NYT: That Long, Long Road From Idea to Success

By Vindu Goel

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. (more)