That Long, Long Road From Idea to Success
By VINDU GOEL
New York Times
Published: July 4, 2009
SAVE paper, save ink, save money, save the planet. Marketing doesn’t get any better than that.
When Hayden Hamilton and James Kellerman started batting around the idea for their printing software in May 2005, it seemed that simple and brilliant.
Roughly one out of five pages that people print are wasted — the stray lines at the end of a Web document, the boilerplate at the bottom of an airline e-ticket, the endless PowerPoint slides before the page with the important conclusions.
Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Kellerman wanted to create software that would make it easy to eliminate the junk: When users hit “print,” a preview of the document would pop up and allow them to quickly choose which pages they really wanted.
Four years later, the two men and the company they founded, GreenPrint Technologies, are still struggling. About 168,000 people have tried the company’s free consumer version, but only about 25,000 are using it on any given workday, by the company’s estimate. Corporations, the gold mine for software like this, have been reluctant to buy it until GreenPrint worked out a host of technical issues.
“It’s more difficult than you’d think it would be,” said Mr. Hamilton, chief executive of the start-up, which is based in Portland, Ore. “We had zero insight into what challenges would be in place for an organization of 50,000 users.”
GreenPrint’s travails are all too common for small technology companies. “The gulf between invention and innovation is often a huge one that many entrepreneurs can’t cross,” said Scott D. Anthony, president of Innosight, a consulting firm.
In other words, it’s not easy to turn a bright idea into a genuine business.
GreenPrint might finally hit its stride with Version 2 of its software. The updated consumer software was released last month (downloadable versions are at www.printgreener.com), and the corporate version is due in a few weeks.
The new software is faster and offers network administrators more reports on who’s printing what and how much money a company is saving. GreenPrint has already landed one big customer — an Asian conglomerate that ordered 50,000 licenses — and says that several more are interested, including the HSBC Group, the big banking company.
But if the past four years have taught GreenPrint anything, it’s that progress can be slow.
Mr. Kellerman, the chief technical officer at GreenPrint, said the company had listened closely to early customers, like the International Finance Corporation, a unit of the World Bank Group.
I.F.C. tested the original version of the software with about 190 people. The verdict was that it was too slow and choked on large documents like PowerPoints. A lot of users turned it off.
“It was preventing them from doing work they needed to get done,” said Sarah Raposa, who runs I.F.C.’s internal sustainability program.
MR. KELLERMAN said GreenPrint hadn’t realized how hard it would be to create a universal “translator” that could handle every application and printer. Ultimately, GreenPrint had to overhaul the entire software engine, switching to Microsoft’s XPS document standard, which is tuned to run especially fast in Windows Vista and the coming Windows 7.
In the meantime, the environmental consciousness that prompted I.F.C. and other early users to support GreenPrint has become commonplace.
GreenPrint’s biggest deal so far is with Xerox, which has distributed 150,000 copies of the software with its line of solid-ink printers as part of a broad, eco-friendly marketing campaign. “It increases the ‘reduce waste’ message,” said Deb Koehler, director of sustainability of the Xerox Office Group.
Ms. Koehler said that Xerox had been patient with the 28-person start-up. Despite the initial sluggishness of the software, “we also had a lot of feedback that if someone really cares about reducing the waste, it’s worth the wait.”
It may be worth the money, too. GreenPrint says its software, which costs about $70 per corporate user, will shave an average of 17 percent from the cost of paper and ink — about $100 annually for a typical employee printing 10,000 pages at 6 cents a page. In the case of Savills, a British real estate brokerage firm whose agents briefly tested the software, the projected savings were more than $800 per user a year, GreenPrint said.
With that kind of money at stake, a successful GreenPrint could nip at the profits of the big printer makers, like Hewlett-Packard and Canon.
H.P., the leading maker of printers, makes a 40 percent operating profit on ink, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. As a result, H.P. is trying to bolster, not reduce, consumption of printer ink, which costs customers $40 to $80 an ounce (making Dom Pérignon Champagne look cheap at about $5 an ounce).
“We’re seeing this explosion of digital content,” said Stacey Wueste, a vice president for environmental strategy in the imaging and printing group of H.P. “That all drives a set of printable opportunities we didn’t have a few years ago.”
H.P. deflects talk about the cost of ink, preferring to discuss carbon footprints. The company has directed its conservation efforts toward cutting the energy used by its printers, recycling ink and toner cartridges and making it easier for machines to print on both sides of a sheet.
As GreenPrint tries to establish its niche among the giants, its attitude is promising, said Mr. Anthony, who is also author of “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times.”
“You see again and again the companies that succeed are not the ones that have the brilliant strategy,” he said, “but the ones that course-correct along the way.”
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