Graphicly is about to close a $1 million bridge round of funding, as first revealed in a regulatory filing.

The company started out as a marketplace for digital comics, but last year it launched a new set of tools aimed helping publishers distribute their content onto a wide range of platforms, including iOS, Android, and Kindle. CEO Micah Baldwin told me today that things have been taking off, with millions of dollars in annual revenue and 1500 percent growth year-over-year. (And even though it’s no longer focused exclusively on comics, it recently announced a big comics deal to distribute more than 60 Peanuts titles.)

Baldwin added that the funding is supposed to get Graphicly to profitability, which the company should reach by the middle of 2013. At that point, the startup may raise a larger Series B.

And he has other plans for 2013. Right now, he said that building a native app based on a book is an expensive process, so as an alternative, he wants to add more and more interactivity and app-like capabilities to e-books created in the Graphicly platform.

“Publishers seem to want it and desire it,” he said. “They’re stuck in this world of doing apps, which are just really expensive.”

That strategy won’t just add capabilities for existing Graphicly customers — it will also allow the company to expand into new areas. As an example, he said that quick and easy publishing of interactive e-books could dramatically change education, with students turning in their assignments in e-book format.

Baldwin said the funding comes mostly from existing investors. The company has now raised about $6 million from backers including Mercury Fund, 500 Startups, Dundee Venture Capital, Ludlow Ventures, and Venture51.

You can read more about Baldwin’s publishing strategy in this interview.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” rolls into the fall months by hosting a jack of all startup trades, someone who has founded a company (and is CEO), but who also is extremely generous with his time as an advisor, coach, and storyteller to startups.

Micah Baldwin, CEO and founder of Graphicly, not only knows a lot about books, but also where books are headed. At Graphicly, Baldwin and his team focus on building SaaS tools to help current and aspiring authors market their books through the right channels and networks, as well as navigating the revenue-share models currently used by online distributors. Whereas musicians and moviemakers initially resisted aspects of the shift to online, Baldwin believes publishers are taking a different approach, as the market for e-books is trending up and to the right, and he wants his company to build tools to help speed up and smooth out that transition.

If you’re in any way, shape, or form interested in books, reading, e-books, self-publishing, and storytelling, I’d encourage you to watch this video. In our discussion, Baldwin shares a wealth of knowledge about the self-publishing movement, key players, and market dynamics, as well how each constituent — from the story creator, the publisher, and device makers — are thinking about their incentives in this fast-growing market. This is discussion may also be useful to founders of consumer-facing startups in general, as Baldwin talks philosophically about how stories are needed to spark imagination within an audience, something that web design and engaging or persuasive copy could do. Finally, for parents of young kids who play with iPhones and iPads and spend a great deal of time playing with app games or app books, Baldwin also indirectly touches on the potential effect mobile devices and apps may have on our abilities to effectively create, absorb, and share stories.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the past few months, Graphicly started to abandon its vision of becoming the “iTunes of comics” and instead focused on digital publishing tools for comics and other image-heavy books. Today it’s fully committing itself to that strategy, shutting down the comic store apps that it offered on both iPhone and Android.

CEO Micah Baldwin says that decision reflects the difficulties of launching a marketplace app in the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace — you face your own challenges attracting users to those app, then only a fraction of those users are going to purchase any individual title.

“The more we thought about it the more we thought having a marketplace within a marketplace is not a strong long-term strategy,” he says.

Meanwhile, Graphicly’s digital publishing tools — which are optimized for titles with a strong visual component, and which allow authors and publishers to release their books to platforms like the iBookstore and the Kindle market, then see readership analytics — seem to be taking off. More than 1,000 customers have signed up for the product and published more than 2,100 books. Revenue is increasing 300 percent month-over-month. And nine out of the top 10 graphic novels on Apple last week were published through Graphicly, Baldwin says.

When I spoke to Baldwin a month ago, he said he was starting to see interest from non-comics authors and publishers, but now he tells me the growth has “gone a lot faster than I anticipated.” Forty percent of titles published through Graphicly aren’t comics, and that number will probably grow — after all, Baldwin notes that cook books alone are a much bigger market than comics, even before you factor in things like children’s books and art books.

Graphicly isn’t completely abandoning the marketplace strategy, because readers can still buy titles on its website. And Baldwin isn’t ruling out the launch of new apps in the future. For now, however, abandoning the iPhone and Android apps seems like the best way to focus on what’s working.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Startup accelerator Advise.me is on a roll, having already increased its seed funding size and its advising team only a week after launch. Today, it’s adding six more high-profile executives to the team, including CEOs from notable startups like Evernote, Adly, CloudFlare, Graphic.ly and more.

Today’s new additions include the following:

• Phil Libin, CEO at Evernote
• Arnie Gullov-Singh, CEO at Adly
• Matthew Prince, Co-Founder and CEO at CloudFlare
• Micah Baldwin, CEO at Graphic.ly
• Rob Bailey - VP of Business Development at SimpleGeo
• Christian Reber, Founder & CEO at 6Wunderkinder

Advise.me, whose “Global Startup Initiative“ program encourages companies from all parts of the world to apply, has now received more than 400 applications from interested companies. That’s 200 more than it had received by the end of September. 200 every 2 weeks? Not bad, not bad at all.

The organization will reveal its first company on Tuesday, but it’s a company Advise.me is building itself. (Hmm?) Stay tuned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When a great story leaps out in front of you, sometimes you just have to whip out your flip camera and hope for the best. Apologies for the lighting on this one, but this interview with Micah Baldwin  was just too good to miss.

First some background. Micah’s company, Graphic.ly (a really cool digital comic book community), is based in Boulder, Colorado – a town that’s starting to get a serious reputation as a hotbed of startups…

There are numerous interesting venture-backed companies that have emerged from Boulder, including SimpleGeo (multi-homed in SF as well), OneRiot, Lijit, Sendgrid and now graphic.ly. Meanwhile cool companies like Kid Robot and Threadless have opened up Boulder offices. When I asked him what makes the town so special, Micah responded, “Boulder is amazing. I think something like 1 in 10 people are involved in a startup.”

I originally met Micah at a Twiistup retreat, where we bonded over an extremely large game of Werewolf (a game based on human dynamics around the truth, lies, problem solving and irrational thinking) that lasted until 7am (yes, this really is how some CEOs and VCs bond). Micah’s apparent unwillingness to lie during the game really struck me – while his Wonder Woman’s lasso confused many of the other players at the table. Micah was a hard one to figure out, but in the end, he was indeed telling the truth and never once lied during the game. Luckily for him, he never drew a Werewolf card so was never forced into dishonesty: my guess is that he would have stood up and said, “I’m the wolf!” and would have been immediately lynched by the villagers. I’ll have to play a few more games with him to figure out what his wolf game (wolf face?) looks like, but that’s my hunch.

Micah wears his story on his sleeves, almost literally. I was immediately fascinated by his tattoos, because it is something that maybe some entrepreneurs have, but they must hide them under long sleeve shirts, because I rarely see them. All of Micah’s tats are really great, but two of the tattoos, a bag of money and a MRI scan really hit a chord in my heart.

We all read Star magazine (of course I carefully hide it behind Scientific American on airplanes) and are so fascinated with so-called sex and drug “scandals” that it’s interesting when someone confronts the issues head-on. Admitting to everyone that you were once an addict takes away the intrigue and the power.

Micah was once an addict and he wears the fact proudly on his human sleeves. That’s the reason Micah has vowed to always try to tell the truth. I’ve asked him at least one dozen times if he was ok with me telling this story and he’s always responded with a strong yes.

To Micah, it’s important that people realize entrepreneurs are human. Just like those celebrities you see in Star magazine, they fall — and sometimes they fall hard. But then they have the ability to pick up the pieces and try again and that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s not giving up. I’m blown away by Micah’s willingness to share such a personal story with us and I’m sure it is going to hit home for a lot of TechCrunch readers who may have once had a problem or are even still working through drug or alcohol related issues.

I hope that Micah’s stories – and his tattoos – are as inspirational to you as they were to me.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch