Our journey: We had the best year ever. And still the best year is yet to come

2019 is about to end. publica.la’s second year is about to end. Or even better: publica.la’s third year is about to begin.

As we get ready to wrap up a very intense year where we had lots of ups but also some downs, where we have exceeded some of our goals and failed to reach others. But more importantly this year we learned a lot. And I believe building a company is about constantly failing, learning from that and therefore improving your product, your service and yourself.

I wanted to share some of our progress and lessons learned this 2019 and also talk about where are we heading next year.

Here’s the first landing I designed while working from Pittsburgh.

Let’s start with some numbers

We started 2019 with a very different (and delicate) situation than now:

• 4 people on the team (including Franco and me)
• $8,000 of MRR
• 24 customers
• And we had about $1,000 on the Bank Account

We were, of course, worried but at the same time we understood 28 customers were relying on us to run a big portion of their business and we were never going to let them down.

That was always (and still is) our motivation: Serving our customers, regardless of their size, the best way we can. I will always be grateful for every person and company that trusted us with their business. At the end of the day we do what we do for them and I’m honored when they choose us (knowing there are other good options out there).

2019 is about to end, and thankfully we can say now we’re in a completely different position:

• 11 people are working full time on the team (that’s a 175% increase!)
• $22,000 of MRR (that’s a 163% increase!)
• 55 customers (that’s a 130% increase!)

Some other numbers about publica.la’s 2019:

• I lived in 3 different countries
• I took over 50 flights
• I drank more than 1,200 cups of coffee (seriously)
• We had over 720,000 minutes of video calls (yep that’s 500 days)

Ups and downs

We sure had a lot of downs, but because it’s the end of the year and my birthday is close I’m gonna focus on the ups :D

1. Start-Up Chile: We were selected to participate in a top accelerator from Chile, where we were able to develop the company with the help of amazing people from the accelerator (Chile is now our third most important market!) and more importantly we met amazing entrepreneurs and colleagues and we built relationships that will last forever. To conclude this amazing journey Franco rocked his pitch presentation and we were selected to present in Start-Up Chile’s Demo Day!

Franco and some of the amazing entrepreneurs we met in Chile

2. Innovation in Digital Publishing Award: We received an award for “Innovation in the Digital Publishing Industry”

We received an Award for Innovation on the Digital Publishing Industry

So what’s next for us?

If you know me you know I’m not good at handling anxiety and 2020 looks so great that I cannot wait for it to begin!

We have managed to finally build a scalable sales team and we are more ready than ever to spread the voice, expand our market share in Latam and reach new markets.

The path won’t be easy, we have very ambitious goals but we have the right team and I’m sure we will succeed.

Product wise we’re launching two new products that will represent more service and new markets for us:

• Marketplace: We want to build an ecosystem that empowers not only publishers-readers relationships but also publishers-publishers and publishers-libraries/universities/schools relationships. For that we’re building a product that will allow any digital library created using publica.la to share their content between each other or to choose from our own inventory of millions of ebooks.
• Repository: Another thing we learned during 2019 is how important is scholarly content and shareability in the academic world. And we want to do something about it, that’s why we’re launching a new version of publica.la to allow Educational Institutions to build their own “digital repository” using industry standards like OAI-PMH, cross-citation, etc

With this we hope to help more companies to achieve their goals regarding digital publishing.

Sales wise we’re expanding the team and aiming to a very ambitious goal (and I’m so sure we can do it, I’m sharing it here):

• We’re expanding the team with more local Sales Managers to keep delivering world class service with a local touch. In the coming days we’ll share some openings we have for the team but if you have someone in mind please send her along!
• We’re aiming to grow 260% next year with the new products and the expansion of the team. That means we’re aiming to reach $1MM in ARR by the end of 2020. Yes, we’ll need coffee.
• We’re going to launch a new plan based on revenue share. Another lesson from 2019: Not every publisher or company is ready or willing to pay upfront and our mission is not to get richer and richer but to help them improve their digital readerships and succeed. That’s why we’re going to launch a fully revenue share plan where our customers will only pay based on how much they’ve sold, no upfront, no commitments, no constraints.

Conclusions

Honestly there’s a lot more we plan to do, but let me keep some surprises for ourselves. I promise I’ll share them with y’all as soon as we’re ready.

I can’t emphasize enough how thankful I am for the year we had, particularly to each one of our customers, to our team, advisors, investors and other entrepreneurs we met along the way.

They make everything worth it.

Onwards to our new best year!