lulu will be one plum of a client. In 2006, it printed one million books, three times as many as 2005, and five times as many as 2004. Revenues hit US$16 million in 2006, compared to US$5 million in 2005 and a mere US$1 million in 2004. Young, an entrepreneur who gained fame and riches with Red Hat, seller of software based on the Linux open-source operating system, says lulu is growing faster than any other company he’s been associated with—and he’s been involved with some pretty fast movers.
 

He made two points that are particularly important to everyone in this industry.
 

One, printing for lulu means vastly rethinking the business model most shops live by. One of the hallmarks of the site, launched in 2002, is how cheaply it can produce a book—often for less than $10. It can do this because lulu sets up custom-engineered interfaces directly with a press in a shop and, instead of sending PDFs or native files, it sends a data stream of information directly to the machine. (The press is usually an iGen because Young began this venture by talking to Xerox, which refers him to its clients.) No one looks or touches a book until it falls out of the press ready to be mailed. In fact, the print shop doesn’t even know what it’s receiving until the finished product appears. 
 

Young says he usually runs across two types of printers. One is the small, innovative shop that enthusiastically buys into the possibility of on-demand publishing and is willing to invest in the equipment. The second is the larger enterprise with more experience, but often must be educated about the potential of the technology. This type of shop assumes it can use the same processes as it does for an offset workflow: phone order, job ticket etc. Young says he has to explain that the moment someone is even aware that a job is coming through, the job becomes unprofitable.
 

Two, lulu is casting a new light on the market model of printing. Everyone—not just printers—dreams of bagging one large client or producing one blockbuster product. But Young likens this market to the visible part of the iceberg. The biggest part is what you can’t see. The publishing industry, for example, thrives on the next Harry Potter installment, or the next John Grisham novel. But there’s a huge collection of tiny markets that can add up to a market greater than any blockbuster. And technology makes it easier than ever to access those markets.

Young credits lulu’s success to ignorance of the publishing and printing markets. He says they were willing to try things that a lot of educated people said wouldn’t work, but they tried it anyway because they were too dumb to know what doesn’t work.
 

Wonder how many other dumb innovators are out there.