Trip Adler, Scribd's co-founder and CEO, talks about building the company from a Flash-based document sharing tool into a subscription platform. He covers early viral growth through TechCrunch and Reddit, experimenting with ads and marketplaces before settling on subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers like HarperCollins to compete with Kindle Unlimited.
Chapters
How—
when you launched this initial product, today actually Adobe XD came in and they did a bunch of prototypes.
Cool.
Back then, I'm sure it was a bit different. The tools would be different. I'm sure you coded it right from scratch. Was this a product that you knew that this was what you guys were gonna build, or was it something you built and then tested to see if it worked? Or did you run some sort of, you know, the typical MVP before?
Yeah, so we definitely started with an MVP. The initial product just let you take a PDF, and we actually— you mentioned Adobe. We were using this Adobe product at the time called Flash Paper, which would display a document on the web using Flash.
Oh.
It's kind of interesting that we were showing documents in Flash. Eventually, we converted that to HTML5, but we basically just hacked together Flash Paper, made a super simple product that basically just let you take a document, turn it into Flash Paper, And we got that up and running in a matter of weeks, and we started seeing people using it. And, you know, we basically just went and found anyone on the internet who was trying to publish any kind of writing, and we emailed them and tried to convince them to upload their content to the service. And we got our first, like, 100 users that way. And what we noticed was that when someone would upload something, that piece of content would start getting traffic from Google Search. And we were like, well, we have 100 pieces of content, and we're getting 100 visits per day. Imagine what would happen if we had 100,000 pieces of content, right? So we kind of got the idea that we were onto something. So we then kept building up the product, adding some features. We were getting— we had a few hundred users using the service. And then we brought the idea to TechCrunch. TechCrunch was— this was kind of the early days of TechCrunch. They wrote an article on us. Immediately, like, we had all these links pointing to us from all over the web with people talking about us. We were on, like, the front page of Digg, which was big at the time. We were on the front page of Reddit. And a lot of people came and uploaded their own content. And then a small fraction— and then that content brought a lot of traffic, and then a small fraction of that traffic brought more content in. And eventually we got this viral loop going, and we just started growing from there. And that's how we got a lot of traffic.
And at that time, it was free?
It was totally free, yeah.
Got it. So when did you guys actually start thinking of, how do we monetize this? Because a lot of the products we have here, yes, they can build a product. I'm sure people will use it. But once you flip that switch of, hey, I'm going to charge you money for this, things might die off. So some of that experience.
Yeah, so at the beginning, we didn't think about the business model at all. As you guys just heard, our first revenue was from me playing saxophone on the street corner. That was like our joke, because we had no revenue, so the only revenue came from that. And for the first few years, it was all just about growth, right? We were trying to grow the number of documents uploaded, we were trying to grow the traffic, and we did get a lot of growth, and fortunately that growth allowed us to get venture capital. We were able to raise a Series A and a Series B. But yeah, after a few years, we started realizing, okay, we have to start trying to figure out how to make money. So the first thing we did was we tried putting ads on the website. It worked. It worked OK. It made a few million dollars, but nothing huge. Then we had this idea of becoming like a store for content. So we allowed uploaders and publishers to buy and sell content in the service. That, again, worked OK. It didn't work great. The other thing we tried is we had a freemium model where we would charge a subscription fee for premium features. That always worked pretty well. That became kind of like the dominant business model just sort of organically, and that was sort of when we realized, okay, maybe subscription is the right way to go. So then over time, we just kept leaning into subscription. Eventually, we went all in on subscription, and we kind of got rid of the ads, and we got rid of the buying and selling features. So it took about 5 years to land on our business model.
Right. And at the time of subscriptions, when you figured out subscriptions, did you have books on there, or was it still the, you know, People's publishing that they would just upload, or did you have books, audiobooks?
So, yeah, so it happened all one step at a time. So the first step was we were just getting— charging for premium features, and then meanwhile, we saw book publishers, like the big companies in New York, were using Scribd to market their books. So that was when we kind of like put things together. We're like, well, we have this interest in book publishers, we have a growing freemium audience, You have these other services like Netflix and video and Spotify and music that are hugely successful. Like, what if we went and we partnered with the publishers to put their books in a subscription and launch a subscription model for books? So that's what we did. It started out really slowly. We went and started talking to publishers. They were not interested at all. We started with really, really small publishers, and we just kind of added bigger and bigger ones over time. You know, just like in the early days of Scribd, we had really good early traction. We put the books in and we saw people were reading them a lot. We saw in the— we added this one publisher called Inner Traditions, and with this one guy in New Zealand was just reading their books all day long. I mean, he was reading for like 10 hours a day. And we were like, okay, this is like interesting user behavior, right? So we're onto something here. So just like in the early days, we kind of kept adding books, kept Growing the reading activity. Eventually, after a lot of work, we got one of the biggest publishers in the world, HarperCollins, to make a big bet on us. They gave us all their books that were 1 year old and older, and then we kind of launched the world's first subscription service for books in partnership with them. And then from there, we just kept adding more stuff. We added books, we added audiobooks, we added magazines, and we just keep adding more content over time.
Was this prior to Amazon Unlimited?
We were before Kindle Unlimited, yeah. Nice.
Yeah.
So, about 6 months later, they launched Kindle Unlimited, which is now one of our competitors.
How would you say the big differentiator there is? I've used Amazon Unlimited. I've also used Scribd. I've found myself that with Amazon Unlimited, I usually get the very cheap books, the $1 books, $2 books, and never a title that I actually would like to read. And I haven't seen that been the case with Scribd. Is that something you guys thought of? How would you penetrate this market that way?
Yeah, I mean, we've worked really hard to get really quality content in the service. You know, we have ebooks from the Big 5 publishers and really, you know, top-selling books in our service that are not available in Kindle Unlimited. We have, you know, a huge selection of audiobooks that are available on a limited basis in our service that are not available in Kindle Unlimited. You know, we have all these premium magazines. We also have all of this user-generated content. So it's really just a totally different set of content with a really focus on, like, the top premium content. So we're really the only subscription service in the world that has all these top books in a subscription. And then on top of that, I'd say we've just— really worked hard to build a really unique product experience, right? I mean, as a company, we're really focused on reading and on the subscription experience, and we're just focused on building really good recommendations, a really engaging experience, a really good discovery experience, and I think our product has become really differentiated from anything else out there on the market.
That's true. I've used Scribd, and if you dive deep into a topic like entrepreneurship, it'll show you books Audiobooks, newspaper articles, so you could actually dive deep into a topic. And that's particularly—
I like your pitch. That's good. Yeah.
There you go. 30-day free trial if you go to scribd.com. Yep.
