Paizo Publishing's 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 1 (2002)

[Morrus]

Lisa Stevens (CEO of Paizo Publishing) has posted the first part of a retrospective on the ten years of Paizo thus far. Unfortunately, it includes a bad photo of me, but you can't have everything!

"2012 marks Paizo’s 10th anniversary. I plan to do monthly blogs for the rest of the year that relive the highlights (and some of the lowlights) from our first ten years of business, and then I’ll take a look into the future as the year comes to a close. There will be side anecdotes and hopefully more than a few embarrassing pictures. And at the end of it all, I hope our readers will have a better sense of where Paizo has been—and where we’re going!"

Check out the blog for more, and keep an eye out for future installments!

[kitsune9]

Nice read. Can't wait for the future installments.

[Mark CMG]

That's going to be a fun series to read this year!

[JoeGKushner]

I love this bit. "We had also continued using the out-of-house subscription fulfillment service that Wizards had used for the magazines, and we soon learned that their costs were much higher than we’d expected. They handled all customer service related to subscriptions, and charged us based on each customer contact—there was a fee for every letter, email, and phone call they received, and another fee for every reply they made. We soon realized that meant they had no incentive to solve problems quickly—in fact, they’d make more money if it took multiple contacts to resolve an issue! It became clear that we’d save a lot of money—and provide better service—if we could bring subscriptions and customer service in-house. That became our first major goal for 2003."

Incompetency paying off. Literally paying off. Sheesh. Wish I could say it was just a WoTC thing.

Comments

Well, not incompetency. They were competent at making money.

[delericho]

Wow, I hadn't realised Paizo were already 10 years old. I keep thinking of them as those new guys who've taken over Dragon magazine - I wonder if they'll be any good?

Anyway, congratulations to them on coming so far.

[William Ronald]

It was great reading about the early days of a company that has become more of a success than its founders imagined. What I truly liked was the sense of a close knit team in the article. Here is to the next ten years for Paizo!