Mr. Soveran says some of these capabilities set Mygazines apart from its digital publishing competitors, though he adds that some online apps, such as Google’s analytic tools, can do more.
Another key to the company’s success has been pricing strategy. At first, Mr. Frisch says, Mygazines approached pricing the same way most of its competitors did: Customers paid by the page or by the document. There were discounts for larger volumes.
That complicated things, Mr. Frisch says, because prospective clients were trying to get multiple departments together to get higher volumes and hence the best rates.
So Mygazines took a different approach – charging by the month. A basic package for publishers, including five publications and a total of 750,000 page views, is $299 monthly. For corporate clients that produce more documents, a starter package of 50 publications with a million page views costs $1,000.
The prices work out to less than Mygazines was charging before, Mr. Frisch says, but the simpler pricing plan accelerates the sales cycle. “The one word that people kept saying was that it was a no-brainer item to look at,” he says. Further, this model encourages customers to use the service more.
There have been challenges. “Starting a business in 2008 ... was not an easy task,” Mr. Schwartz says. Mygazines started with angel investment from friends and family, then did a first round of seed financing early in 2008 to launch the initial commercial product, with another round of financing early this year.
Explaining digital publishing to people used to traditional printing was tricky, too. Part of the answer lay in hiring “digital-publishing believers,” Mr. Schwartz says. Using webinar technology such as Cisco Systems Inc.’s WebEx for visual demonstrations has helped as well. “Once they pay attention for the first 10 minutes,” Mr. Frisch says, “that half-hour meeting that they’ve set aside quite often turns into an hour-and-a-half meeting because they start asking more and more questions.”
Today the company has 12 full-time employees and a handful of part-time developers, all in Toronto. More than half its business is in Canada, but Mr. Schwartz says there are also quite a few customers in the United States and the company is doing business as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.
