is so important with media, you know, a book, it’s not just a collection of words on page. It is something much more meaningful than that, and our approach was always to try to build the best products we possibly could, even when they’re . . .
Andrew: Josh, let me stop you right there. I want to dig into that, because I did see an article where you were trying to get text onto iPod from years ago, and I saw that you had this vision even back then. What I don’t understand is why didn’t you accept that blogging had already killed Esquire magazine, that online publications were going to take over the newspaper industry and the magazine industry, and books were going to go digital in the way that they already had been, like blogs and Wikipedia except more. You had a different vision. Why?
Josh: Because I’m a content creator, and if I can’t sell my product, I’m out of business. And I knew that the only way to make a product that was a print product that lived in this world was to sell it, was that it had to be sold by the creator and that . . .
Andrew: Why? Why not advertising?
Josh: Because advertising has not been the primary way in which books have been sold in the history of time. You know, you’d walked into a bookstore. And with things like iTunes, you start to see that the world was going into a one-to-one transactional system. We’d always been told that micro transactions were happening, and it was really Apple that figured them out. I just felt that one day a system would work, there would be a system in place where all this content could be sold again. And the object was to anticipate where that would be and to get a jump start on thinking about how that content would look.
John: Not only that. When you start thinking about 300,000 apps in the App Store, millions of songs, all of a sudden people need brands to latch onto. It’s these micro [inaudible 07:22] experiences, these bite size experiences now. You have millions to choose from. So what do you do? You choose brands. You start off with a brand, and you say, well, I’m going to go Esquire or Oprah or James Patterson or something else. It’s like I’m going to attach myself to brands that I already know I can follow. I think that’s what we thought was going to be [inaudible 07:41].
Josh: And we knew we couldn’t build the brands on a shoestring. Right? This was not, we were not going, especially in iTunes, we were not going to be able to build a new brand in that space. Instead, we homesteaded across the entire space with great, great, great content. So, I mean, when you go look for Twilights, you find us. When you go look for James Patterson, you find us. And it was that idea, rethinking about how to think about the space of iTunes as opposed to building one app and going very deep. We built lots of apps and went very, very, very wide. And that was a completely different idea than anyone else had in this space.
Andrew: All right. What you’re seeing me do here, I’m not looking away. I’m writing down a note to come back and ask why lots of apps and not one single app like the Kindle. But you were starting to talk about your early experiments with the iPod and getting text on small devices. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I interrupted you earlier. What did you get text on?
Josh: It was, and it really would be very hard for me to show you by putting this thing up to the screen. But what we did was we basically made . . . one day I was looking at my iPod because I play with stuff. My job really is to play with technology until I find a new use for it. And I played with QuickTime for many years. I played with iPods for many years, and one day I put all my pictures into my iPod photo browser. And I was running through them real fast. And I was zipping around, zipping around, and I found these two pictures of my father. One where his arm was up, the other where his arm was down, and I kept moving him back and forth, making a little animation of my dad. And looking at that, I suddenly realized that this was a very primitive flip book, and if we could take a whole sequence of images and sort of put a user through like a roller coaster of experience, like a little path, whether it was an album turning around and then opening up and then moving into a lyric section of album art or a trading card, the things slips around and then moves into animation. I just started playing with this content, because I was in television and I had broadcast designers at my fingertips, I knew how to make beautiful images that would sort of feel like a computer. They kind of feel like what’s special about technology without really actually really being technology. And then I met technology, Mr. John Lema, who basically took all these ideas and these notions and these fantasies about what content could be and actually made realities out of them. Because John comes from a serious automation background, and John’s the person that basically takes a process that is lengthy and depressing and turns it into something that is very, very efficient and optimistic.
Andrew: John, what’s one of the early projects that you guys worked on together to get a feel for the way you two work together?
John: The first thing we did was the Tribune Company. So the Tribune wanted three or four or five different apps, and this is back when we were pitching people. When we started pitching people in 2008, they were asking us what’s an iPhone. I mean there were four and a half million devices or six million devices in the space, and we were trying to convince people that these devices were one laptop or child, that it was going to be the communication meeting for all of us. We’re going to leave our computers behind and tablets were coming. And this is before the fall of Western Civilization in August. I mean nobody was even thinking about iPhones. So we pitched the Tribune on three or four different applications. I think they ended up buying half or all of them. And we started developing product. It was how do you turn it into workflow, how do you automate it, build the platform, and sell it again and sell it again?
Josh: And we had a real synergy about the level of work that we sort of believed the quality of stuff had to be. Like John is the first person I’ve ever worked with that didn’t think that good was good enough. And I love that about him. You know, and that’s really, that’s how I feel too. With the type of stuff that we want to make, it’s got to be excellent in that that’s really what we try to do. We try to bring excellence into the product, and then we try to make sure that it’s automatable so that excellence can be scaled.
John: It also helps, I mean, Josh’s skill set and my skill set are two completely different things. So it’s not like there’s anything to argue about. It’s not like I’m going to be arguing with him over colors or creative styling or how to position a brand. It’s not going to happen. He’s not going to argue with me about the technologies we choose or automation. So we both have a lot of autonomy in how we approach what we do, and it was really evident from the beginning. I could come into things, well if you position the button this way or if you use this type of web, you’re not going to have it automated for more customers. He’s like, “Okay. Well, how do we do it then?” So that type of collaboration helped us a lot from the beginning.
Andrew: So you guys partnered up, the Tribune Company was the first client. Before there was even an App Store, you guys started creating apps for them. And you launched with the App Store from what I saw, and right from the start you were aiming for excellence, you were aiming for beautiful design that worked well?
John: Yeah, absolutely.
Josh: Absolutely.
John: It was one of the things, you know Josh had a couple of companies before. I had a couple companies before. And I think one of the things that I realized in building even small companies was that there is no replacement for excellence. You want to get customers, you want to work with brands, you want to work with the best brands in the world, you have to just strive towards excellence, and that was it.
Andrew: Now I’m interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs, and they just say over and over the first version just stunk and then we improved and we improved and we improved. And the goal of the first version was just to get something out there to get feedback from people. Now you’re giving me a different perspective. I’m wondering, how do you get to a place where version one is excellent without driving yourself crazy and thinking that you know what the customer wants but really creating a product that’s out of touch with what the customer really wants?
John: It does, it does. I mean you have to, at some point you need to know [inaudible 13:57]. And I felt like we had an additional filter mechanism along the way. I mean, it’s not like we were releasing a product out to consumers immediately. It was develop a product, release it to Tribune, allow them to work with it, allow them to have input, and then release it to the world. And then iterate beyond that. So, there was an additional step along the way.
Josh: Actually, yeah, and it’s really been one of our sort of foundations of our process is that if we have a new product that we’re coming out with, we don’t actually release it. We go sell it first. Right? So when we finished our magazine product, we finished our textbook product, we went and sold it to the marketplace before we put it out in the world for other people to see.
John: Otherwise, you have no way of knowing what’s going to work for your customer, for your consumer, what works in the value, you have no idea. Right? You try not to build product in a vacuum. It’s the hardest thing to do.
Andrew: The magazine product is Iceberg Media? Iceberg Player?
John: It’s actually released under the brand, so it’s released under Esquire or released under Oprah.
Josh: That’s a very important discovery for us as well, right. The brand really needs to own the experience, and that’s something that wasn’t clear to us right away, that Esquire magazine, Oprah magazine . . . and Oprah magazine, by the way, just released today. So that’s a little bit of woot woot.
Andrew: Another one for you guys.
John: That’s right, but I mean it has to be Oprah. It has to be Oprah magazine on the label of the thing that you’re going to buy. It’s the only thing that, that’s the respect that you pay the brand.
Andrew: All right. I’ve got a few notes here that I want to back up and understand. I wanted to find out about how you got customers like Oprah, because not just anyone can walk in the door and partner with Oprah. I want to find out, I think it was you John, who said you did it the wrong way first and then you discovered that you need to sell it and then put it in the market. And then I want to find out why lots of apps. So why don’t we start with that. You said that you did it the wrong way first. Can you expand on that John? Do you remember what you said, or do you want me to remind you? It was when you talked about how we have to sell it first to partner . . .
John: He did it the wrong way first.
Andrew: Oh, okay. Josh?
Josh: No, I’m Josh. So the idea was that what we realized was that we had to, the way to make this work was to build a product and then take it around to the industry leaders and essentially get them to buy off on it and get their feedback into the app. So that once you got that feedback, you got their buy in. They actually were interested in being a part of this platform because we’re selling platforms. We’re not really an app company like your traditional app company. I’m not building a game. I’m building essentially, we’re building essentially a platform in which print media can live in beautiful ways. So, I’m not building this thing myself. My partner, the publisher, has really, really got to be invested in this experience because it’s their content. I’m the vessel, they’re filling it. So what we did was we built these, and this is really much more, this really happened when we got into the book business. This was essentially November 2008. People were jumping out of buildings. It was a terrible time in New York City. And John and I, we walked around and basically sold this to all the publishers by showing them this vision of how their content could live beautifully on these devices.
Andrew: I’m sorry. Let’s take it in story form. I want to see the evolution. So the first product you do, you do for Tribune Company. It’s in the App Store. What do you learn from that? What are you going to do differently? How do you learn to evolve your business as a result of that first experience?
John: Simple things. The first things were simple. One, once you release these products, they’re very hard to manage. When you release to an App Store, you don’t have control of an updating cycle. You have to rely on Apple to do the reviews and then get released. So some of the web rules around releasing early and constantly updating every 15 minutes don’t apply. That was the first thing we learned. The second was that the kind of review cycles and the feedback from consumers was huge, and you had to serve the needs of consumers. No matter what you did, you had to serve the needs of the consumers because they were going to be talking about your product everywhere. It was a huge change from just releasing websites. And I think third was to kind of make sure you build up enough time to let the customers review the product, to let Tribune, to let Lifetime, to let Hearst, let somebody review the product along the way and get them invested inside the decision making. Because if you don’t, it’s going to extend your timelines. You’re all going to be in trouble. The first things we learned were all critical and very specific to kind of building apps in the app space.
Andrew: Okay. And then, what’s the next thing that you do for the store? Who’s the next customer you partner up with, and what do you build for them?
John: We launched a couple of applications for Lifetime.
Josh: People. Was People there yet?
John: No, no. And then, we basically went to the book publishers. It was the fall of 2008. It was after kind of a lot of the global financial crisis, and we thought that we’d be able to, while everybody was busy worrying about their financial portfolio, we’d go door to door and sign up all the publishers to launch their e-book contents with our reader. And lo and behold we did.
Josh: And that was really an exciting time, because if you think back, there were no other players in the book space other than Amazon. And Amazon was exerting a lot of pressure on the publishers, and they were looking for another venue to basically put their books out. And we came to them with a really beautiful idea for what a book could be. You have to realize at this point we’re trying to shift ourselves as a company. We are a services company. We’re making apps. These are our ideas, but they’re not really our ideas. And we were trying to shift from being an app company to being a product company. We saw the book space as the opportunity to do that. We showed them this sort of vision of what these books could be, and we got a lot of buy in. There was no one else in the marketplace. It was a very dark time. You’d go into meetings and there’d be a TV on playing CNN silently. And all you would see was like a gigantic, like graphs of the last two hours. It was like ski slopes. So we basically snuck in like little mice, skipping along the dinosaurs.
John: We had to be optimists in a time of pessimism. Everyone was a pessimist, and we were like we’re going to be the optimists.
Josh: Yeah.
John: And we’re going to tell everybody it’s going to be okay. We go into meetings and like it’s going to be all right, guys. I promise we’re all going to make it. Let’s talk about some books. So we launched on Christmas Eve.
Josh: With the top five major publishers.
John: The top five publishers in 2008, and started building the business. That was really the beginning of the whole business.
Andrew: Older industries like that are notorious for wanting control and not wanting to change things. What kind of issues did you face when you were trying to convince them to go digital and to use your platform and to trust you guys and to trust the store?
John: It was kind of easy. I mean, first we had already had a good track record with the Tribune. Some of our Lifetime products, they had gotten good reviews. There was a lot of positive feedback.
Josh: Stuff to show, we had stuff to show.
John: We had good product to show. We both had pretty strong careers working with brands, so we could talk about protecting brands. We could talk about being brand guarding because that was easy as well. And then Amazon had essentially forced everyone’s hand. Amazon had forced the hands of the publishers to say you have to get into this space; you have to try to control your own destiny. They were exerting a lot of pressure. So the book publishers were looking for a partner. So it made it very easy for us.
Andrew: What kind of relationships did you have with the publishers? Were you splitting revenues or were you at the time working . . .
John: At the time, we were all [inaudible 22:35].
Andrew: It was all what, I’m sorry?
Josh: Rev share.
John: All rev share.
Andrew: All rev share, okay.
Josh: We knew there was no way that anyone was going to, especially in that sort of marketplace, was going to spend money on anything, and that the only way that we could actually launch this world was to do a rev split.
Andrew: Okay.
John: There are some companies we would go in three or four times, and staff that was there the first time was fired. And then you go in a second time and that staff was fired. You go in a third time and every time you’d go in to meet a company, there’d be new people because everyone had been fired like the week before. So we knew there was no way to get a complicated contract. We just had the simplest contracts.
Andrew: I see, okay. All right. And so you’re building up the apps for them, and the next thing I’m wondering is have you guys ever heard of Spreadsong? These are the guys who create the free book reader in the App Store that was number one for a long time? Well, I had the founder of that company on here, and he was hustling like you wouldn’t believe to make sure that he was SEOing his stuff in the App Store completely, so that if you searched for classic books, because that happened to be a word that Amazon mentioned in their commercial, he wanted to have that in his description so when users came and searched for that term, they’d find his app. And anyway he was doing all kinds of stuff like that, and he’s focused in on this one or two apps or now five apps. How do you guys do that when you have so many apps? How do you guys compete with people like him when he’s putting in all that energy into his app and others are doing the same for theirs?
John: Why not just let people search for Stephen King? Right? When you’re looking for a book you’re looking for Stephen King or James Patterson or Twilights. A bunch of people search for that. Let the title do the work for you.
Josh: Exactly. That’s why we felt that brands would live, brands rule.
John: Why not let Oprah do the work for you? You want to search for Oprah on the iTunes store, you’re going to find ScrollMotion applications with Oprah in it. I mean that’s it. I mean it’s a beautiful way of getting your content out. I mean really the way we see our business is almost like an Intel inside, that the brand goes first. We’re just powering it. That’s all we’re doing is powering the brand. The brand is out there doing that work for you every day, right? Oprah’s out there five times a week with her television shows and her channels and the magazines and all this great stuff. All we’re trying to do is help deliver that. That’s all we’re doing.
Andrew: I see, right. If I’m doing a search in the App Store or anywhere for the New Yorker magazine and you come up with Manhattanite magazine that’s 50% cheaper, I’m not going to read it. Ditto for Esquire if it happens to be two scrolls down the page, you have to go where you want to go. I see. What about what you said earlier, “We want to have lots of apps.” Why not one platform the way that Kindle had their one platform? Why did you decide to create a, sorry one product the way the Kindle did. Why did you decide to create a different product for each customer?
John: Because this isn’t about ScrollMotion or Iceberg the brand out there selling this. What this is about is about Esquire, this is about Oprah, this is about James Patterson, this is about all these brands living in this space and what do they need to be delivered. It’s about having a standalone space for those brands, not about being part of a bookstore. There already is a bookstore. There’s iBooks, there’s Amazon, there’s Nook. Those are great products, and they do their own thing. But it’s a different way of thinking about how do you interact directly with something that you’re in love with like the Twilight series.
Josh: And before there was even one app in the App Store, there were already eight million pieces of content in iTunes. We knew that iTunes was a space that was all about volume and that we weren’t really afraid of being able to put more content into that space. We knew that once we had lots of apps in that space, we actually had something that was like a channel and a way that we could actually promote and build out that space. If you’re homesteading with gigantic fantastic brands, people will find your stuff.
Andrew: How do you maintain all those apps and update them and adjust for improvements in IOS?
John: You know, platform maintenance is always a concern. Lots of times we do mass updates of applications. Right? So that comes through automation. How can you automate updating 12,000 apps when a new IOS piece is released and maybe you’ve launched backward compatibility? It’s just automation, automation, automation. You get infrastructure that allows you to update different apps at the same time.
Josh: And we’ve done that. We’ve updated 12,000 apps one time. We’ve been through it.
Andrew: Over how long? How long does it take to update 12,000 apps?
Josh: We did it in about a week.
Andrew: A week?
John: A week or two.
Andrew: All right. I saw I think it was you, Josh, who was demoing on Mashable, I guess it was an old video of, how do you describe this? A story that users can tell by scrolling through the story forwards and backwards, and you said that if enough people want it, then we’ll keep making chapters. What was the idea behind that and how did it do?
Josh: Well, you know, I started this business as a writer. My last book was published in 2000 and ended up in landfill, because it was not a book that was appropriate for physical experience. Instead it was a book that was really about, it was a digital book in analog form. And I realized that my job as a creative person was to figure out what a digital book was. It’s been a long journey of thinking about what that is. I mean that’s why when you ask why not do it with advertising it’s because I’m a book writer, and the books I want to write, if that can be sold and bought. So we did something, me and a guy named Ben Maraniss made a book called “First Things Last,” and it’s done pretty well. It’s been downloaded tens of thousands of time. But I also realized that . . . and I’d love to make books again, but right now our job is to power all the print in the world. It’s to power creative people, to give them the abilities to build their content using these platforms and truly take advantage of what you can do with one of these and what you can do with one of these. And that’s the point of our company. And I’m just not, it’s not time for me to be making stuff again.
John: But you can also look at those, I like to look at those things and think about them as experiments.
Josh: Yeah, definitely.
John: And listen, we’ve had a lot of apps in the space, and a lot of some of the things we’ve done we’ve released as experiments just to see how they do and see how people react to them. Everything like “First Things Last,” which was that app that was released, we just learn from and then package into other, either the technology gets packaged into a textbook or gets packaged into as part of the magazine or gets packaged into something that somebody uses further down the road.
Andrew: Okay. How did you use some of the ideas that you learned from that project?
Josh: Boy, everywhere.
John: So, first was the idea that we had kind of replaced text differently on that and layouts. It was not really the best way to do it. Then we thought about how to kind of replicate that technology inside of HTML, which we did. Then we thought about how to use that, we actually have, we developed a technology with Houghton Mifflin called Math Motion, which is a step by step process to math equations, which we used that for. We used it around our 360 degree views with Esquire and Oprah magazines. I mean we’ve used that 20, 30, 50 times.
Josh: And that is the name of our company, ScrollMotion. I mean that technology scroll motion, that’s what we were doing, and that was the first sort of way of showing people what that could be.
Andrew: Teach me a little bit about design. Your design is complimented in just about every post that I read about you. What should the rest of us who are developing apps know that you guys have already learned about design?
Josh: I would say for starters make sure that your experience is additive. If you’re making something that is essentially a digital replica, you’re going about it the wrong way. This is a new medium. It’s a new thing and there you are.
Andrew: He’s holding up the iPad and I see my reflection in it. It’s kind of cool.
Josh: You want to look at yourself inside the iPad, but you want to understand that this is, this idea it’s got to be better than what you’re trying to build. And a smart device is smart because it knows where it is. It can listen, it can hear, it can speak, it can see, it can take pictures, it can record. I mean that is the most fun that you can, I mean you can add so much fun stuff to your idea. And we really try to look at what’s important in an experience and how can we use this bag of tricks that we have access to in this magic slate to enhance, improve, add. I think that the real failures that you see from a design perspective, especially in the spaces that we play in, are about people that are a little bit too uptight about what the content is. And they aren’t trying to take this thing and actually make it much, much, much better, but they’re just trying to make it just as good.
John: Also, don’t be afraid to customize your look and feel for a very specific user niche. I mean some apps you’re going to go far and wide across the App Store. They’re going to be touched by people of all ages. But a lot of these apps are going to be used by a very specific demographic. Don’t be afraid to think about that demographic, exactly how they’re going to use it, exactly what colors do they want; exactly do they need big buttons or small buttons? Do they like page turning? You got to think about what this user wants. Even in the magazine space, every magazine should have slightly different interface and different uses and different features, because a consumer of Food Network magazine is looking for different things than somebody who reads Esquire. And you have to consider that.
Andrew: And you guys from what I remember of your app, I could select text on your app, I could copy text, I could e-mail it. How hard was that to get, how hard was it to convince publishers to let you guys do that?
John Well, it’s all policy driven. So we give them control over it. So if they want that in, they can have that in. If they don’t want that in, it’s not in. It’s all controlled by policy. They can control how much is shared and how much isn’t.
Josh: But I think that question also sort of comes on the fundamental ideas that we have as a company, which is that our platforms for HTML5, the reason that we, in sort of going through all these different iterations of a book, you know starting at trade, then going to kids, then going to magazines, then going to textbooks. I mean we were learning each incremental hill, and where we came out was that the content needed to live in an open standard, separate from the app itself. And this is all Mr. Lema over here.
Andrew: But what I’m seeing as I’m in the app here, where is your app? There, here’s one of them. What is Iceberg magazine? It says powered by us, Iceberg magazines.
Josh: Oh, that was an early version of what our brand meant. So you’re looking at something that basically came out about a year and a half ago. So that’s just a vestige of sort of where we were at that moment and how we thought that we would be branding that company. That’s not really where we are now. We sort of live silently inside our applications.
Andrew: So, it’s so hard not to engage with the app. I’m trying not to touch it so that I can just talk about it. So this, what I’m seeing here, Esquire magazine, this is HTML5 right here on the screen?
Josh: Oh yeah.
John: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s just within the app. I see. And wow, it’s . . .
John: It’s a more recent version of what we’re doing with Esquire on the iPad. It’s much more engaging, almost pixel perfect design, and yet all done with HTML5.
Andrew: Wow. And you guys say you also do the, do you do he New Yorker also?
Josh: No.
Andrew: There’s no New Yorker magazine app from what I remember.
Josh: There is. There is. It’s not for the iPad.
Andrew: It is, okay. All right, is that a competitor? I brought it up earlier, and I think I lumped it in with your products.
Josh: I mean, Adobe, it’s an Adobe product.
Andrew: Oh, okay.
Josh: I don’t really feel like we’re competing head to head with Adobe.
John: They’re slightly larger.
Andrew: How do you get customers?
Josh: Well, we believe that the way to get customers is to build great products. And that by building great products, by being able to really listen and understand what people want, we’re able to go and get more people to believe in the vision that we have.
Andrew: But this has been two years now, maybe three years now. You’ve managed to get in doors of companies that most people would dream, most companies would dream of getting in the doors of. We talked about Oprah today. We talked about Esquire, talked about so many others. How do you even do it? Is it just working a network? Is it your personal network, Josh?
John: I feel like it comes down to great products. I feel like we try to build . . . it’s like a little house of Legos and you try to take one block, one great product, go to the next one. Build another great product, go to the next one. I feel like . . .
Andrew: And they just find you? They say, “Wow, this app looks beautiful. Let’s find out who does it? Let’s trace . . . ”
Josh: Well, and other things. So we also have what we call ambassadors. An ambassador, someone with a lot of experience in a certain vertical and that is well known in that vertical and they bring us in to a, they can bring us into a company.
John: So we’ll have somebody who works specifically in the magazine space help introduce us to magazines. We’ll have somebody who works in the textbook space introduce us to the textbook companies. I mean that’s kind of the way, that’s really the way it works. And then you bring a product to them and you show the first customer in a space what a product can look like.
Josh: Sorry about that. We were getting darker and darker and darker.
John: I feel like that’s the best way to do it is you have to try to get somebody who really understands the space and then build on top of their experience with your products then.
Andrew: When you say ambassador, how formal is that? You talking about finding one person who will then go and actively introduce you to others?
Josh: Yeah.
Andrew: How do you find the right ambassador, and how do you help them introduce you?
Josh: Well, I mean there’s a lot of ways to incentivize people in a startup. I mean, that’s one of the great things about having options is that you’re able to sort of incentivize people when startups really need, if you don’t have money as a company you really need to be able to use equity appropriately. If you give people an incentive and you find the right people, I mean in New York City, we know a lot of great people. Having worked in media and having worked in software, we have a very large network of people. We were able to sort of understand where the interesting places in which this could work. I mean some of the verticals didn’t pan out for over a year. I mean the magazine space really, really didn’t come into it’s own until the iPad. And we just had to keep plugging away at it. Otherwise, we could’ve let it go. In other cases, the book space, the kids book manager, essentially kids book ambassador that brought us into the children’s book space and landed people like Sesame Street for us.
John: Everybody who’s brought us into a space has been unbelievably . . . they have been very passionate about their own space. So they’re either passionate about textbooks and learning or they’re passionate about the kids space or they’re really passionate about magazines. I think what we’ve been lucky to find are just people that are very passionate about their own little world. And then they see the vision, either their own vision or it’s a shared vision with us, about how those products should live in this new space. And once you have that, it makes it easy.
Josh: Well, once you also have people that also believe in this excellence idea, we have to find people that are really trying to make sure that the content lives up to the expectation of what it can be. When you find those people, you’re really able to sell the right way, and that’s what we look for in our people.
Andrew: These people, when they’re not working as ambassadors for ScrollMedia, what are they doing?
Josh: They were working in those verticals.
Andrew: Oh, they’re full time with you now as ambassadors?
Josh: Yes.
Andrew: Ah, I see, okay. I’m sensing from you . . . I love that we’re on video, because I could pick up on vibes that I never would be able to put my finger on if we were just talking on the phone. I’m sensing such enthusiasm. You guys are, you hit your stride, you’re at a good place. Do you remember when you hit that place, when you said, “Yeah, we made it. This vision that we had that could’ve been completely nuts, we could’ve been another company destroyed by those old media giants, it didn’t happen. We made it.” Do you remember one of those moments where you knew we’re on the right track, we did it?
Josh: There’ve been . . . you don’t remember the first one. Oh, hit me. What do you think?
John: Oh, we had, so don’t forget it was April/May of 2008 when we started this company, and I had a couple of job offers on the table. He had some job offers on th table.
Josh: I had no job offers.
John: And the idea was if we get our first customer, we’ll start the business. If we don’t get the first customer, we won’t start the business. I kept trying to put off the job offers and I kept trying to wait and wait and wait. And finally, we got our first customer and that was it. That’s when I knew that we had something. I mean there weren’t even any devices. There was four million devices. The App Store hadn’t launched. And we closed our first customer, and I felt like this is, there’s something real here. This is going to be huge. We just need to hold onto this tiger’s tail as long as we can, because this thing is going to go really far, really fast.
Andrew: Who was that customer?
Josh: It was the Tribune.
Andrew: Tribune Company. And you guys, sorry go ahead, Josh.
Josh: Just there’ve been a lot of moments like that. I feel like if a startup isn’t about to, like the first year, if you’re not about to go out of business every week, you’re not doing it right. And for the next year, you should be going out of business almost every month, because you have to be hungry. You have to be willing to be wily, move around and change direction. This company was an act of will. There was tons and tons of insecurity and fear, but we just kept plugging away at it. We kept believing that this was important and that this space would be meaningful. We sell with passion because we’re passionate, because we really believe in this vision and this world. I think it’s been a really great ride. It’s been really fun.
Andrew: And you started out the interview by saying that you needed to charge so that you can realize this vision. Charging is what helped you guys continue and to build your business. How did charging affect you? I don’t want to impose my statements on your experience.
John: Well, I think I felt like one of the things we wanted to be able to do was anybody can give it away for free. You could always give it away for free. So the first thing we had in the space was well what if we just charge for it just a little bit. Just let’s make sure, let’s just set a bar. I don’t know what that bar’s going to be, but let’s just not go to the bottom instantly. Every day it’s kind of a constant fight to stay at that bar. I mean there’s always an opportunity to give it away. But I feel like the content, look at Esquire magazine, it costs an incredible amount to curate the content, to put that brand together. They do a wonderful job of filming videos and writing features and having articles. It’s a great product. So anybody can make it free, right? Well, I said, “What if we could just try to find a way to charge for it.” I think it was a very important thing that we first did was we didn’t want to go straight to zero. And it’s definitely set the tone for almost everything we do.
Andrew: Well, I’m going to leave it there with the questions. I’m going to congratulate you, and then I’ve got one request here. First of all, thank you guys. Congratulations. Really great to meet you. The request is I’m in your office, Josh. I’m looking over your shoulder the whole time trying to figure out what does Josh have over his shoulder. Mr. Digital’s got all kinds of paper there. You’re talking to me on a laptop. Can you carry your laptop over there and just show us a couple of things over there.
Josh: Sure.
Andrew: See what we’re looking at.
Josh: Okay. Well, so this is the wall of inspiration. So we have all kinds of stuff here. You have things like these are the first devices that I had, and whenever we have a device we put up on the wall to sort of remember it and sort of share the love, all my iPods, there’s my Zune. Am I the last person with the chocolate Zune?
Andrew: The only.
Josh: And this is of course the Newton and the Kindle and there’s my SAT scores. Just a reminder that all that glitters is not gold.
John: Want me to get that for you?
Josh: And basically, our notion here was that we had to basically make content that could do any of these things, from a magazine to a newspaper to an art catalog. I don’t feel like I’m doing this very well, an art catalog, Mr. Sam Zell, personal hero. And just that our job was to basically make content that could live across all those mediums. And I keep that on my wall because the truth is that every single problem has been solved before. Every one of the print problems that we have to deal with has been solved in the last 500 years. Look for inspiration in your world. Read in the tea leaves because ideas are everywhere. And that’s how we work. And we look for people to, that share this vision that life is full of mystery and that there’s lots of things to find out there that will solve your problems.
Andrew: Well, thanks. Thanks for doing the interview. Thanks for showing me your wall. What’d you get on SAT?
Josh: Oh, 960, not much.
Andrew: 960. There’s work for everybody.
Josh: I know, I know, there’s hope for all of us. And speaking of hope, I just wanted to reach out to your audience and say that ScrollMotion is hiring and that we are really, really looking for great software architects, great HTML and JavaScript people, and of course Objective-C ninjas. We are definitely looking for people. Please come to our website, ScrollMotion.com. Look at our job boards, send us your resume. We want you to come work for us, to come play with all this fun, fun media.
Andrew: And I’m personally happy to make any introductions to anyone in my audience who’s sitting there working on their own projects and says, “Hey, you know what? I want to work with these guys.” You have my contact info. You can reach out to me. You can go to ScrollMotion.com. You can reach out to them directly.
Josh: Thank you so much, pleasure.
Andrew: Thanks for doing the interview. Thank you both. Thanks John, thanks Josh. Bye.
Josh: Bye.
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