Topular: Product Demos

Every entrepreneur knows, beware of falling into the "demo trap" when talking about your business as a business. But, sometimes, we just can't resist showing pictures of our kids. Here are two examples of our product successes.

Client Demo: Summon

Topular's Andrea Michalek joined forces with the VP of a newly created business unit of Serials Solutions to start from a business plan and build the technology platform and team to aggressively target a new market segment.

Andrea built and led an agile, international team of developers to build a large scale content ingestion system and highly performant search engine for 3/4 billion scholarly documents.

The Summon product defined a new category of Web Scale Discovery and claimed first mover advantage in the academic library market.

Summon won the 2011 CODiE Award for Best Enterprise Search Solution by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

See it in action here:

More about Summon:

The Summon™ unified discovery service allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content. It goes beyond federated search, beyond next-generation catalogs to create an all-new service for libraries. Through one simple search, it provides instant access to the breadth of authoritative content that's the hallmark of great libraries - digital and print, audio and video, single articles to entire e-journals, and every format in between.

Product Demo: Fast PDF

Topular founder Andrea Michalek and her long-time friend Doug Grundman (currently working for Google) built the first version of Fast PDF in 2001 as a free way to convert Microsoft Word documents to PDFs. As a part of an April Fool's joke, Doug hooked up PayPal to it to charge for the service. And, surprising them both, people came to their cheesy little site.

Over a million document conversions later, the little site chugs along. It is 99.9% hands off, with the technology automatically processing all conversions. The only human effort that it requires ongoing, is to remember to transfer the money from the PayPal account to the bank account.

It's a great example of how you can bootstrap a niche business, with reliable technology underpinnings, and let it ride.

See it in action here:

Fast PDF