Product People

Imagine this: you build a product that you’re passionate about. To demonstrate it’s capabilities, you create a demo that attracts the attention of the New York Times legal department; who promptly send you a cease and desist letter. That’s exactly what happened to Cody Brown and his team at ScrollKit.

Show Notes

Imagine this: you build a product that you’re passionate about. To demonstrate it’s capabilities, you create a demo that attracts the attention of the New York Times legal department; who promptly send you a cease and desist letter. That’s exactly what happened to Cody Brown and his team at ScrollKit.

Highlights
  • “Scrollkit is a way to create powerful visual stories on the web.”
  • “We’re trying to bring what you can do in print, to the web.”
  • “A kid will intuitively understand what to do when you give them some crayons. But if you slid ‘WordPress’ over to them, they’d probably be confused.”
  • “Our biggest cost is salaries: we’re paying ourselves low ‘founders’ salaries right now. The only other big cost is Heroku.”
  • “We used ScrollKit to re-create Snowfall in an hour.”
  • “Time Magazine loved our replica: they invited us to their corporate headquarters.”
Show notes
Premium Sponsors
  • Sprint.ly – Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter:  @sprintly
  • WPengine – Are you frustrated with your current web host provider? A few years ago I was looking to switch from my current cheap host to something more robust: but trying to search online for hosting providers is a nightmare (there’s so much spam in the search results). Then Rob Walling recommended  WPengine. I’ve been with them ever since. If you’re looking for dedicated WordPress hosting, that can handle huge traffic spikes (like 40,000 visits in a day), is lightning fast, and has great support I highlight recommend them.  Click here to get up to 2 months free.
Shout outs

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

Creators and Guests

Host
Justin Jackson
⚡ Bootstrapping, podcasting, calm companies, business ethics. Co-founder of Transistor.fm

What is Product People?

A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them

Speaker 1:

Hey, it's Justin from Product People. Imagine you've built a product that you're passionate about and to demonstrate its capabilities you create a demo that attracts the attention of the New York Times legal department. They promptly send you a cease and desist letter. What do you do next? That's what's on the show today.

Speaker 1:

Cody Brown is gonna tell us about his experience with ScrollKit. First, I want to tell you about some great sponsors. Sprint.ly has been with us since the beginning. Their web app is the best way to manage the software development process. It's agile project management that works.

Speaker 1:

You and your team can try Sprintly for free by going to www.sprint.ly. We have another premium sponsorship slot available. If you want us to represent your product every week on our podcast Twitter, and our website. Visit productpeople.tvsponsors. Now, let's get to our interview with Cody Brown.

Speaker 2:

Hi, I'm Justin and this is Product People, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. And today we have Cody Brown on the show. He's the co founder of Scroll Kit and he recently found himself going head to head with the New York Times. Hey Cody, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:

Thank you Justin for having me.

Speaker 2:

Well it's good to have you. Now let's start, first tell me a little bit about yourself. Where do you live? What's your your background?

Speaker 3:

Sure. I'm from originally from Colorado. I live in Brooklyn. My background is actually filmmaking. I spent years, like twelve through nineteen of my life practicing my Academy Award acceptance speech.

Speaker 3:

But when I when I got to film school, I just got quickly obsessed with the Internet. And here we are.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. What How did you transition from film to the web? What was Was there a specific point, or is that just something that happened gradually?

Speaker 4:

Sure.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I pursue both interests sometimes, you know, at the at the same time. Mhmm. I The the web has a lot lot in common with film. And that film is a a kind of synthesis of a lot of different types of media. You have photography, you have sound, you have music, all of it coming together.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. And on the internet and and in the browser, you have that massively. You can combine photography, music, and all those things, but you have this kind of interactive element. So in some sense, you can see the browser as a continuation of film in some ways, but there's even more media inside of it to play with.

Speaker 2:

That's right. That's right. And this is probably a good segue to the the product you've you've created. You're the co founder of a company called Scroll Kit, and that's the name of your product as well. What's the the story behind it?

Speaker 3:

Sure. Scroll Kit is a way to create powerful visual stories on the web. Scroll Kit is a company started because doing this is really expensive and or requires you to know how to code at a pretty high level. Mhmm. So, we wanted to massively increase the number of people who were capable of telling these pretty powerful stories on the web.

Speaker 3:

ScrollCut as a product is our attempt to do that.

Speaker 2:

And what was the impetus to do that? Like what was there something that happened that you felt like we've got to do this and how did you meet your co founder? What was kind of the genesis of the company?

Speaker 3:

Sure. Well, it's funny because we take advantage of a lot of, you know, very new browser technologies in order for the product to work.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

But you could think of ScrollKit as actually doing something pretty old and obvious, which is what you've been able to do in print for a long time. Which is you can say like, oh, I wanna like change the page in this way. I want to move this there. So I want to be able to do that. That was somewhat of an inspiration for building the product itself.

Speaker 3:

Was that it wasn't as It was very, very difficult to do those kind of obvious moves when you're on the web. I met my co founder while we were both in college at NYU. Okay. And we were just friends there and started working together. And

Speaker 2:

did you Is this company bootstrapped or did you take some funding?

Speaker 3:

We got some seed funding a little while ago, a couple years ago.

Speaker 2:

Okay. And the company's been around for a couple years now?

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So you've been working, because a lot of people may have just heard of ScrollKit recently, you've been working on product for a while.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So Kate, is my co founder, we've been working on projects together since we graduated college. Not all of them have been ScrollKit. We've worked on a a couple of projects in the media tech space. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

This is our latest one.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. And now and people can check this out. You actually have a live demo on the ScrollKit website and I was just playing around with it and it is interesting because really for a long time there's been kind of a print paradigm that was kind of carried over into print software where you could lay things out as if it was a page and you had kind of pixel, exact pixel control over where things were. Could kind of drag them around on the screen and do that. And then there was the web publishing paradigm which, like you said, it was a lot different.

Speaker 2:

It was kind of anchored in code and was you know you can only do so much and definitely didn't have that same sense of control. But this thing that you've created like I was just trying it out and it feels like laying something out on a page. Can you tell me a bit about what's behind that, especially the UI and design choices you've made there?

Speaker 4:

Sure.

Speaker 3:

What you just described is very much our inspiration for this. The reason that paradigm is old is because it's the most natural. A kid will intuitively understand what to do when you slide them over a piece of paper. Mhmm. And give them some crayons.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

But, you know, if you slide over WordPress to them, they may be a little more confused. Mhmm. So a ton of inspiration for Scroll Kit was about how can we make this kind of this advanced publishing a lot more natural. And the way we do that is that we restore this basic metaphor in their mind for how this should work. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

So a distinguishing aspect Two distinguishing aspects of of ScrollKit is that we focus directly on a single page at

Speaker 4:

a time.

Speaker 3:

You could think of this as a constraint. We we don't have interface for adding multiple pages like Dreamweaver or something like that. Yeah. We focus purely on this single page experience. And we think that inevitably makes things a lot more simple for users.

Speaker 3:

The second thing, as you mentioned, is that you have pixel level control over the whole page. So if you wanted to, you can actually just draw on the page. You can draw over text. You can draw over images. And that's something that we'd really That goes against a lot of people's understanding of how web publishing technology works.

Speaker 2:

You That's

Speaker 3:

can't make those kind of moves previously. So That's right.

Speaker 2:

Like everything's supposed to be rigid and in its own little box.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Yeah. So so in some sense, we we want to move away from like so much web publishing is just about filling in text boxes.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And we want to move that to a Canvas model. So, like, box to Canvas is, in some sense, how we're thinking about this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I mean, think a lot of people have tried to solve this problem. And, you know, I think so many people have tried and failed that now kind of the overriding kind of feeling on the web is no, all we have to do is code in like a text editor and you see what's going on or you know if it's like a content management system you fill out forms on the back end and then you click publish and then you can see what it looks like on the front end. How did you solve these technical problems? Have you restricted this to browsers that can support HTML5?

Speaker 2:

What were some of the technical challenges with building this?

Speaker 4:

Sure. A lot of what we did was take advantage of cutting edge browser technologies and make them accessible to people. To answer this question to some degree, could back up a little bit, and talk about Flash.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah.

Speaker 4:

So Flash was responsible for so much of this kind of, this, you know, interactive, more cinematic style

Speaker 3:

websites back But

Speaker 4:

Apple and Steve Jobs destroyed Flash with, you know, the iPhone and the iPad iOS. And pretty much, in doing so, single handedly set back the internet for, this kind of experience on the internet for a number of years. Mhmm. It's only recently with HTML5 and Canvas and a lot

Speaker 3:

of new technologies that we're able to take some of

Speaker 4:

that back and do it in a way so that wouldn't, you know, that when you do it, it will actually work on the iPhone and the iPad.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

You know there's definitely two sides to this because there's some purists out there would say you know obviously like in the web community now flash is kind of like a joke. But on the other hand you do have creative people or even if you've ever had to teach someone how to use a content management system for the first time you can see that they intuitively want that kind of control. That I just want to draw or I just want to move this thing here. But yeah, you're right. On the web today we often don't think that way.

Speaker 2:

Just kind of stuck in this one model. Will ScrollKit work in every browser or are there some restrictions right now?

Speaker 4:

The editor works in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Speaker 4:

We focus a lot of

Speaker 3:

our efforts and depth to Chrome first. We're we're a three person team, so we can't hit you know, be compatible with everybody.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. But ScrollKit itself produces code that's designed to be, you know, supportable by all of the browsers.

Speaker 2:

So that the output

Speaker 4:

Except some low versions of IE. Yeah. IE can go to hell. So

Speaker 2:

the output is pretty much agnostic, but to edit these things, you're gonna need a modern browser.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Microsoft's current website looks awful in early versions of IE.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That's a good point. So how long did it take to build ScrollKit and how much did it cost? Were you guys planning on you know, making this a business from the beginning? Maybe let's get into that.

Speaker 4:

Sure. So we've been working on Skolted, the product, for about a year and a half. It's taken, you know, an incredible amount of Kate's coding ability to get to where we are. We've gone through a lot of different versions and ideas about how to do it. The editor has started out in a pretty simple way, but has, you know, gotten a lot more advanced to the point where we can make the New York Times a snowfall in about an hour, or a replica of it rather.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Speaker 4:

In terms of our business, we've pursued a lot of different options with this. We started When we first started, we saw this as a much broader consumer play, because we're like, Finally. We found the obvious way that people who are as young as seven years old can just jump in and start making a website.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

We saw that because we actually saw a lot of seven year olds on the site using it in the most adorable way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4:

But we followed that hunch to the point where we eventually were into a partnership with name.com, and once we did that, we started getting a lot of users and traffic from them, and we started to understand that you know, we give people an incredible amount of control with the ScrollKit, you know, with the ScrollKit Canvas. And the scrolls that we liked the most tended to be from people who already had an eye for design. That was, at this point, we have, you know, recently gone to a more pro designer end with that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And maybe just to back up a bit, you saw a year and a half of development, you have a three person team. Can you give us a sense of how much that costs? What does a year and a half of development with a three person team, both in terms of money, but also in terms of time? How many hours have you put in?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, well, Squirrel Kit has been our baby and our obsession for that, you know, entire amount of time. And that includes like, you know, marketing in addition to designing the product, and all the things that go with a startup. The answer to your question is in some sense, you know, you take how much salary we've paid ourselves, which in this case is, you know, a founder salary, which is very low.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

And then you multiply that by, you know, 1.5.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. So those are your biggest costs, are just

Speaker 4:

Yeah, oh my god, it's people, we pay for tools like Olark and Heroku, but that's not where a lot of the expense is. Although Heroku is really good at getting your money.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. It starts, Heroku starts off free, but then the costs go up pretty quickly.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. Can you give us

Speaker 2:

a sense of how much it costs to host the app right now on a monthly basis?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, depends. I mean, it can be anywhere between We've had some months that were like $600

Speaker 3:

which is still

Speaker 4:

relatively small, but it is certainly a taxing expense.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. And you'd mentioned the New York Times, I mentioned the New York Times in the introduction, And they had this really cool article on the web called Snowfall. But it different than anything anyone had really seen before. It was a single page, you would scroll through it and as you were scrolling through it, there's a narrative. It's telling a story in a really kind of neat interactive way.

Speaker 2:

And that got a lot of play, lot of people you know it got passed around on the web. And you decided to make a replica of Snowfall. You give us the story behind that, why you did that, and then what happened?

Speaker 4:

Doctor. Sure. We were completely thrilled when we saw Snowfall, when the New York Times published Snowfall. We were thrilled when they published it, and then we were even more thrilled by the response that it got. Snowfall generated millions and millions and millions of page views.

Speaker 4:

I think it was like 5,000,000 page views around this point. And the response on Facebook and Twitter was just people had either a new affinity for the Times or a renewed affinity for them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

This was really exciting to us because we saw this and we're like, Cool. We've been working on a tool that helps people do these kind of moves long before the New York Times started work on Snowfall.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

So it was very much a no brainer to create a replica of it. Because it was, in some sense, our tribute to them. A way of thinking about it, maybe, is that, you know, we've, at that point, spent thousands of hours coding ScrollKit, hand coding ScrollKit, so that you could make a replica of Snowfall in about an hour. Yeah. So doing that, assumed that the Times would see this more as a cool thing, as a tribute.

Speaker 4:

And then we got a cease and desist.

Speaker 2:

And what was the, the cease and desist was to take down the replica that you had on your website?

Speaker 4:

It to take down the video that we made of creating the replica, which showed our aim base for doing it. But as I said in my post about this, we understood where they were coming from in terms of their copyright argument. Like We could've seen how it could've been fair use, but we don't really have the ability to fight them But on we took down the video right away, and then this is where things get more awkward, is that they then wrote back and said that we needed to remove all references of the New York Times from our homepage.

Speaker 2:

So you could no longer say, Scroll Kit is a product that helps you make something like snowfall a couple of hours.

Speaker 4:

Right. I'm just like, Really, New York Times? At a certain point, I have a bunch of friends who are at the New York Times, and they're great. I think the New York Times legal department is on a kind of autopilot, and it does things like this. But it was important that we respond, we just asked them why.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

And that's what we did.

Speaker 2:

And you wrote a post on Medium about this that seemed to get a lot of traction. What's been the what's happened since then, since you wrote the post, both in terms of, you know, what's currently happening with the times and also did that generate additional interest for Scroll Kit?

Speaker 4:

Sure, yeah. The post on Medium really blew up. The last time I checked it, it had gotten more than 100,000 page views.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 4:

So it brought us a ton of attention, and my inbox last week was just completely crazy. And it was a lot of people. I mean, it's like to maybe the credit of the Times was Snowfall. There are a lot of other news organizations who want to produce work like that, and were inspired by it, but just have nowhere near the resources of the times to be able to do it. So this, to them, is a way to do that.

Speaker 4:

I would say that this, even to The New York Times itself, is a way for them to more rapidly put these stories together.

Speaker 2:

Like they could be using your tool and save themselves a lot of money, or actually even just create another snowfall, because they haven't done anything like that since.

Speaker 4:

They've done some things. They've done some things. But yes, no, we can help them produce these stories faster.

Speaker 2:

And so is the times, like right now is the times still kind of going after you? Like they want you to remove all of those references from Yeah. Your

Speaker 4:

So, I mean, as of today, our, so the claim in The Times went after us specifically for was the line about how it took The New York Times hundreds of hours to hand code Snowfall, and we made a record cut in an hour. That line is still there on our site. And we wrote them and asked them to know why they told us to take this down, and they didn't and like what legal grounds that they are telling us to take this down.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm.

Speaker 4:

And they responded with, you know, the letter that I posted to the site was saying like, you know, they would appreciate it.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha.

Speaker 4:

And then they were just being pics. And then they froze it. That is still there. So we're going to replace it because it's much better to have just another example than to just keep that there. Did

Speaker 2:

you have a similar response from because I remember seeing something, you did something for Time Magazine or a replica of Time Magazine. Did you have a similar response from them?

Speaker 4:

Time, when they saw that, invited Kate and I to their corporate headquarters, and someone there just spent the afternoon introducing us to the whole team.

Speaker 2:

No way.

Speaker 4:

Yes. Very much an opposite response from time. We haven't heard anything from their lawyers or anything like that. They seemed to really think it was cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So that's interesting. Two very different responses and that's interesting. And did you get a lot of interest because a lot of people wonder about that you know if I had a post that blew up and had a 100,000 views would that help Has my it helped Scroll Kit?

Speaker 4:

Hell yes. No, it's awesome. It's awesome just to get people on Scroll Kit and finding bugs for us and sending these kind of reports in, which is good. But yeah, we've had a lot more new people hear about us, and I think what's good is that we're having, a lot of people will just read the story and then start thinking about the potential of their content differently.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

Where they can think in their head like, okay, like, you know, a lot of people just have like a very big story in their head that they want to tell, and they can think about a different treatment of that content for the web. Yeah. That's the web.

Speaker 2:

And so I've read one comment on Hacker News. Jeremy Mims said, I work with hundreds of newspapers and a dozen or so have contacted me to ask how they could use ScrollKits technology. Have you been getting requests from newspapers?

Speaker 4:

Absolutely, yes.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Can you give me an idea of numbers? Like, how many newspapers are contacting you?

Speaker 4:

I don't really say a number, but I can just say like I've been living inside of my Gmail since this post.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's a bunch.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, and I can say that a lot more than I anticipated. Yeah. Hitting us up in response to this.

Speaker 2:

Okay. And what is the business model for this? Are you going to be licensing the technology? Is it going to be like a SaaS app where people can How's pay it going to work?

Speaker 4:

The business model is pretty straightforward. It's two things. It's a very straightforward software service per month that we work out on an individual basis with the publisher that we're talking to.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 4:

And then in addition to that, once they're set up with that, we we sell services to help people make scrolls sometimes. And so they can, that's something that we haven't developed as much. But yeah, once they're set up there, they can sort of buy a scroll a la carte.

Speaker 2:

Do mean buy a scroll? Like you have writers and you create content?

Speaker 4:

No, so not writers, so it's more like that they already have their idea for the story.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha.

Speaker 4:

And they have individual assets, but we have a small network of designers that can help them produce their vision.

Speaker 2:

I see. What is so do you have paying customers right now? Yes. Okay. So you you have people paying on a recurring basis for ScrollKit right now?

Speaker 2:

Yes. Okay. And right now, how, like, do you have a sense of when you might become profitable?

Speaker 4:

Hopefully soon. It will take a little while for us to find our footing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

When it comes to

Speaker 4:

profits like, you know, a lot of startups. What I'm thinking now is less about profit and more about just great use cases. Yeah. How we can accomplish those.

Speaker 2:

And what's the kind of average monthly cost? Can you give me a sense of cost? Like is are we, is this a thousand dollar a month product? Is it a $20 a month product? Is it, you know, what would most people fall into?

Speaker 4:

Mhmm. Like I said, it's on a case by case, you know, it's case by case per publisher, but it's in between 3 and 4 figures for each publisher.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Interesting. Cool. And so what's next for Scroll Kit? What are kind of your next steps?

Speaker 2:

Where are you gonna go from here?

Speaker 4:

So next steps are to continue living in my inbox, and fielding off requests and things like that. Our next steps are we're looking for, again, just great use cases, and you know, really compelling publishers with cool stories to tell. And just helping them realize their vision, and releasing awesome stories on the web. Yeah. That's pretty simple.

Speaker 4:

We're just looking, yeah, we're looking for more stories.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, cool. Well, thanks

Speaker 1:

so much for being on

Speaker 2:

the show, Cody. Where can people find out more about ScrollKit?

Speaker 4:

Scrollkit.com is a good place.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Perfect. Well, thanks again, and we'll talk again soon.

Speaker 4:

Cool. Alright. Thanks, Justin.

Speaker 1:

Well, Product People, thanks for listening to this week's episode. You can follow Cody Brown on Twitter Cody Brown. You can follow me, Justin, on Twitter at MI Justin. You can follow the show on Twitter as well at ProductPeopleTV. You can also sign up for our email newsletter.

Speaker 1:

That's productpeople.tvnewsletter. If you like the show, please give us a review in iTunes. It's as easy as searching for product people and clicking five stars. Next week, we're joined by Dan Martell of Clarity. We'll see you then.