Hi,
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I’m Ben. I’m from Canada. That’s me in the blue T-shirt. I founded Red River Press in 2002 when I was living and teaching English in Japan. My first product was simply a notebook called "The English Notebook." It was just a notebook, but the pages were designed for English students to easily make study notes and organize new vocabulary. I sold 1,000 of them to a school in Kanagawa. But I didn’t get any more orders after that. :(  I was never very good at sales.
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My next product was called ESL Library (which we recently renamed Ellii, pronounced like the girl’s name Ellie). I launched it that same year (2002). It was a hard sell in the first few years. I had to convince teachers with low budgets to pull out their credit cards and buy a subscription online with recurring billing. This was at a time when e-commerce was just getting started. Almost no one was doing online banking or buying anything online, let alone committing to a monthly subscription fee. But the site did well enough right away that I could afford to pay myself a small salary and not have to go back to teaching. For the next few years, it was just me at the company— writing, editing, and formatting the lessons (perhaps the quality was not as good back then—never edit your own stuff!!!), answering emails and phone calls, designing, writing and sending the newsletters, attending conferences, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

By 2006, I was able to afford to hire my first writer (Tara Benwell, in the lower photo on the left), who is still with us today and is now our VP of Publishing. In 2007, my wife, Marta Solodun (in the lower photo on the right), joined the company, and instantly we had tripled in size! By 2012, we could finally afford our first editor (Tanya Trusler, in the top photo on the left) and suddenly we had a full publishing team.
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Year after year, with no salespeople, Ellii kept growing, but only gradually. As we grew little by little, we would hire little by little. It’s a good way to run a business and not get ahead of yourself on costs. Many tech companies today launch and think they need to go straight to the moon. Most end up crashing along the way. When you focus on long-term growth, you might not become a billion-dollar company overnight, but one day you wake up after many years and you notice how high you are. That’s what happened with Ellii. To take a phrase from Andrew Wilkinson about his own business, we are an overnight success story, 22 years in the making.
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Today, Ellii is used in more than 10,000 schools around the world. We have around 35 employees, and we like our small size. We have the financial freedom to work on the things we care to work on, and I think that’s why we’re able to build such great content and software, and offer such great service.
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Anyway...that’s a little about our company. If you care to learn more, check out our main product, Ellii.com, and stay tuned for our new app coming in 2025.
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PS. In the purple shirt is Ann, who is another one of our amazing editors, and in the black shirt is Ginny, who leads our incredible customer service team.

All the best,
Ben Buckwold

Red River Press Inc