Celebrity business development tips: Bob Young on Lulu.com
Online entrepreneur Bob Young tells the story of how, after the business success of RedHat, he went on to create Lulu.com:
We started Lulu after I left Red Hat in order to serve what we felt was an unmet need which was simply that the unique element of the internet is that it connects every single person on the planet to every other person on the planet. So sites like Ebay were doing a brilliant job of helping people sell things to each other. But what didn’t exist at the time was the ability to sell your creations to each other. So books and music and videos are very different from physical objects, because I sell you my video I still have my video to sell to the next person. If I sell you my car I no longer have a car. So they are very fundamentally different concepts and Lulu was set up to create a marketplace for digital content.
To a certain extent we set this up without any clue as to what our customers were actually going to use it for. Because it’s up to them to figure out how to use our tool to serve their customers. So whether it is Accounting in Austria or whether it is Rolex watch accountants or whether it is bad poetry, we have to Lulu in that half a million published titles. We have a lot of poetry books because there are a lot of aspiring poets who can’t get publishing contracts, as you might expect. So with a perfectly straight face without exaggerating at all I can safely say that Lulu owns the biggest suppository of bad poetry anywhere in the planet, but again my definition of bad poetry might not be yours or some other reader.
We cover religious books, we cover accountant books, we cover bad poetry and we cover adventure stories. It is whatever either the business or the individual. And here’s the other interesting piece is Lulu doesn’t differentiate between the individual author and the corporation because at the end of the day they are both authors. So Disney Corporation has all sorts of content that they want to sell to their audience. Or lets pick another one, the NBA wants to reach out to their fans so they have content that they spend millions of dollars producing and they have millions of users, how do they connect the two. They can publish their content on Lulu, they keep 80 percent of their profit of publishing that content and Lulu makes that content available to NBA fans around the world.
