Guides.co is a website which features the largest collection of online guides on the web. Featuring both free and premium multimedia guides, content includes detailed information, templates, tips, instructional videos, discussions and more. Popular topics include life hacks, education and careers, startups and entrepreneurship, software and more. The Guides.co publishing platform allows anyone to share any kind of content— no technical knowledge needed—for free. We recently spoke with Scott Annan, founder of Guides.co, and we’re excited to share their story with you as we gear up to head to LeWeb Paris (an internationally renowned conference for digital innovation) with their team. Guides.co applied for a trip to demo at LeWeb via our Membership Program and were selected for this super exclusive offer. Are you attending LeWeb next month? Get to know Guides.co before the big event!
What is Guides.co?
Guides.co is a free online publishing platform for interactive guides by authors, experts, and professionals on everything from how to start a business to how to get in shape. While the internet is great at answering questions – how to tie a tie or how to stuff a turkey – it’s not so great at providing comprehensive solutions to more complex problems. Guides.co solves this by making it easy for anyone to publish long-form instructional content in an easy-to-use “how to” format that people can access on any device.
Who is the Guides.co Team?
The Guides.co team started with only three people and a dream to change the instructional publishing industry. Today, we’re 10 full-time people in Ottawa, Canada with over 1,500 freelance writers, editors, and designers all over the world building interactive guides for authors, celebrities, and really cool business ranging from startups to international brands.
Tell me about Guides? What problem is it trying to solve? Who are you trying to solve it for? What gives it the edge?
Whether you’re an expert on startups or a celebrity chef, your options for publishing your knowledge are limited. You can publish on a major platform and earn little to no profit, never know who is actually reading / viewing your content, and be forced to reduce your information to short, “click-bait” content. With Guides.co, you keep 100% of the profit, obtain detailed information about your audience, and keep your content up-to-date in a format that your users love.
Why .CO? How has being on a .CO helped you?
On any given day, over 5,000 blog posts, videos, and eBooks are published claiming to be the “Ultimate Guide” or “Complete Guide” to some topic. While eBooks, blogs, and online learning are well-established categories, the “Guide” category hasn’t been claimed. Leveraging the .co domain made it possible for us to be the first brand in the “Guides” category – which is critical to our growth plan.
What’s next for you and Guides?
While Guides.co continues to grow organically, we’ve recently launched a business solution to convert static corporate PDFs (whitepapers & eBooks, product handbooks, sales material, and employee manuals) into interactive Guides that improve the quality, cost, and speed to publish, keep content up-to-date, and provide detailed analytics data on who is accessing content and how it is being used. Our goal is to upgrade every corporate PDF in the world into interactive content that is mobile-friendly and accessible in real-time on any device.
