Adam Krefman calls it a clichéd moment.The former McSweeney's associate publisher and editors Peter Meehan and Chris Ying stood before a San Francisco newsstand in 2011, pulling off the shelves ESPN, Cook's Illustrated, Garden and Gun, and all the magazines that would inspire the now cultish literary food magazine Lucky Peach. Within two years, Lucky Peach-a print magazine going for $12 USD a pop-had 100,000 readers. Now it's at another turning point since leaving McSweeney's to go independent and fulfil their original vision of a multi-platform brand.Krefman, the former publisher and now vice-president of advertising, is the keynote speaker at the 2015 Alberta Magazines Conference, where he'll explain the business decisions they've made, what lessons they drew from the early days and what's behind the brand's growth.What's one lesson you learned in Lucky Peach's nascency?We were so naive looking back at it. We ended up reprinting the first three issues, and because of publishing cash flow we didn't realize how much we would have saved, and how much better off we'd have been, by wildly overprinting, even if it was unrealistic. Economies of scale was an important lesson.Who would have guessed you'd have 100,000 readers in two years.Only 25,000 are subscribers. We are starting to try to wean out some of the inefficiencies of the newsstand. I wish we'd gotten more aggressive about it early on.Why'd you decide to go independent?Magazine margins are small enough that they're hard enough to make with one company. When you have two companies sharing profit margins, there's just a natural ceiling. Nobody accounted for explosive growth. We were expecting it to be the side project.Lucky Peach was originally envisioned as an app with a supplementary print brand. What happened?It was basically a deconstructed TV show in an app form. All of that footage became first season of [PBS television series] The Mind of a Chef. The global lesson of it is, is it's really about the content. Like you, I read shit on my phone, on my computer screen, all day, but that doesn't mean that's the better reading experience or where I'm going to give my money as a reader. And the job of the publisher is to find the best way to get that to the reader.But now you're exploring the app and more web content again. What's on the horizon?There's stuff in the works, but I can't say because we're working with some brands on it.One of the goals of the website was to have more of a platform for that video and get ad sponsorship for it. Whether it's directly sponsored, branded video, versus programmatic pre-roll, versus things on YouTube, there's a number of ways that we're going to go at it. We're trying to triple our ad revenue over the next year. That is ambitious.It sure is.Having worked at McSweeney's, doing those crazy projects like the San Fransisco Panorama [a one-off, 300-page newspaper] ... people really like this kind of thing.Is Lucky Peach still a "literary food quarterly"?That still aptly describes the magazine, but not the website, not the videos we're doing. It's a media company that was founded accidentally on a literary food quarterly.So what's it mean to be a magazine in 2015?In my time working at the Pitchfork office, I talk to the guys there, and they run up against this thing all the time: talking to someone who then they might say, "And then you guys can do a blog post about it." The Idea that after being in business for 17 years, a leading voice on music, and someone they're trying to do business with will call them a blog? They have 50 people working for them. It's just insane.They like to call themselves a publication. There's this search for what is this word [to describe itself]. And I think that Lucky Peach, since launching our website, has to search for this word too. I call us a food media company on our media kit, but I don't know if that's accurate.What are the magazines you look at now for Lucky Peach's future?The people at Pitchfork have been real mentors to me on the business side. We're looking at paywall models, so it's like the newsstand experience again, only I'm clicking around the internet.That's not like the romantic, clichéd newsstand experience at all.It's not. It's me exiting out of this Skype window and googling "paywall technology." That's the difference right there. That's not a very tactile experience, but that's the life that we've chosen.By Omar Mouallem
