Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Boundless is looking for on campus marketing managers. These are positions for undergraduate students who want to get marketing and management experience while they are in school. We are looking at many, many campuses across the country, and there is a good chance that your university is one of them. You can visit Boundless’s On Campus Marketing Program to apply for one of these jobs.

We need you to:

• Hire and manage hourly reps to execute on-campus marketing strategies,
• Approach classes, clubs and events to spread the word about Boundless,
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to acquire new users.
• The role is fun, fast-paced and varied: you should laugh in the face of adversity & show us how you can dominate your campus!

Requirements
You should be:

• Involved on-campus & extremely outgoing,
• Exude energy, fun & a passion for ‘getting stuff done’,
• A Sophomore, Junior or Senior, please!
• Prior marketing & management experience is a plus.

One of the big perks of my new marketing position with Boundless is that I get to work with amazing undergraduate students across the nation. These students are charged with letting people on their campuses know about Boundless and free textbooks. We recently had a great on campus competition, where we motivated our on campus student managers to hit aggressive sign up goals – and a lot of them really did an amazing job! Below is a cool post on the “campus battle” with some great pictures of the action.

http://storify.com/GoBoundless/how-campus-battle-started-a-textbook-revolution

Well, it’s time to brag again about the great work we’ve been doing getting press here at OfficeDrop. This past Friday two HUGE publications wrote up the ExpenseMagic/OfficeDrop integration! Both TechCrunch and Fast Company covered how we make it fast and simple to create expense reports right from your mobile phones or PC’s desktop.

TechCrunch on OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic

TechCrunch writer Alex Williams covered the integration OfficeDrop/ExpenseMagic combination, writing that “today I had a briefing with OfficeDrop which now has a service that works with ExpenseMagic for scanning and creating expense documents from an iOS, Android device or your desktop. It seems good enough to offer the potential for eliminating much of the manual work I do in preparing expense reports during my precious weekends.”

When Alex interviewed me for the piece, he also asked a lot of questions about the history of OfficeDrop. We discussed how the company was originally a mail in scanning service, and he immediately understood how we used that background as a basis for entering the cloud storage world:

“OfficeDrop has scanning and optics in its DNA. The company started as a service you could use to send your mail for scanning. The model did not work. People wanted to do the scanning themselves. So they pivoted, built a strong search engine to go with the scanning and now offer a combined storage and collaboration service. They see themselves fitting between Box and Dropbox, offering a service for small business people for easily scanning receipts, ideally from a mobile device. Google Drive is also seen as a competitor.”

 FastCompany “Free You From Expense Report Hell”

Fast Company’s Christina Chaey’s piece on the integration has an awesome title: “OfficeDrop And ExpenseMagic Want To Free You From Expense Report Hell.” Of course, we do think that’s what the integration will help you do, since getting automated expense reports is potentially a huge time saver!

Christina says, “Through the new partnership, mobile and desktop users will be able to combine OfficeDrop’s smart text recognition technology, which makes the text in your scans searchable, with ExpenseMagic’s data extraction to generate expense reports from any receipts you scan using OfficeDrop. Receipts will go into an ExpenseMagic “uploads” folder, from which ExpenseMagic’s India-based bookkeepers will generate reports that they’ll then drop into a “results” folder overnight.”

We are pretty happy with the way we’ve evolved into a searchable cloud storage system, with the smartphone scanner applications that help small businesses digitize paper, plus the file search engine that helps you find the exact document that you are looking for in an instant. It’s really great to be recognized by a major technology publications like TechCrunch and Fast Company!

I’ll be adding these two pieces of press to the OfficeDrop News and Reviews page soon. Looks like there are a few more on the horizon, which probably talks to the importance of partnerships in today’s cloud/app computing environment.

Ok, well here is my chance to brag a little bit. OfficeDrop recently released our updated Android scanner app, and included 7 inch tablet support. Well, we got some great press with this OfficeDrop Android Update. So I’m going to show off some of it here! As a reminder, I firmly believe that a solid PR strategy is imperatitive to any app marketing efforts. Users will need to remember your app’s name, head to the app store and actually type and then download the app. Even better, if you can get a reporter to link directly to the app in the store then the reader could go directly to the listing and get the app right away. Press does work for app marketing; our Android downloads are way, way up.

Anyways, here is the press that our Android app has gotten recently:

OfficeDrop Android App Press Reviews

August 13th, 2012

OfficeDrop – a Top 25 Business App for Android - Network World

July 30th, 2012

OfficeDrop, Escanea y guarda tus documentos en la nube - Lo Nuevo de Hoy

July 24th, 2012

OfficeDrop Review - Android Rundown

July 16th, 2012

OfficeDrop: Turn Your Android Into a Scanner - App for Android

July 16th, 2012

OfficeDrop Android Review - Android Authority

July 11th, 2012

How Mobile Apps are Changing Software - PC World

July 10th, 2012

Scan Your Receipts for Safe Keeping - Lifehacker

July 6th, 2012

OfficeDrop Releases its First Android Tablet App - BSDB Blog

July 6th, 2012

OfficeDrop Android, iOS Cloud Apps Help SMBs Improve Workflow - Mobile Enterprises

July 5th, 2012

Scan Documents From Mobile Devices Faster, Easier with OfficeDrop - CMSWire

If you actually want to get the OfficeDrop Android app, you can get it for free by clicking on the following button from your device:

Does branding still matter?

I’d like to think so. This video of a 5 year old giving her impressions of different companies’ logos is very cute, and reinforces the idea that having an identifiable brand does (probably) still make a big difference for most companies.

Ok I’ve got to brag a little here. OfficeDrop recently launched our newest mobile app, the OfficeDrop Android Paper-to-Go app, and we’ve had great success with new users and downloads. I’m working on a post about how SEO may be dying, at least for SaaS services, since the huge majority of our new users are coming from app marketplaces these days. I really think we are undergoing a significant shift in the way people find and buy software and web services… and I’m personally having a ton of fun trying to figure it out!

Anyways, here is some of the recent press OfficeDrop has gotten on our new Android app:

May 18, 2011

OfficeDrop: Scan Docs, Turn Them into PDF & Make Searchable (Android)

Using Paper-to-Go you can scan physical documents using your smartphone’s camera and store these documents … other file formats can be uploaded and processed as well. Read OfficeDrop’s Paper-to-Go Review on makeuseof…

I’ve made noise recently about how Boston needs a stronger early stage technology press/blog ecosystem.

But I’ve also been thinking about what I can do to help fix this problem. I know that there are real journalists and dedicated bloggers here working hard to put out legit pieces on the New England startup scene. How can I support them?

One of the things that I think helps set the publications in other cities apart is the large number of readers who interact with the articles – in particular, in the comment sections. There are real conversations that happen around the stories by members of the startup communities in the comments on blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable. You don’t see that as much in Boston.

So, my New Years resolution is this:

I will leave at least one comment a day on a Boston tech blog

I know this isn’t much, but if other members of the community would do this too we would not only show our support for the journalists who try to help Boston tech companies get the word out, we would also potentially help increase the dialog that goes on around the local scene. (If I miss a day I’ll make it up the following with an extra comment…)

Maybe this is putting the cart before the horse. I know that other the big tech blogs have a lot of traffic, which leads to the large number of comments. But I also know, from my own blog and from the different blog publishing I’ve done for OfficeDrop, that after there are one or more comments on a post other readers are more likely to come out of the woodwork and post comments. And a healthy number of comments helps build community around a topic.

Here are the blogs that I want to try to help promote. Please let me know if I’m missing any:

Mass High Tech Galen Moore is out there everyday trying to make noise for New England.

BostInnovation I’m hopeful these guys will evolve into our own local Mashable.

Xconomy Boston I love the national ambitions coupled with local coverage.

Scott Kirsner Boston’s best known technology promoter.

Let’s try to help these local bloggers take their message to a national level. Is anyone else up for this? You could show your support by leaving a comment

Very unrelated links, but both I found to be very interesting.

Web Design – Google and an Example

An amazing piece by Justin O’Beirne on why Google Maps is so much more readable than the competition. He must have put a massive amount of work in to this post. I love the modifications he makes to Bing’s maps to make them better based on what he sees Google doing. Awesome stuff.

Taking Money off the Table to Boost Growth

One of the venture firms I worked for, Summit Partners, used to say that letting a founder take a little money off the table often boosted the company’s growth rate. I know this may sound counter-intuitive – if the founder just got $, won’t they become a lazy fat cat? Roger Ehrenberg has a great post on letting your winners run – even if that means letting the founders take a little money off the table prior to the real exit. I think he explains how a little liquidity can give the founders the confidence to go for the big time with their company.

My ocassional co-blogger and OfficeDrop’s CEO has a good post on Small Business Trends with some tips on working with outsourced designers. Like many startups, we can not afford a full time designer, so make extensive use of outsourced designers to help us with everything from logo design to site design to button design. It is working well for us, and Prasad shares a number of good tips in his “5 tips for working with outsourced designers” article.

I’ll be speaking at a very cool event next week in Cambridge on the 5th in the evening. The event is called “Customer Development: The Second Decade — with Steve Blank’s co-author Bob Dorf.” Come out and hear some pretty interesting folks talk about startup marketing. The main speaker will be Bob Dorf, and the event is moderated by Simeon Simeonov. Other speakers include:

• David Cancel, serial entrepreneur and founder of Compete, Lookery, Ghostery and Performable.
• Andy Moss, founder and CEO of ESMZone.
• Andy Greenawalt, founder and CEO of Perimeter eSecurity and Continuity.net.
• Healy Jones, founder of Startable and VP Marketing at OfficeDrop.
• Rob May, founder and CEO of Backupify.

The event is free (sponsored by General Catalyst, a local venture capital firm.) To register for the customer development event click here. The event will start at 6 PM and will be hosted at Microsoft’s NERD Center, One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA. Everyone should come!!

The conference is organized by General Catalyst Partners and FastIgnite. Bob Dorf will provide an exclusive peek “under the covers” at some of the many new rules and advancements that Steve Blank, Bob and the ecosystem of thousands of entrepreneur, marketer and investor practitioners have developed over the past several years. The event will feature a keynote by Bob, guest appearances by entrepreneurs and executives who have successfully applied customer development in their businesses and a discussion led by General Catalyst Executive in Residence and FastIgnite CEO Simeon Simeonov.