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Our mini birthday

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Today, Feb 19th 2009, marks one year since we launched OfficeDrop in private beta. We launched as an invite-only service, with the goal of testing our Beta Launch document viewer and put our scanners to task in terms of handling a variety of documents, be it receipts, invoices, bank statements, kids’ artwork (we didn’t see that coming) or recipes.

Five months (plus a few more iterations, several user-friendly features, a few hundred gallons of coffee, loads of Kashi and a couple of instances of “What were we thinking?”) later, we launched our service. The rest, as they say, is history. And Feb 19, 2008 was our memorable first date (with history).

Posted in Entrepreneurship | 1 Comment »

Pixily Wins Audience Choice Award at WebInno 19

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

We attended our first WebInno event in September 2007, one month into founding OfficeDrop. We were very impressed with the group of people we met and we have since then aspired to present at this conference. Yesterday, that became a reality.

We are very honored to have won the Audience Choice award. Since we were chosen by an audience and not just by a panel of judges, it is a true validation of the service. Being the first in the market, we not only have to create awareness for our firm but also have to educate people on the service. Being awarded means people recognize that :

there is a need,
we have addressed that need, and
people want to use it.

Here is the proud OfficeDrop team with the award (and a big shout-out to the rest of the team that is not in this picture). GO PIXILY!!

Part of the OfficeDrop Team @ WebInno

Posted in Awards, Entrepreneurship, Pixily, Press coverage, Testimonials | 2 Comments »

Goodbye Paper, Hello Pixily! - Launched July 19th, 2008

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

We are very excited to share the great news. OfficeDrop launched its service on July 19th, 2008, less than one year since the company was founded. OfficeDrop is now open for business.

When Anand Rajaram, Vikram Kumar and I founded the company in August of 2007, we set a lofty goal of going live within a year. We had a lot of work to do, but we did it! We managed to go to market within a year. We are very proud of our achievement.

Like many successful ventures, we had the help of many who have made our dream come true: our spouses, our employees, our advisors, our customers, our friends and many well wishers.

First and foremost, Anand, Vikram and I would like to thank our respective spouses Gayatri, Vidya and Shivani. Without their support, this venture would have been dead the day it was conceived. If the three of us were able to pursue OfficeDrop full-time and work on it every waking hour, it is because they stood by us and shouldered the majority of the responsibilities.

Without all the hard work, initiative and perseverance of our employees we would not have built a winning product. For them, the product came first and everything else was next. They always looked for opportunities to make the product better and went the extra mile to realize them. We are truly fortunate to have a great team.

OfficeDrop is a customer-centric company. From the beginning we have engaged our customers and have designed the product to suit their needs. We would like to thank all the focus group participants, usability interview participants and our beta customers for supporting us over the last eight months and for giving us timely, critical and crucial feedback. They shaped the product and made it awesome. We hope that our customers will continue to support and help us evolve OfficeDrop into a valuable service for all.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank our advisors, Prof. Karl Ulrich, and Dean Harris, our friends, well wishers and business partners who supported us in the last one year in ways we did not even imagine. They connected us with the right people, they shared their wisdom, imparted knowledge and when times where tough, they encouraged us.

Please do join us in our celebration and if you have not already signed up for OfficeDrop, please do now and experience the revolution.

Yours truly,

Prasad Thammineni
Vikram Kumar
Anand Rajaram

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Pixily, Product Announcements | No Comments »

The Rookie Entrepreneur’s Reading List

Friday, June 27th, 2008

If you are a rookie entrepreneur or a wannabe entrepreneur, I’d highly recommend that you read the following :
• The art of the start - Guy Kawasaki If you had to read only one book, this should be it. I read this book initially, sort of understood the key points and then find myself going back to it time and again, when I need specific information. No nonsense, practical advice.
• Founders at work - Jessica Livingston A pretty good compilation of interviews with founders (sabeer bhatia (hotmail), Craig Newmark (Craiglist), Joel Spolsky (Fogcreek) for example). Every once a while, when you get those “knots in the stomach”, it is good to know that the feeling isnt unique to you and that almost every successful company has gone through a similar phase.
• Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation - Andrew Metrick — Read Chapter 6 to get a great overview of all the technical terms involved in the VC funding.
• Getting Real - 37signals While this is a relatively new book, its advocacy of simplicity and “release early, release often” principle won me over.
• Noam Wasserman’s blog - You will have to figure out sooner or later as to how you are going to divvy up the equity. This is a great (only?) resource that gives you data on startups.

I wanted to keep the list short and focused, and picked my must-haves. Please add your suggestions in the comments. Happy Bootstrapping

Posted in Entrepreneurship | No Comments »

How did we come up with the idea for Pixily?

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

I get this question a lot when I tell people what OfficeDrop is. Like most business ideas, the idea for OfficeDrop was born out of a personal need. Well, here is the story behind OfficeDrop:

After starting four companies, I went back to Wharton Business School to get an MBA in 2005. After I wrote my last exam in April 2007, I looked at 8000 pages of bulk packs and course notes and asked myself if there is a way I can keep those without having to carry them everywhere I moved. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to digitize all documents and carry just the Adobe PDF versions of the paper. There would be be no need for paper anymore and I can find any article, business case or class note, just by searching the documents using keywords.

$Prasad\'s documents$ After some research, I bought a high-end scanner for $800 and spent two weeks scanning all these pages. I also converted these pages into searchable PDFS similar to what OfficeDrop offers today. Even though it was a painful and a time-consuming process, it was well worth it. I refer to these documents all the time just by searching on the keywords in the documents. I have classmates calling me asking if I could share my digital versions with them. Of course, I only share them with those people who took the classes with me - just to be sure I am not violating any copyrights.

After I moved back to Boston I started performing due diligence on four of my ideas including that of OfficeDrop. The more I talked to people about OfficeDrop, the more I heard from people how much they liked it and how they wish they could use such a service. I called our part-time accountant and asked her what she does with all our documents after they are processed. She responded by saying that she stores them in her basement along with her 49 other clients documents in boxes. When I mentioned the idea to her, she was excited. This were her words: “With this idea, my clients can access their documents whenever and from wherever they want. I do not need to go looking for them anymore. This would be a huge time and money saver”. Having the customer validation, I decided to put together a team and pursue OfficeDrop.

$Vikram\'s Organized Documents$ I spoke to Anand Rajaram and Vikram Kumar (my partners in OfficeDrop) who were running jPeople (my previous startup) about what they thought about the idea. They loved the idea and they told me they could relate to the problem. Vikram is the super-organizer and Anand like me is a wannabe-organizer. All of us spend time either organizing documents into folders or in finding documents when needing them.

I asked Anand and Vikram if they are willing to join me full-time in making OfficeDrop a reality and bring paper to life. After some deliberation they said yes and in August of 2007 we founded OfficeDrop and like they say: the rest is history.

Posted in Document Management, Entrepreneurship, Paperless, Pixily | No Comments »

Indiana Jones and the Spirit of the Entrepreneur

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

As a huge Indiana Jones fan (I am http://del.icio.us/drjones and http://twitter.com/indyjones , to give you a sense), and an entrepreneur myself, Justin Petruccelli’s article in Entrepreneur.com titled Unearth your Inner Indy was a great read. No one embodies the qualities of an entrepreneur more than Indy does.

I find the lack of stereotype in Indy’s character refreshing (An archaelogy professor afraid of snakes yet a confident, globe-trotting adventurer). Indy’s can-do attitude (chasing army trucks in horses), astute thinking (deciphering the Staff of Ra), sense of humor (Shooting the Cairo swordsman) all suggest creative ways to deal with the unexpected, something that entrepreneurs have to do day-in and day-out.

Perhaps the best analogy between Indy and entrepreneurs is how Indy, in the face of adversity, always says “I’ll figure something out”. This has been a recurring theme, from my own experience at OfficeDrop. While we had a strong technology background, we started out as rookies (thats an oxymoron, right?) in the nitty-gritty of scanning, image manipulation etc,. But we “figured it out”. Our users rave about our document viewer and snippet interface, again something that we figured out. Every time we were faced with a difficult problem, we rose to the challenge and came out on top (with our fedora intact, of course).

While we have accomplished a lot and have put together a great product thus far, there is still a lot more figuring out to do (and for once, unlike Indy, we do have to plan that far ahead ) Stay tuned for exciting product updates over the next few weeks.