Split it.
Compress it.
Convert it.
Edit it.
Sign it.
Once the problem was framed that way, the technology became almost invisible.
And for a utility product, that can be a powerful characteristic.
The Growth Happened Gradually
Grossi did not immediately build a large company around his idea.
For years, iLovePDF remained a relatively small personal project.
El País reported that Grossi worked alone from home until 2017. By then, the website had grown substantially, reportedly receiving between 200,000 and 300,000 visits per day, which prompted him to hire his first employee.
That timeline reveals something unusual about the company.
Growth came first.
The organization came later.
In many startup stories, founders build a team first and then try to find enough customers to justify the team. Grossi's experience followed almost the opposite sequence.
The product attracted users before the company became large.
As demand increased, the business gradually developed the people and infrastructure required to support it.
By 2024, El País reported that iLovePDF employed 43 people. The publication also reported that the company had accumulated enormous web traffic while maintaining a relatively small workforce compared with many technology companies of similar visibility.
The company's own website continues to describe the organization as a small team focused on solving document problems for users around the world.
That is perhaps one of the clearest lessons from the story.
A company does not necessarily need to become huge internally simply because its product becomes huge externally.
Why a PDF Website Could Become So Large
At first glance, PDF software may not sound like an exciting category.
There are no social-media celebrities.
There is no entertainment feed.
There is no viral video algorithm.
There is simply a document format that millions of people need to work with.
But that is precisely the opportunity.
PDF-related problems are highly practical and recurring.
A person searching for a PDF compressor is usually not casually browsing the internet. They have a specific task they need to complete.
The same applies to searches for merging, splitting, converting or signing PDFs.
This gives utility software a particularly valuable characteristic: clear user intent.
Someone searching for "compress PDF" already knows what they need.
The product does not have to convince them that PDF compression is interesting.
It simply has to solve the problem quickly.
That may help explain why a seemingly mundane tool can attract enormous international traffic.
OVHcloud, which has published a case study about iLovePDF's infrastructure, says the service has users around the world and has ranked among the world's most visited websites.
In a 2024 report, El País cited third-party traffic data showing that iLovePDF had reached approximately 150 million visits in October 2024 and ranked among the world's top websites at that time. Those rankings can change over time and depend on the measurement methodology, but they illustrate the extraordinary scale the service had reached.
The important point is not a particular ranking.
It is that a website solving a very ordinary problem had managed to become a major destination on the global internet.
The Power of Keeping the Free Product Useful
One of the most important parts of iLovePDF's strategy is the relationship between free access and paid services.
The company has continued to offer free PDF tools while also developing premium features and business-oriented services.
This is a familiar freemium model, but iLovePDF's implementation is notable because the free version is not merely a demonstration of the paid product.
A large portion of the basic functionality remains genuinely useful.