Bob Young对lulu.com的愿景

Bonjour and hello from Bob Young, CEO and founder of Lulu.com
Lulu is not only revolulutionary, but we are undergoing a revolulution ourselves. In the coming weeks I’ll be posting some exciting news about our dramatic new release, we’re calling “Lulu 2.0”. But I thought I should start by explaining what is remaining the same at Lulu because of the founding principles of our business.
Lulu is founded on a couple of simple concepts. The first is the Internet’s unique feature - it connects everyone to everyone else. The other is that creators need to be paid for the work they create if they are going to create more and better works.
Lulu was created to empower a new generation of content producers, authors, photographers, musicians, and educators. Our goal is to help you bring your work to your audience whether it is a photo book for your family reunion, or a series of sophisticated professional training videos and manuals for you company’s new products. Taking advantage of the Internet’s unique feature, we figured we could build a set of tools that would enable you to better serve the audience for your work, whether that audience is your extended family, your school, your company, or your customers.
The other founding concept behind Lulu’s success is to help you get paid for your work. So whether you just need to be compensated for the cost of printing and shipping your family history to family members around the world. Or your goal might be to make a living writing novels or poetry. Or you might be trying to build a business teaching technology to your global customers. In all these cases and many many more, Lulu is building tools to enable you to successfully serve your customers. So features of Lulu, such as our commitment to leave you with full control and ownership of all your rights in the content you have created are not a benevolent act on our part. It is simply a necessary part of our goal, namely to empower creators to create millions of unique and valuable pieces of content for your audiences. This simple goal also explains why we work so hard and take so many chances to improve Lulu.
Our business model is almost the exact reverse of the existing publishing industries. Which is a big part of why they don’t have to worry too much about us. Where they would love nothing better than to get their stable of authors, or musicians, ie creators, down to say just 10. And then have those 10 creators produce a new work every year and sell a million copies, resulting in sales of ten million copies.
Lulu is looking to create the reverse – we want to create a million, or ten million, or a hundred million authors. Whether you publish and sell a few copies, or a few thousand copies or more, it still adds up to a lot of copies of your works.
To be precise Lulu now hosts over a million and a half registered users. Over 300,000 authors have created over a half million works that are available on Lulu already. All these numbers are growing at over 10% per month! This scale of success will enable us to continue to expand the scale and quality of the services we can offer to you, your readers, your audience, and your customers.
Our site had better continue improving if we are both going to keep making you happier and happier with our service. And to look after the millions of new creators you keep recommending to Lulu.
Next week I’ll discuss some of the cool new tools our engineers and designers have unveiled with the recent launch of Lulu 2.0.
Until then, let me know what you think about Lulu 2.0 so far by sending me your comments to askbob@lulu.com
Cheers, Bob. 来源