Emmanuel Nataf is the co-founder and CEO of Reedsy, an online platform that connects authors with top-tier publishing professionals and provides tools to write, edit, and publish books. Since launching in 2014, he’s built Reedsy into a profitable, 10-year-old business with $40M in annual revenue, a team of just 50 people, and a global community of writers — all without chasing hypergrowth or succumbing to startup burnout. His approach blends patience, product quality, and deep respect for the creative process...

We live in a world obsessed with velocity. Founders are supposed to scale fast, pivot often, and raise money like their lives depend on it. But not every success story fits that mold. Some companies are built slowly, deliberately, and on their own terms. Reedsy is one of them.

I first wrote about Reedsy back in 2014. It was a small, strange idea at the time: a marketplace for authors to find editors, designers, and other publishing professionals. Now, more than a decade later, Reedsy helps produce over 50,000 books every year. It’s profitable. It’s stable. And according to founder Emmanuel Nataf, it’s calm.

We had him on Keep Going to talk about how he pulled that off.

No deadlines. No burnouts. No nonsense.

Emmanuel’s approach to building Reedsy is almost aggressively anti-startup. He never bought into the blitz-scaling mindset. Instead, he focused on building something that worked—then waited to see what it wanted to become.

The company raised a little money early on, but quickly moved to profitability. No pressure to grow at all costs. No mad rush for the next round. Just a team of about 50 people, working quietly and consistently, building tools that authors actually want to use.

That freedom has shaped the culture. There are no arbitrary deadlines at Reedsy. No imaginary pressure. If a product feature isn’t ready, it waits. If the summer is slow, they accept it. December? Forget about it. They’re not chasing unicorn status. They’re building something real, at their own pace.

Studio: A writing app that doesn’t yell at you

One of Reedsy’s biggest moves was launching Studio, their collaborative writing platform. It's where writers can draft, plan, revise, and format their work—all in one place. It started as a humble book editor, but over time, it became something closer to a virtual writer’s room. Studio lets you build characters, map worlds, outline stories, and track your progress. You can even invite editors and beta readers to work with you in real time.

It's a calm product, made by a calm company.

Writers will invest in themselves

One of the best insights from the interview was how Emmanuel thinks about pricing and value. Writers don’t always have a lot of money, but they do invest in their work. Just like photographers buy cameras or musicians buy guitars, writers will pay for tools that help them finish the thing that’s clawing at them from the inside.

That understanding—that writing is a form of personal investment, not just a commercial pursuit—shapes the whole business.

Growth, the old-fashioned way

Reedsy isn’t stagnant. It’s growing steadily. But Emmanuel’s version of growth doesn’t rely on sprints, pressure, or panic. It’s about listening to the users, iterating with care, and avoiding hype. Even when things slow down, he sees it as part of the rhythm. "You keep digging, and usually, you find something,” he told me.

That’s how they’ve unlocked new waves of growth again and again—by being patient enough to let them happen.

A life beyond the company

In the end, what stood out most was how Emmanuel talked about life outside of Reedsy. He and his co-founders aren’t martyrs to the startup cause. They’ve built lives with room for more than work. They write. They think. They breathe. Reedsy is central, but not all-consuming.

It’s the opposite of the founder-as-hero myth. It’s just a group of people building something good, carefully.

And that, to me, is what Keep Going is all about.