Digital Publishing New Publishing Tech
3 mins read

Q&A: Canvasflow, powering publishers’ mobile-first workflows

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Based in London, Canvasflow was founded in 2016 when co-founders Gareth Jones and Patrick Cobbett realised the challenges publishers were facing when trying to implement a mobile-first strategy.

Having built, and implemented numerous back-end solutions to transform and publish digital content for many companies, the founders set about creating a powerful but simple-to-use platform, giving them the toolset and confidence to make the move to a mobile-first workflow. WNIP caught up with Canvasflow to find out more…

What business problem is your company addressing?

With the rise of mobile usage, publishers have scrambled to provide a good experience across multiple devices and channels. But with what’s out there now, the whole process is fragmented and costly.

Creating responsive content takes too long, and too many people need to be involved. The same can be said for populating channels, nothing is straightforward or built for purpose.

Now more than ever publishers require flexibility in their content, whether that’s adapting it for different audiences and devices, or experimenting with new channels without a large investment of resources to do it.

That’s the problem Canvasflow fixes, it streamlines the workflow so that our customers can be agile and adapt their strategy as often as needed.

What is your core product addressing this problem?

Canvasflow is a mobile publishing hub that enables customers to create, optimise and distribute content to wherever their readers are. Delivering strong reader experiences is essential for increasing digital revenues, so Canvasflow makes content more readable, accessible and discoverable, helping  customers grow and build deeper engagement with their audience.

The Canvasflow editor is simple to use so content creation feels organic, we connect to multiple platforms and systems ensuring our customers’ workflow is optimised. We provide native support for major app publishing platforms and offer one click publish-to-web and social news channels such as Twixl Publisher, Pugpig, Purple DS, AEM, WordPress, Apple News, Facebook IA, Medium, etc.

From multiple sources to multiple channels, Canvasflow gives customers the creative control that connects their content to their audience.

Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solution?

FlightGlobal is a digital news and information publication which covers the aviation and aerospace industries, it’s published in the UK by Reed Business Information (RBI). Since implementing Canvasflow, RBI have vastly reduced the time it takes to produce and publish content, while simplifying their entire workflow. You can read in-depth about what we’ve been doing with FlightGlobal in this case study.

Pricing?

Because we provide a multi-channel experience for customers, our pricing is dependent on each client’s requirements, i.e number of users, publish volume and number of connected platforms. We offer a free trial period so customers can experience the benefits of Canvasflow before signing up.

What are other people doing in the space and why?

Canvasflow is positioned to help publishers make sense of the digital publishing minefield. Content comes from multiple sources and needs to be published to multiple channels to reach its intended audience. It was developed with a clear understanding of the challenges publishers face, the result is a flexible hub that streamlines workflows and offers complete creative control without the need for any developers.

Other systems in the market do not offer the same level of flexibility or usability, and often lock you into that ecosystem, making it difficult to pivot or adapt with the industry. Canvasflow doesn’t lock you into anything – we want publishers to own their content, and we make it easy for them to do whatever they want with it. With tools such as our WordPress plugin we make it simple to repurpose existing content that wasn’t originally created in Canvasflow.

How you do view the future?

We’ll continue to improve and build on Canvasflow, our customer feedback is strong, and we have some amazing case studies and testimonials. The momentum we’re building shows no signs of slowing down, as we’re tackling a problem that’s widespread in the industry. 

Our main aim is to improve the way publishers work, but when we call Canvasflow a ‘hub’, we mean it. Canvasflow delves into all areas of content, it’s not just an authoring tool. For example we recently added the ability to create responsive HTML5 emails from article content, because we want Canvasflow to be the ultimate toolbox for all publishers.

Thank you.