Ep. 123 Building LuminPDF with Max Ferguson

The MongoDB Podcast

LuminPDF was founded in 2014 as a better way for people to annotate and collaborate on PDF files.

Today, 70 million people use Lumin to meet their administrative needs and bring their documents to life.

On this episode, we chat with Max Ferguson, Founder & CEO of LuminPDF, to learn more about building LuminPDF as a student and his lessons about growth and startup experiences, as well as how LuminPDF uses MongoDB Atlas.

LuminPDF and MongoDB Blog Posts

• https://www.luminpdf.com/blog/scaling-for-success-how-lumins-partners-are-super-charging-our-platform/

Conversation Highlights:

• [01:23] LuminPDF
• [02:08] Pandemic growth
• [03:07] Where did the idea come from, and how it came together
• [05:09] LuminPDF's capabilities and how data is stored in MongoDB
• [07:09] What the MongoDB infrastructure looks like for Lumin
• [08:16] Running a company for the first time
• [09:24] Advice to other founders
• [11:45] Max's relationship with coding nowadays
• [12:27] Python, MongoDB, and products in the portfolio
• [15:14] What's next in the pipeline
• [17:12] A great experience with MongoDB, and the Lumin API