The on-demand economy now includes printers

By John Pletz

Jonathan Treble sees opportunity in the gig economy, catering to the needs of freelancers and mobile workers who make their offices in coffee shops and cars.

Anyone with a laptop, tablet or smartphone can ply their trade from virtually anywhere. But what happens when they need to print something?

His startup, PrintWithMe, offers printers at about 75 places in Chicago and about a dozen in New York. He got the idea a couple of years ago.

“I was living in Old Town and found myself constantly needing to print things,” he says. “I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of owning a printer. So I researched it and decided to give it a shot.”

Treble quit his IT job at Grubhub and started the company. He recently raised $800,000, led by Network Ventures, a Chicago-based seed fund, along with M25 Group, New Stack Ventures, Little Engine Ventures and other investors. The company has five employees.

Customers pay 25 cents per black-and-white page and 75 cents per color page, using a mobile app connected to Braintree’s payment-processing software.

“It’s profitable enough that it can sustain itself,” Treble says of the business model. “What we need to prove is sales efficiency by bringing on enough (locations). We’ve proven the concept. We need to prove that in a bigger way.”

Read the full article on Crain’s Chicago Business.

And download Zuora’s 9 Keys to Building Sucess in the Subscription Economy.

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