Joe Hyrkin

“I should just say I'm no longer the CEO of Issuu. I was the CEO of Issuu for eleven years eleven and a half years. And we got acquired by Bending Spoons at the end of July.”

“profitable growing north of 30,000,000 in revenue. Good business. Huge number of really happy customers with a million free customers a year, marketers, content creators, 65,000 of them paying Issuu. And we had gotten some inbound interest. And once we got that inbound interest we started talking to folks on the market.”

“The point of it is like we got through it and it didn't actually hurt the business, but it's a distraction, you know, and one of the things that I focus on as a CEO is CEO's main job is to limit distractions.”

“We spent three months really digging into the business. What were the core things that we needed to be looking at? What were the ways in which we needed to innovate around the product? What were the areas that we needed to streamline around our initiatives and around innovation?”

“Freemium companies often give away too much and always trying to test what are the right things to include in the free product as opposed to the paid product. And so we started to really align the value that we're delivering with what we were charging for and began to identify a couple of aspects in the product that we had been giving away for free and we began to experiment with how to incorporate those into the paid plan.”

“Profitability and revenue in general is really a proxy for the value that you're delivering. If you're able to think about this from a perspective of delivering value, then of course you ought to be profitable because the businesses that you're providing tools and services to are finding so much use and so much value from what you're doing that they're willing to pay and they wanna be in a position where you have an ongoing profitable concern.”