This is an interview/demo excerpt in which Pete Ericson summarizes the origin and early development of the Anvil platform. He explains the three-year build process, the platform's three core components (Issue M, Leaky Paywall, and an integrated app), the availability of free WordPress plugin versions, and publishers' reluctance to manage WordPress themselves—preferring professionally hosted solutions.
Chapters
Well, Pete, how old is Anvil? I mean, this is. You guys have added a lot. This is our first demo ever and we just launched it. We have been working for maybe three years now actually putting the platform together and then we've done it in stages. We started with Issue M. Dartmouth College hired us to build an issue based publisher for WordPress. Then we. That's when I was with you, before. Then we came into Leaky Paywall. Another publisher said, hey, we need this metered paywall. We built that and then we built the app to fully integrate with the whole thing. So. But those are really the three major cornerstones of the platform, all running on WordPress, all integrated for one click. Publishing taken up an effort, we'll grant you that. And then what we did was we took our Issue M plugin and our Leaky Paywall plugin and we have a free versions on the WordPress repository. So people can. Anybody can download it and use it. That gives us a lot of exposure. But what we found is publishers don't want to deal with the technology and they shouldn't. They want the system to work. And WordPress is complicated. And you can take two paths. You can download the software yourself and fool around with it and never get anywhere, or end up with a system that's maybe not exactly what you want, depending on your level of expertise. Or you could just hand it off and let the pros take it over and build you something that just screams.
