Aussie PDF developer prepares to tackle Adobe

Angus Kidman
Tuesday, 02 March 2010 09:44

IT Industry - Market

Australian PDF software developer Nitro PDF is planning on a combination of a 'freemium' software marketing plan and an expanded channel presence to help it eat into Adobe's dominant market share for PDF creation and management software.

"We're going after Adobe," CEO Sam Chandler told iTWire at the company's San Francisco office, where its headquarters shifted in early 2009. "We're very confident that we can build a big sustainable business here."

While Nitro Pro has been on the market since 2005, sales have grown rapidly since Chandler took over the CEO role in 2007 and began pushing the 'freemium' strategy, which uses free single-purpose downloads and web services to promote its more comprehensive paid offering.

"Revenue had been growing prior to that but because we had been competing with the behemoth that is Adobe, it was very hard to cut through," Chandler said. "But when we started acquiring and launching free PDF software, we found that this traffic could be migrated to Nitro Pro, in much the same way that Acrobat has been marketed by Adobe Reader all this time." Its PDF Download browser extension has been downloaded more than 16 million times.

"We tend to release things in private betas and send a bunch of invitations through well-known and popular blogs," Chandler said. "It's just a really passionate engaged crowd. It's become our model for releasing and marketing."

For the paid Nitro PDF product, staying below Adobe's price point for Acrobat and aiming at mid-sized companies has been the main aim. "Companies with hundreds of employees expect some sort of scale-based volume discount, but won't get a look in from Adobe; they just don't care," Chandler said.