Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Anand Rajaram, co-founder of OfficeDrop, (i.e. my coworker) recently penned a piece on Kissmetric’s blog about how we almost doubled the conversion rate of our pricing page. Check it out!

Obviously this is very important for a SaaS company!

I’m very pleased to announce that OfficeDrop has launched our first app in the new Mac App Store. ScanDrop Mac Scanner Software connects your Mac’s scanner directly with popular cloud storage provides like Google Docs, Evernote and OfficeDrop’s own cloud filing system. I’ll keep you updated as to how this new distribution channel does for us, especially since this is a paid download. Go to our listing here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scandrop/id412518240?mt=12

We are launching the app for $1.99 in the app store, although we “pre-released” ScanDrop with a great piece of press from Lifehacker last Friday. You can also learn more about ScanDrop on our Mac Scanner Software page.

OfficeDrop is being featured in the New York Times’ Small Business case study section. The Times is doing a case study on how OfficeDrop uses background checks to help ensure clients data is protected.

There are two pieces up today on us, one that talks about how Prasad decided to start doing background checks on our employees:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/business/smallbusiness/02sbiz.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&src=busln

The other is on the “You’re the Boss” small business Times blog. Please leave a comment there if you use background checks or if you are thinking about it:

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/do-you-do-background-checks-on-job-candidates/

As I mentioned in a previous post, my company recently did a lot of cool testing during our site redesign. Anand Rajaram, OfficeDrop’s co-founder has a series of posts on Performable’s blog that talk about tips, tricks and tools that we used during the process:

Optimizing Conversion Rates Part One – Quantitative Tests

Optimizing Conversion Rates Part Two – Qualitative Tests

Optimizing Conversion Rates Part Three – Lessons Learned

I recently did a post on DIY Marketers, a site dedicated to helping CEOs with limited budgets get the most out of their marketing, called “5 Tips For A More Professional Website.”

We learned a lot at OfficeDrop when we remodeled our website, and these are 5 things I think many small businesses (and startups) should be doing on their website – things I often see overlooked. They mainly revolve around the idea of generating “social proof” that your service/product is trustworthy and worth putting money into.

Cloud computing is evolving as quickly as you’d imagine it would – a technology with only one place to update, upgrade, re-engineer (vs. standard installed software that needs to be updated on desktops/servers throughout the land…)

I’m getting to live this first hand at OfficeDrop. We have changed our strategies and service rapidly over the past year. With this change comes a pretty major change on how we view cloud computing.

I’ve just published a blog post on OfficeDrop’s website called “OfficeDrop: All About the Cloud,” where I talk about how we see SMBs using cloud based SaaS – and some of the surprising learnings we recently gained as we rolled out our digital office, cloud content management platform and cloud filing cabinet.

My bit take aways are:

1. One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is the ability to easily connect different SaaS systems with each other, allowing small businesses to move their data and information in between different best of breed services as needed.
2. With SaaS in the cloud, small businesses don’t have to have as much tech expertise in house, since upgrades, maintenance, equipment, etc are all done off site by the various SaaS providers.
3. Here is the surprising one to me: SMBs like using apps to interact with the cloud. I’m not going to claim that the browser is dead, but apps seem to be the thing right now that is driving adoption!

I’ve had great luck at OfficeDrop using the “crowd” to help us with important decisions. We very actively survey our customers on new features, pricing changes, etc. Our most important use of the crowd was when we changed our name from Pixily to OfficeDrop. This name change was an important step for us, since we wanted to reposition ourselves from a document scanning company to a digital office provider. SmallBusinessComputing recently quoted me on using crowdsourcing; check out the article!

We’ve had some cool developments at my startup, OfficeDrop – mail-in scanning service + document management – and I figured, why not brag about it on my blog.

First of all, we have really had some aggressive integrations with Google Aps. These basically allow people to get paper into Google Docs, either by our self-scan scanning software download or by linking an OfficeDrop account directly with Google Docs, which pushes the mail-in scans directly into Google Docs accounts as text-searchable PDFs. For us, this is a pretty big deal. A blogger lead a piece on this integration with the title:

OfficeDrop Puts Pressure On Microsoft

Very awesome! (Scroll to the middle of the article) I’m not sure Microsoft feels pressure from us, but we think our integration is a big deal…

You may have noticed that Prasad Thammineni, my occasional co-blogger here at Startable, is becoming very occasional. Well, this is partly because he’s been writing some good stuff on other sites like Small Business Trends. His two most recent articles were published this month and are getting some good traction:

20 Tips Small Businesses Can Use to Build Web Credibility

and

Finding the Application Marketplace That’s Right for Your Small Business

Check them out!

A while ago my company changed its name from Pixily to OfficeDrop. While we briefly talked about this on our blog, two recent posts have talked about this change. Dharmesh Shah’s OnStartups has a piece on coming up with a company name written by me (and OfficeDrop’s fearless marketing intern Matt Fellows). Matt and I detailed the name change brainstorming and customer validation/involvement process. I’m glad Dharmesh published this piece – he and I have had some pretty involved/heated discussions on the importance of choosing your startup’s name and the ramifications of actually getting a particular name.

Ivana Taylor, a small business technology and marketing professional, posted an interview she did with me on the QuestionPro blog on how we changed our name from Pixily to OfficeDrop. It was nice of her to do such and extensive writeup on our process.

Startup naming is a very difficult thing to do. It’s hard to find a name that customers will remember, that is somehow descriptive or evokes what it is that you do – and finally one that you can get the domain name of. Domain name hording isn’t too bad of an idea – OfficeDrop owns over 200 domains, and I’ve been collecting a ton recently too around the concept of the smart grid and smart grid applications.