He Built a Simple PDF Tool for Himself. It Became a Global Business Used by Millions

Some of the most successful internet businesses do not begin with a grand business plan, a large investment round, or a team of dozens of employees sitting around a conference table.

Sometimes, they begin with frustration.

A person encounters a small problem that should be easy to solve, discovers that the existing solutions are unnecessarily complicated, and thinks: There has to be a simpler way to do this.

That is essentially what happened to Marco Grossi in Barcelona in 2010.

Grossi, a designer and web developer, needed to perform a basic task with a PDF document. Instead of accepting the limitations of the tools available to him, he decided to build a solution himself.

That personal project eventually became iLovePDF, a website that has grown from a small experiment into a global document-processing platform.

Today, iLovePDF provides a broad collection of tools for working with PDF files, including merging, splitting, compressing, converting, editing, signing and other document-related functions. The company says its journey began in Barcelona in 2010 with the goal of making PDF management easier, more accessible and less frustrating.

What makes the story particularly interesting, however, is not simply the popularity of the product.

It is the way Grossi chose to build the company.

Unlike the familiar technology-startup model, where founders often raise venture capital, rapidly expand their teams and eventually pursue an acquisition or public offering, Grossi has described a very different approach.

In a 2024 interview with El País, he said iLovePDF had never had outside investors and that the company was not looking for them. He also said he did not actively pursue acquisition proposals because he wanted to continue running the company rather than building it primarily for a sale.

The result is an unusual technology success story: a company that became enormously visible online while its founder remained relatively unknown outside the world of document software.

The Problem That Started Everything

PDF files are now an ordinary part of everyday digital life.

People use them for contracts, invoices, applications, school assignments, business reports, presentations, government documents, forms, manuals and countless other purposes.

Yet working with PDFs has not always been particularly convenient.

A PDF is designed to preserve the appearance and structure of a document across different systems. That makes the format extremely useful, but it can also make seemingly simple tasks surprisingly difficult.

Want to combine two documents?

Split one file into several smaller files?

Reduce the size of a large PDF before emailing it?

Convert a PDF into another format?

Add a signature?

Extract particular pages?

For someone who regularly works with documents, these are ordinary requirements. But for an occasional user, finding the right software can become an unnecessary obstacle.

Grossi encountered exactly this kind of problem.

According to an OVHcloud case study about iLovePDF, the original idea emerged when Grossi needed to merge PDF files and found the task more difficult than expected. After spending significant time trying to accomplish something that seemed straightforward, he began thinking about how the process could be simplified for other people as well.

The idea was not initially presented as the foundation of a major technology company.

It was simply a practical response to an annoying problem.

That distinction is important.

Many entrepreneurs begin by asking what market they can enter. Grossi's story suggests another approach: start by identifying something that genuinely frustrates people and make that specific experience better.

The difference may sound small, but it can lead to very different products.

From Personal Project to Public Tool

The first version of iLovePDF was essentially an extension of Grossi's own needs.

He had the technical ability to create a web-based solution, so he built one.

Instead of keeping the tool exclusively for himself, he made it available online.

That decision created an important advantage: anyone facing the same problem could potentially use the same solution.

According to iLovePDF's own account, the project began as a personal need and gradually developed into a global service. The company says its objective from the beginning was to provide a free, accessible and high-quality way of managing PDF documents.

There was no need for users to understand how the underlying technology worked.

They simply needed to upload a file, choose an action and receive the result.

That simplicity became central to the product.

Instead of turning PDF management into a complicated software-learning experience, iLovePDF focused on making individual tasks understandable.

The website could essentially answer a user's question:

What do you want to do with this PDF?

Merge it.