Pugpig

We're a small business, but we’ve got big plans, and we want to play a significant part in the future of publishing – that’s what gets us all out of bed in the morning (oh and it’s quite fun too). We get to spend time with (most of) the most important publishers in the industry as well as some of the new entrants: from The Economist and Condé Nast, to News Corporation, Hearst, Tortoise and many more.

London, February 2011, in a huge, almost completely deserted office on Gray’s Inn road, a handful of people sat around a boardroom table hatching plans. A few months earlier the same office had been crammed with 140 developers working together to build what News Corp hoped would become the next big thing in publishing; Project Alesia was a platform designed to give readers access to hundreds of news media and consumer magazine brands through a single service. Sadly however, it wasn’t to be and the project was canned six weeks before its planned public beta launch, leaving a lot of people wondering what to do next.

So there we were, the last four standing, no longer employed by NewsCorp but full of energy and eager to kick off our next big project. We set up a company, Kaldor Ltd, and started throwing around ideas for new mobile-based business, but we kept coming back to the same place: no-one on the market was offering a decent mobile publishing platform and we thought we could do better – after all, we’d spent the last 18 months trying to build a publishing platform and learning a great deal about how not to go about it. And with that in mind, we set about building a brand new platform designed from a completely different angle to our soon-to-be competitors.

We wanted to create something that was fully native (iOS and Android) but that could harness the power of structured content and HTML, both of which had long been the standard for content delivery on the web, but oddly not yet on mobile. A platform that would allow publishers to create content once that would work beautifully across all platforms with no extra faffing around. And with that, Pugpig was conceived and born (if you want to know why Pugpig, then you’ll have to get in touch and ask us).

Soon after, we met with Alex, Paul and Kerin from Dennis Publishing (who we’ll be eternally grateful to), launching our first ever app for The Week and setting us off on the journey that has seen us build a team of 40 amazing people and amassing hundreds of customers around the world who publish their gorgeous content to over 2.5 million readers every single month.