OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, recently wrote a piece with simple tips on how your small business can save money in the new year on Small Business Trends. Check it out and leave a comment!
OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, recently wrote a piece with simple tips on how your small business can save money in the new year on Small Business Trends. Check it out and leave a comment!
I recently posted a small business marketing tip on DIY Marketers on how to use your LinkedIn profile as an SEO tool. Check it out:
Anand Rajaram, OfficeDrop’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer, has just completed a list of tips and tools we used here during our recent website redesign to improve visitor conversion. You can see the entire list of his articles on the Performable blog.
Optimizing Conversion Rates Part One – Quantitative Tests
OfficeDrop’s co-founder, Anand Rajaram, has recently written a post on tests we used here at OfficeDrop during our recent site redesign to optimize our conversion rate. The post is found on Performable’s blog here: Optimizing Conversion Rates with Simple Tests.
When we remodeled our site, we took advantage of a large number of online tests to make the site experience better. Anand set up and ran some pretty cutting edge tests that helped us understand what our visitors were looking for, how they interacted with the site and where they got confused/lost the message/didn’t like the navigation. The post I’ve linked to above is the first in a series that he is going to write on how we did this.
Anand mentions a few pretty cool, cutting edge testing tools that we used, including UserTesting, Feedback Army, and FiveSecondTest.
Special thanks to the folks over at Performable for giving us the opportunity to post on their blog. They are a local, Cambridge MA company focused on helping startups turn website visitors into customers, and are a great contributor to the startup scene here in the Boston area.
On Tuesday, October 5th, Healy Jones – OfficeDrop’s Vice President of Marketing, will be speaking at the “Customer Development: The Second Decade — with Steve Blank’s co-author Bob Dorf.” The event will start at 6 PM and will be hosted at Microsoft’s NERD Center, One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA.
The event is free (sponsored by General Catalyst, a local venture capital firm.) To register for the customer development event click here.
More about the conference: At Customer Development: The Second Decade, a FutureM event 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, 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.
The March 1999 Fortune magazine raved about The One to One Fieldbook, which Bob Dorf co-authored, saying, “if your company is launching a customer-focused strategy…it sets the agenda.” Bob has advised more than a score of startups on customer development, including Steve Blank’s startup, Epiphany, as well as Broadvision, and Markettools, among others. Entrepreneurial from the age of 12, he personally founded six substantial startups, including—as he puts it—“two homeruns, two base hits, and two solid tax losses.” Dorf+Stanton Communications, founded at age 22 in his living room, grew from a staff of two—Bob and a St. Bernard—to more than 150, when Bob sold it in 1989. Dorf lives in Stamford with his wife Fran, a serial published novelist. An avid bicyclist and skier, Bob’s proudest startup by far is daughter Rachel, a psychologist who recently made him a grandpa.
A parallel entrepreneur and investor, Sim has co-founded several companies, most recently Better Advertising & Thing Labs, and has played a key role in dozens of v1.0s, financings and exits. Through a partnership between FastIgnite and General Catalyst Partners, Sim helps entrepreneurs with big ideas find Product/Market Fit and happy, paying customers while building a team and raising capital along the way. Previously, Sim was a partner at Polaris Venture Partners and chief architect at Allaire and Macromedia (now Adobe). He blogs at blog.simeonov.com, tweets as @simeons and lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, son and an adopted dog named Tye.
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.
DIYMarketers, a resource for CEOs looking for affordable marketing tips, published a piece by Healy Jones (i.e. OfficeDrop’s Marketing department), called “5 Tips for a More Professional Website.”
We learned a lot when we relaunced our website, and these are some of the key ideas we used when we remodeled the OfficeDrop home page. Hopefully some other small businesses will find these tips helpful!
I’m sure you remember how we changed our name a few months ago, and how we shared the way we came up with the new one. Now, all of that handy name-changing info is hosted on the entrepreneur section of About.com
About.com is an awesome resource to learn about almost anything. The article is part of a set that share the theme of crowdsourcing. Mainly how to effectively use crowdsourcing to the benefit of your company. Since we did a lot of crowdsourcing of employees and customers to change our name, we offered our story to About.com writer, Mitchell York, who was happy to include our input. We were happy to contribute by sharing our knowledge and experience to create a guide for changing your company name, and are honored to be featured on About.com Crowdsourcing was a big help for us in getting this done, and we encourage any business owners to look into crowdsourcing for various business tasks.
Thanks go out to Mitchell York for getting us on there, and for providing great content for entrepreneurs on About.com!
You might have heard about OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad’s radio interview last week; he was interviewed by loyal OfficeDrop customer, Greg Skidmore, on his AM1490WGCH radio show, Greenwhich Entrepreneurs.
Greg asked some great questions and Prasad fielded them all with helpful answers. A few of Greg’s questions (paraphrased):
For the answers to these questions and more, those who missed it can listen or download the interview below (it’s the first segment titled “OfficeDrop”).
The interview was packed with helpful tips for entrepreneurs. Topics covered included:
Lowered costs of web services for small businesses
Tips for small business owners
Prasad’s previous ventures and his inspirations for them
The roots of OfficeDrop
Prasad’s youth and how he developed an entrepreneurial spirit
Lessons learned marketing to small businesses compared to enterprises
New OfficeDrop features
Greg also had some nice things to say about OfficeDrop throughout, including the following quote about the OfficeDrop document search feature:
Greg (in respect to financial documents): “You have to either be absolutely meticulous with your filing, or make your documents searchable. I think it’s a lot more time effective to make them searchable.”
Thanks again to Greg Skidmore for hosting Prasad, for using OfficeDrop, and saying nice things about us on the radio. We enjoyed the show and look forward to serving your document needs.
We’re proud to announce today that OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, will be a guest on radio show, Greenwich Entrepreneur, on AM1490WGCH, The Voice of Fairfield and Westchester Counties.
The show airs at 9:30am tomorrow morning and Prasad will be discussing entrepreneurship & starting companies with host and OfficeDrop customer, Greg Skidmore, President of Belray Asset Management.
For those of you interested in startups companies and getting a new business going, we hope you tune in to hear Prasad’s entrepreneurial insight. To tune in from your computer, just follow this link, or you can visit http://wgch.com/showarchive/ge.shtml and hit the “Listen Live” button.
We’ll be tuned in rooting for Prasad here in the office and we hope you enjoy the show too. Special thanks to Greg Skidmore for having Prasad on the show and for scanning your documents with OfficeDrop!
OfficeDrop was featured in a recent Christian Science Monitor article on how startups are creating jobs despite the recession and how high growth small businesses can help reduce America’s high unemployment rate. The article states, “Innovative entrepreneurialism has always been at the core of America. It may now be the best hope for the return of the country’s self-confidence – or at the least, for simply putting Americans back to work.”
The article profiles OfficeDrop (still named Pixily when the article was researched). The print article includes a great photo of some of our fearless scanning associates – check out the second photo! The piece says:
In the Boston area, a start-up called Pixily is growing jobs by helping small businesses ditch their file cabinets and store their documents digitally. Founder Prasad Thammineni, a serial entrepreneur from India, says he expects to double his payroll this year to about 20 employees.
“Being able to find information efficiently is the reason [businesses] find the service useful,” says Mr. Thammineni.
Like many entrepreneurs, he stumbled on the idea for a business while trying to solve a problem – figuring out how to store his graduate-school notes. But what defines an entrepreneur is turning an epiphany into a viable product. In this case it took some nimble software, developed by a Pixily cofounder, that offers a no-fuss way to process all the documents that clients mail in monthly.
These kinds of employers represent the spearhead of job creation, even if many of them fail. “There’s no question that they [high-growth firms] are critical to recovery,” says Rob Atkinson, head of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington. “Their role in job creation is just so great.”
At OfficeDrop, we are happy to be growing and serving more and more customers. We hope other great startups will continue to hire and help the US get back on its feet.
Copyright © 2010 Pixily. All rights reserved.
