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The Growth Tactic Lumin has Used to Reach 75 Million Users

+ small business loans, PDF editing, and New Zealand Tech Companies

Author

Rhys Jeffery
January 25th, 2023

How A Kiwi PDF Editor Just Hit 75 Million Users, Lumin.

Lumin, a kiwi born and bred cloud-based PDF editor, has just crossed 75 million users. Their user base is 15x the entire population of New Zealand.

Lumin won by hitching their wagon to the behemoth working platform Google. Right-click on a PDF you've saved in your Gdrive, and the editing tool google suggests you use is Lumin.

It's hard to lose when Google has your back.

But there were more than a few PDF editors around when Lumin arrived. They took first mover advantage by building cloud-first rather than desktop-first (which the incumbent players were focused on at the time).

You see this story playing out all the time.

Any industry, vertical etc.. that has been operating as status quo for more than a decade is ripe for disruption.

Our Take

Ignoring the goat in the room, i.e. buddying up with google. Lumin executed incredibly well on the freemium model.

Their free version, which gives you a couple of free edits a month, is the gateway drug to their paid version.

The trick to making freemium work is giving away just enough value to make you want to come begging back for more.

Businesses mess up the freemium model by trying to give away as little as possible - but that's silly because they're not letting people know what they're missing out on.

Reducing Small Business Loan Re-Payments by 66%

Business lending isn't exactly a hot topic at the entrepreneurial water cooler - But here's something your bottom line might want to know about.

Most companies were lucky enough to make do with wage subsidies and low-interest-rate government loans during the Covid lockdowns, but not everyone got off so light.

The less fortunate had to go hand in pocket to their banks or, worse yet, the business version of pay-day lenders. And the interest rates on some of those loans were astronomical - we're talking 20%+.

That's where Spinach comes in - a fresh-on-the-scene (2018) business finance broker helping hundreds of SMBs deal with their Covid loan hangovers.

We had no idea there was such a thing until we met Jemma (Director of Spinach) a few weeks back.

Basically, Spinach reviews your numbers and then gets you the best finance terms possible for your situation - similar to how mortgage brokers work.

Just last week, Jemma helped a hospitality (they got smoked by Covid lockdowns and took on a high-interest rate loan) business reduce their business loans interest rate by 12% and stretch out their repayment period by a couple of years.

The outcome? they reduced their weekly loan repayments from $990 per week to $320 per week…. Crazy.

Our Take

While we haven't shopped with Jemma so we can't personally recommend her. If you have business debt, a conversation couldn't hurt, right?

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