“Make us smart” with smarchive and crowdfunding

My “make us smart” contribution for today is about a Munich-based company founded in 2010 that developed a cloud based archive where users can store all their paperwork.

You can either scan your documents or take a picture with your Smartphone and put them into your virtual folder in the cloud. The technology would actually label and sort the documents and store them for you. If you already receive your invoices per email or have some online access to your account, you can just forward it to a virtual mailbox that would then include those documents into your archive. It helps you keeping all your stuff in one central place.

Why is the archive actually smart?
The technology automatically reads out addresses and dates and more importantly reminds you of specific dates, e.g. when you have to cancel a subscription or a contract. Moreover, it reads out other data such as monthly spendings and gives you an overview of your total expenses.

As you can see on their website they are still in closed beta, slowly but surely adapting the product to the customer needs!
If you would like to participate in the beta, fell free to sign up on www.smarchive.com

Recently, they received a 100k € funding in crowdfunding. Within only 3 days they got 144 investors on board!

That’s why I actually want also to point out the concept of crowdfunding here. I think it is pretty interesting from the point of view that it gives you a lot of credibility and validation when you can get so many people to invest in you on an individual basis. Doesn’t that also confirm somehow that there are some people that are keen on getting the product out there?

Here are some crowdfunding opportunities for those of you who are interested: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201111/comparison-of-crowdfunding-websites.html
Also watch the TEDx Event with Victoria Westcott: Crowdfunding 101 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY5EfaF61hI

Feel free to comment on anything or raise questions on the product or the company!

4 thoughts on ““Make us smart” with smarchive and crowdfunding

  1. Darya Sakharova

    Hi Lena,
    Thanks for the post! I was wondering what is their business model for making money? Are they planning to charge for the service or use advertising? Also, I was wondering about privacy. I know in the US, if you store documents in the cloud, the US government can gain access to it. Is it different in Europe? Do you think there are some privacy concerns here? Would people be afraid to use it because of these concerns?
    – Darya

  2. Ariel Chait Post author

    Smarchive seems a lot like http://www.expensify.com which plays well with mobile scanning and data extraction apps like http://lemon.com/. This is definitely a huge issue for anyone who would like to track expenses and especially for people who have to fill out expense reports. I wonder if there is an app that has emerged as best in class for this kind of thing.

  3. clawler

    Awesome post! The first article that you linked particularly interested me because even though I’ve heard of Kickstarter, I haven’t heard of Indiegogo or any of those other crowdfunding companies. One major gripe that many customers have with Kickstarter is that only people in the United States can use it due to its reliance on Amazon Payments. I haven’t looked at the numbers or anything, but despite its restriction to the American market, Kickstarter seems like it has garnished way more attention on aggregators like Hacker News than the other international crowdfunding solutions. I think that it would be very interesting to try to figure out why that seems to be the case!

  4. Kari McGlynn Post author

    I think crowdfunding a start-up through a service like Kickstarter is a very smart way to go if you can make it work. If the elevator pitch and prototype for your service is compelling enough to get a significant number of people to donate money to see it built, then you obviously have validated your hypothesis of demand, and when you launch you already have a built-in beta group. Cool example!

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