We almost had 1000 Sign Ups this month

manojranaweera 01/12/2011
[6] comments

In July 2011, I announced a new dawn for edocr.com, having founded the company in 2007 with few friends. Six months have passed by, and it is worth exploring the progress we have made.

Since July 2011, we:

  1. Re-wrote the document processing engine, moving away from python to php. We also moved to EC2 from in-house servers. With this movement, our full technology stack is provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). We can now process most documents within seconds of uploading. In the past, it used to take hours with significant high failure rate.
  2. Replaced Macromedia Flash paper with flash based document viewer, offering greater resolution and flexible ways to read documents.
  3. We can now support lot more file formats than before, i.e. .txt, .pdf, .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .xlsx and .odt
  4. Enforced document limits and streamlined pricing plans. Moved from freemium to permanent free trial.
  5. Simplified sign up process from a long form to a very short form.
  6. Improved My Account page, giving better information.
  7. We hired a great designer, Chamara Peiris and launched a new home page simplifying why every business should consider using our services. Going forward, we will continue to refine home page, as well as redesign the rest of the webpages to reflect home page design.
  8. We improved performance by refining MySQL queries, and the work is continuing.
  9. I attended two key conferences,  GSocial and Small Business Web Summit in San Francisco, and met over 200 tech entrepreneurs, mostly in SaaS.
  10. As a result of my visit, we integrated with a cool web app, Bufferapp.com to generate automatic tweets when documents are uploaded. Do expect more integrations over the next 6 months.

Over the next 6 months, we will work on:

  1. Improve user experience, both in terms of design and performance.
  2. Be HTML5 ready. The four documents on home page are HTML5 compatible, but their functionality is lot less than flash document viewer at present.
  3. Increase scalability of our architecture and resilience.
  4. Integrate with web applications which enhance customer value.
  5. List on Google Apps Market Place.
  6. Introduce easier sign on.
  7. Become more social.
  8. Spin off CRMthis.com to allow exporting of document leads to CRMs.

More than any of above, we are becoming more customer centric. We can respond to customer queries much faster than before, and agile enough to introduce new features when requested, provided they make commercial sense.

The more you engage with us, the better we become meeting your needs…

Almost forgot, we were 34 accounts short of signing up 1000 new users last month.

 

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  • Anonymous

    Nice one Manoj – all your hard work appears to be starting to reap rewards. Well done to you and all your team!

  • http://twitter.com/edocr edocr

    Thanks Mike. How’s your launch?

  • Anonymous

    Lots of good feedback so we’re doing a revamp launching soon – will keep you posted.

  • http://twitter.com/p7r Paul Robinson

    Glad to see that edocr’s tech is finally catching up with the vision. Well done, keep plugging on, and let’s see what the local tech community can do to raise the profile a bit: I’ll gee them on a bit. :-)

  • http://twitter.com/edocr edocr

    Hey Paul, very much appreciated, especially coming from you. For the first time since we were incorporated, we are building edocr.com with love and care – and that feels awfully different to past years. There is an immense work load. We are very keen to work with independent developers who want to build cool integrations (especially with DMS/CMS/ECM for one-click upload to edocr.com). Let’s hope some of the local talent will find us interesting. Any nudges in the right direction is very much appreciated.

  • http://twitter.com/p7r Paul Robinson

    It’s the love and care that we were trying to get you to “get” I think. Devs don’t bash out code, we solve design problems with code. I definitely thought you weren’t understanding the value of that back in 2007, and were over-valuing the pitch/sales strategy. It sounds and looks like you have a bit more balance going on, and that will lead to a really polished product that people love. I’ll take a look at the integration options again in a few weeks and see if any ideas spring to mind.