Lob is disrupting the Printing Industry- one Poster at a time!

In a world where even Print Service Providers sometimes question whether the printed piece has the compelling power it once did, a two month old Silicon Valley startup is achieving success by making (gasp!) paper-based, physical products-- albeit selling them via the most modern of programming techniques.

After graduating from the University of Michigan, and stints on Wall Street, and at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, Leore Avidar and Harry Zhang founded their company Lob, and were accepted into the well-respected startup accelerator program at Y Combinator just a matter of weeks ago—and they are already generating revenue from their service at a fast pace of growth.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that among my favorite topics are cloud printing, integration and automation, so as soon as I heard about Lob I needed to know more about the founders, their idea, and plans. Lob specifically refers to themselves as "Cloud Printing for Developers".  I love it. I sent Leore an email, and we spent a few minutes discussing the company and their approach. 

The concept and execution are both compelling. They created the service as a solution for software developers who want to include printing and distribution capabilities with their web/mobile applications. Without Lob, this is hard to do, and expensive.  With Lob, it’s easy and priced competitively.

In terms of startups who work with Y-Combinator, Lob is one of the youngest companies. Their idea was to expose printing to developers via an API (Application Programming Interface).  It took them a week to develop the initial alpha API, and then immediately got started working with customers.

The technical challenges were one thing, but getting familiar with printing industry jargon, paper and ink choices, etc. also presented challenges. Lob initially produced their products with their own desktop printers. Now, the company manufactures and distributes through a network of printing partners to whom they route the jobs.  Many of their print partners are good at printing and reliable delivering on time, but don’t understand how APIs work, and don’t have programmers.  For such partners, Lob translates the order instructions for the job and delivery into human readable form, or helps the printer develop the integration.

Their first printed product idea was transactional mail—financial statements, bills, etc.  Almost as soon as they engaged with customers, they started hearing new use cases. So they turned their attention to other printed items. Turns out, other products were more desirable. Because they are an agile Silicon Valley startup, and using their API, they can create new products of virtually any shape and size, from the ground up, quickly.

Brace yourself: according to Leore, physical mail is making a comeback: open rates are up.  Email open rates are down. His customers want to engage with users via physical mail… when they buy a product or reach a certain milestone. I almost fell off my chair—I thought to myself, “I know this… what’s wrong with all the naysayers in this industry?”

And as it turns out, there are a couple of things wrong with the printing process, from a customer standpoint, that Lob is addressing nicely.  Print automation and personalization are really hard for people outside this industry. When Harry worked at Microsoft, he had a project where he needed to send a large number of printed pieces, each personalized with information about products, and each to be delivered to a different address.  As many have found before him, when it came time to have them printed and mailed, there was no good way to do this… and service providers were expensive. Instead, Harry himself and colleagues spent untold hours printing, addressing, stuffing and mailing the envelopes. So the idea for Lob was born.

Other product ideas soon flowed. According to Leore, posters are “killing it.”  And this certainly shouldn’t be news to most Printers-- on demand posters, sold on a partner’s website, with no inventory required, shipped directly to the ordering customer… are a money maker.

As the startup culture requires, a prospective customers simply reads the documentation for the company’s REST API, at https://www.lob.com/docs, then signs up and orders an item sent to their self.  Almost immediately, most such customers start running batches of real work for their own customers. Not surprisingly at least for now, many of the company’s customers are other Silicon Valley startups—who begin with small quantities of print, then grow their business. LOB has grown with them. It’s a great market and Lob knows where startups hang out.

In their very short existence, Lob already has hundreds of customers and is generating revenue, the founders say.  With an innovative idea and a great technical approach, along with great energy and passion, it’s going to be very exciting to watch their evolution.  I can hardly wait to see what they are doing a few months from now—it’s bound to be a great story.

Workflow Renaissance

Workflow has been an important topic in the Graphic Communications business since there has been "technology" involved. The modern definition of workflow kicked into high gear as desktop publishing came into commercial use.  Then it really became essential when Print Service Providers (PSPs) adopted Computer to Plate (CTP) in the late 1990s. 

So it's kind of fascinating that today, there is a workflow renaissance going on.  It's really interesting because it's primarily driven by print service provider needs that focus on making vendor equipment more efficient.  These demands have always been present, but because they didn't gate the hardware sale for the press maker, nor did satisfying them differentiate a particular vendor company from its competition, they were not top of mind for anyone. 

That has changed, for a number of reasons.  

First, Web-To-Print is maturing, and many more PSPs need super efficient workflows to handle the high volume of extremely short run work. Second, presses are bigger and faster, as well as more expensive.  So PSPs ramp up sales efforts to increase equipment utilization, to pay the press bills.  To make money, labor expenses (and as a result, craft), must be kept at a minimum and workflow software is the only answer.

The demands from PSPs are frankly greater than what most vendors are delivering. With some great exceptions, many of the workflow solutions in the market today can be considered "legacy software".
Two of the brightest exceptions today are HP SmartStream Production Center, and Enfocus' Switch line of products, which we aren't going to go into in detail here, but may in a future post.

Instead, for the moment, let's think about some of the things vendors need to address to take workflow to the next level, and satisfy the emerging requirements of PSPs for the next few years. I'm probably going to write some discrete posts on some of these topics in the future, too.

- Sell software standalone vs. bundling with hardware. 

- Make workflow software work well with other people's equipment, including competitor equipment.

- Package and describe workflow software in bite size pieces that directly address the MOST IMPORTANT customer/users needs directly. 

- Make the existing software modern with user interface enhancements.  Software that runs on Windows will soon benefit from the "Metro" interface.  Some of the interfaces of industry software just look horrible, and users have become accustomed to new, beautiful web interfaces they use in their life outside of work.

- Make workflow a sexy part of the print production story, with giant screens, visualization and data elements, ala Landa and HP Production Center.  

- One of the coolest things about the Landa launch was the Tablet device from which the operator could control 3 presses

- Appropriate parts of Workflow software should run in browsers, and even smartphones. Handheld devices are incredibly valuable for managing a large and busy production floor.  They are good for a small and busy production floor, too.

- Touchscreens everywhere appropriate. Command line interfaces are still important for the tech nerds, though. 

- Rule based automation should be defined either graphically, or by writing code, depending on how complex the rules, and how sophisticated the user.

- Run the workflow software in the Cloud, delivering it as a set of services at tiered monthly subscription fees. If Adobe can do it with Creative Suite, it can be done with workflow software, too.

- Larger customers today are far less concerned about whether something runs on a particular piece of hardware.  Smaller customers would also likely gravitate toward the subscription model. 

- Create better and more integration with MIS and Web-To-Print systems.

- Create better ways for customers to solve each other's problems and let customers enhance the software, ala Enfocus Crossroads-World community website. 

- Add "cross-media" or marketing services stuff, where it directly benefits the PSP strategy to drive pages and profits.

- Help PSPs show how print complements email--  which for a younger audience with money to spend today is important (i.e., not how email or "cross media" complements print-- that's a message from yesterday.)

- Increasingly, the assets customers use to create printed materials are stored in the cloud.  Workflow systems need to be able to reach into those systems (via APIs), and consume the assets to make print jobs.

In summary, we're talking about a whole new generation of print production workflow.  It takes into account the new environment PSPs are operating in. It makes it so employees (especially those new to the industry) will want to become or stay involved in print production.  It makes the company profitable, efficient and competitive. It remains to be seen whether this will be delivered by the existing vendors, or by the new vendors... but one thing is certain, it will happen!