Celebrating 100 million users

It’s December 2014, and a young man named Max Ferguson is bunkered down in his room at Stanford University, shunning the social joys of college life to code for 18 hours a day.

After three weeks of sweat, coffee, and an ambitious vision, he sends the first version of Lumin out into the world. A month later, a million people are using it.

Today, we’re celebrating hitting 100 million users (and Max leaving his bedroom). But how did we get here?

From the rubble Lumin rises

Great ideas can start anywhere, even in a bedroom in earthquake-shaken Christchurch, New Zealand. That’s where Max, then an engineering student working on the city’s rebuild, noticed something that would spark a global shift in document management. On construction sites, he’d draw on paper blueprints; back in the office, digital plans bounced around in endless emails. The disconnect was obvious, and the solution was waiting to be built.

Max carried this idea with him to Stanford, where he studied artificial intelligence. Within a few years, he’d be contemplating how to incorporate AI into his PDF editor that was on its way to becoming a global success.

“People were just so fed up with USB drives, Microsoft Word crashing, and manually passing file copies around,” recalls Max. He saw a world ready to embrace cloud solutions, though even he couldn’t have predicted how right he was.

Lumin: The early years

Lumin wasn’t Max’s first shot at startup success. He’d already built 10 different apps (including Drive Tunes, a music player for Google Drive that thrived in the pre-Spotify era, with loyal users still around in 2020). Despite a little cult-level success, Max was looking for an app he could truly throw himself behind.

After launching the first Lumin prototype, Max saw it had potential. In 2015, he brought on developer Hung Vo, and together they turned Lumin’s promising but basic prototype into something reliable and ready to scale. The team quickly grew to ten people within six months, a sign of the whirlwind growth to come.

Max recalls those days as a time of “constant experimentation.” “Back then, we were just throwing things out there and seeing what stuck. There was no grand strategy. We were small, and everyone was hands-on. We had to be flexible.

The big bet

“I didn’t realize how big Lumin was going to get until 2019 when we rebuilt everything from the ground up,” Max says.

“We knew we were onto something. We had maybe 20 million people using the platform at that time, mostly for simple PDF annotations.”

He knew there was product-market fit, but Lumin was still basic and, importantly, filled with ads. Since Lumin was free for everyone, it was funded solely by in-app ads.

Then came 2019: a complete rebuild that nearly emptied the company’s coffers. "We pretty much spent every single dollar we made from ads,” Max laughs now, though it probably wasn’t quite as funny at the time. “I nearly bankrupted the company rebuilding this new version.”

The gamble paid off spectacularly. Not only did users adopt the new platform, but they also eagerly started paying for it. “One customer mailed us a check, and it took three months to get to New Zealand. Caleb and I stepped outside the office one day, and a guy on an unmarked scooter pulled up, asking, ‘Are you guys Lumin?’ and then handed over the envelope. We framed that check and put it on the wall.”

The rise of remote work

When the pandemic hit, Lumin was ready. The product was perfectly designed for remote collaboration, which was suddenly essential. While many companies saw growth fall, Lumin kept soaring.

“Because we invested so heavily into the product, we just saw continued growth,” Max notes. He reflects on this moment as a turning point: “Suddenly, we weren’t just an app; we were a tool that teams relied on every day. It made us rethink our responsibility to users and pushed us to raise our standards.”

Lumin today

Today, Lumin isn’t just a PDF editor anymore. With products like Lumin Sign, Templates Discovery, and the Lumin Sign API, it’s become a full-loop document management ecosystem.

"We’ve gone from launching products that were barely functional but proved a concept, to releasing things that are super reliable and that people depend on," Max says.

But Max is quick to remind us that growth hasn’t changed the core values that define Lumin. “From day one, it was about solving real problems. We didn’t have the luxury to get sidetracked by flashy features that didn’t matter. Even today, when we’re developing a new tool, it starts with the question: How will this actually make people’s work easier?”

With a goal of creating a seamless, interconnected suite for document management, Lumin’s recent products, like Lumin Sign and the Lumin Sign API, have redefined what it means to collaborate on documents. “In a way, we’re just getting started,” Max adds. “There’s so much left to build, and now we have the resources to do it right.”

Looking forward to the future

As Lumin approaches its 10th birthday, it’s proving that you can grow up without growing old. The startup spirit that drove those early 18-hour coding days lives on, just with better coffee and a few more colleagues to share it with.

For Max, Lumin’s journey remains close to his heart. “It’s still surreal to see how far we’ve come, but my favorite part is knowing we’re making work just a little easier for millions of people every day. That’s what drives me and the team—solving problems in ways that actually help people.”

Here’s to the next 100 million!