Marco Grossi, the man behind the success of iLovePDF

Reading the following article will take about 10 minutes. During that time, 300,000 people will have visited iLovePDF.com to cut, merge, compress, and perform other tasks on a PDF document. Most of these users will not have paid for this quick and accessible tool, created by Marco Grossi, a 39-year-old from Barcelona, who rides his bicycle to work each morning, with the goal of staying in his company until his retirement.

“We don’t have any investors behind us, we’ve never had one, and we’re not looking for one,” Grossi says. When asked about offers for his website, which is among the world’s 50 most visited, he responds, “I never had an entrepreneurial spirit. I don’t even open purchase proposals because I know how they end. What makes me happy is coming to work by bike and meeting the team in the office. I hope I never have to think about selling.” Grossi worked alone at home until 2017, when the website’s grew so big— receiving between 200,000 and 300,000 daily visits — that he had to hire his first employee, a colleague from his university. He keeps his company’s turnover figures private, but now employs 43 people and rarely gives interviews.

The idea for iLovePDF.com originated in 2010 when Grossi, a Design graduate with an Italian father and Spanish mother, needed to cut and paste a PDF. “I realized that it was a very simple task and that I could actually create it myself.” That’s how iLovePDF.com came to be. By October 2024, it had gained 150 million visits and ranked 34th globally, surpassing Amazon in India and coming just below Wikipedia in Russia, according to data from the Singapore portal ahrefs.com.

“A lot of people think the name and logo could be improved, but... don’t you remember it?” says Grossi during an interview via Google Meet. For several years, he balanced his web development work — focused on solving PDF-related problems — with his freelance work as a web page designer. “I studied Multimedia and Photography at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. My father is from Milan. He came to Barcelona at 20 and met my mother, who is from here, and started designing websites in the 1990s. I was born in Barcelona, though I studied at the Italian school,” he shares.

The humility of Grossi stands in stark contrast to the typical CEO culture in the current digital business ecosystem, where ego, flamboyance, and calls for investor attention are the norm. Instead, Grossi stays true to his focus on creating “a good free product.”

“I can’t understand how iLovePDF is a free tool. It’s perhaps one of the best inventions in history after the wheel, air conditioning, and penicillin,” tweeted Mariano Heller, a lawyer in Buenos Aires, in August 2023. From time to time, Grossi’s image, mainly visible on his LinkedIn profile, goes viral on X through memes that humorously elevate him to the status of a savior for creating such a tool that’s able to solve so many problems.

“Yes, sometimes I see this, and we appreciate the affection, but really that’s why I hardly give interviews, I like to lead my normal life without being a public figure. For example, our business growth is sustained. We will never be a company that hires 200 people one year and then has to close. The year we hired the most was when we hired 10 people, and staff turnover is very low,” he points out.

Between 80% and 90% of iLovePDF’s revenue comes from premium subscriptions, which are mainly offered to businesses. The remaining revenue is generated through a banner ad. A paid subscription, priced at around $4 per month, grants offline tool access, technical support, and PDF-to-Word conversion with image recognition. “Actually, the free tier works for 99.9% of the people who use us and will continue to do so. But for the past couple of years we have had a sales team of five people for businesses,” he says.

One of the biggest fears users have about free digital solutions is file security and transparency in data usage. “All PDFs are deleted within two hours. No one can access them. We know that the PDF file has been used, but we can’t get in. Plus, we have ISO 27001 certification and have passed several internal and external security audits, which is not the same as just saying in words that iLovePDF is safe to use,” he explains.

In 1982, mathematician Dr. John Warnock, driven by a desire to solve the problem of printing what appeared on the screen, founded a company in California. By 1991, he invented a tool allowing screens to be transferred to printers, which he initially called Camelot. A year later, he patented the Portable Document Format (PDF). Warnock, alongside his partner Chuck Geschke, went on to establish Adobe Systems, adopting the name of the stream next to their house in Palo Alto. Over the course of decades, they quietly created a business giant in an industry filled with messianic personalities such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Marco Grossi believes that “PDF will continue to exist as a standard format in the short and medium term because at the moment AI [which could create a direct competition] is not in this field.” His project for images, iLoveIMG.com, is also growing at a rapid pace. Grossi remains committed to innovation, maintaining a close-knit team, and disconnecting through outdoor sports. “The way in which the internet affects people, especially on social media, has gotten worse. The human mind is not prepared to be so connected. You could say that I make a living from this, from the internet, but it is a tool that makes your work easier. I think we have to readapt how we approach society so we aren’t seeing it through Instagram.”

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