Easy Print - The pitch

Printers are a huge waste of money, they spend most of their time idle and can cost up to $1 per page if you don’t use them frequently. Stop throwing away money and use Easy Print. Print your document to the cloud and pick it up in a retail store near you.

Easy Print - The fun part

For me, the fun part here is twofold. First, detailing all of the costs in printing and finding clever ways to cut them. For example, Easy Print won’t need very many customer service representatives, which can be a huge cost. Second, making Easy Print truly easy will be a fun challenge. Really understanding how people will use the product and make everything seamless will be the key to its success.

Easy Print - The growth potential

So, above I show that I think each printer will make $2,200 in profit per year. I think in America this could grow large enough to have one printer for every 1,000 people, or around 310,000 machines. That amounts to a profit of around $700 million a year, and a revenue of roughly twice that.

Easy Print - The monetization

The Easy Print printer will look mostly like a big office printer, except a little simpler. The printer will only do the most basic printer functions: print color or black and white, one or two sided, and collate. The print won’t do everything under the sun, and by limiting the functionality, it will be possible to cut costs and increase printer speed (around 30 to 50 pages per minute). The printer will also have a large store of paper and ink, enough to print 2,000 pages. Lastly, the printer will be designed to need minimal maintenance and, when maintenance is required, it will be simple and require hardly any training.

On average, the printer will print around 200 pages a day and need more paper and ink every week. Because the printers will be other stores, the supplies for the printer can be stored in a back room. The maintenance time could be as short as 5 minutes, or $5 paid to the store (0.25 cents per page).

I believe that it will be possible to drive the total cost per page (paper, ink, maintenance, energy) down to 2 cents per page for black and white (4 cents for color). Between the profit for black and white and color, I expect an average profit of 3 cents per page; That makes $6 per printer per day, or about $2,200 a year.

Easy Print - The idea

You need a twenty page paper printed including two color plots, but you don’t have a printer. So, you go to easyprint.com and upload your pdf. The website quickly processes your pdf and gives you pricing options: 20*2 cent per page for light B&W, 20*4 cents per page for B&W or 20*4.6 cents for B&W and color (10 cents a page for color); The website is smart enough to figure out which pages have color and which don’t. You can also customize your order if you only want particular pages to get printed in color (not just all pages with color). After finishing your order, you see a map of easy print printers in your area (in grocery and corner stores). You choose a convenient location and pay for the printing. The website then gives you an order code to use when you reach the printer.

You drive to the store with printer, walk up and enter the order code, wait for the printer to print the pages, and take your pages and leave.

Easy Print - The motivation

Owning a printer just isn’t worth it for most people. If you only need to print something every few weeks (or months), it doesn’t make sense to buy a single purpose machine for the job. If you calculate the average cost of a printer over the 2-4 years of ownership, it comes out to around 10 to 50 cents per page (assuming 1,000 and 200 pages printed, respectively), and that doesn’t even include ink or the energy the printer consumes while idle.

But wait, there is already Google Cloud Print right? Printing from a Fedex Kinkos costs 10 cents per page just for black and white (50 cents for color). Those prices are on par with the using your own printer, so they don’t make much sense either.