Interview with the CEO of Approver.com

Q) Where did your idea come from?
A) Approver.com was a classic example of a software developer "scratching his own itch" -- working for big internet companies like eBay and Yahoo!, I would regularly receive documents to review sent to me as email attachments. But it wasn't always clear why the sender was sending me the document or what they wanted me to look at specifically. After receiving a document to review, I'd inevitably receive a deluge of "me too" comments from all the people on the CC list, and six months later I'd find it impossible to find the document because it had drifted to the dark recesses of my inbox.

Sharing Powerpoint slides and Word documents as email attachments is not a terrific user experience for sure, but it also occurred to me that if the document represents the end results of weeks of work, it seems crazy to store the majority of a company's knowledge in such a haphazard and ad-hoc way.

So, Approver.com is our attempt to fix everything that's wrong with using email as a document collaboration tool. Instead of sending the document in email, you upload it to Approver.com, then invite people to review it. You receive alerts when someone views, approves or comments on your document. And the document, reviewer list and comments are all on one page so you can easily return to it whenever you like.

Q) What is your elevator pitch?
A) Have you ever sent someone a document in email only to wonder if it ever got there? If the recipient ignored it? If it got spam-filtered? If you forgot to attach the document to the email? If you accidentally CCed your competitor on a confidential document? Approver.com addresses all those problems. It's a document-management and workflow system for the majority of knowledge workers who would never use such a system because they are too complicated, too expensive and too internet-clueless.

Q) How is your proposition different from competitors?
A) We are not on a crusade to get people to use the web browser as their word processor (although we have an in-browser word processor), and we're not on a crusade to get people to publish promiscuously (although we enable users to publish to the web or to their blogs from within Approver.com). Instead, we want to work with the applications that people use today to provide them a secure and simple way to share with trusted collagues. You can upload Microsoft Office or OpenOffice documents to Approver.com and share them that way, if you want.

Q) Who do you see as your main competition?
A) Email attachments and commodity file-sharing sites. We are doing to email attachments what Plaxo did to email contacts.

Q) Why will you succeed?
A) Partly because we're betting against email. Email isn't going away tomorrow, but in a world in which people declare "email bankruptcy" I'd say its usefulness may have peaked. So as email becomes an increasingly painful way to collaborate, people will look for alternatives.

Q) What are your biggest successes so far?
A) In less than a year we've generated a critical mass of users (including paid users) with a small team and a marketing budget of $0.

Q) How will/do you make money?
A) The site is free to try, and we never charge document reviewers/approvers just to look at documents that others have sent them. We charge document creators to create or upload documents, and we'll be rolling out additional value-added features to our users over time.

Q) What is your target in terms of annual revenue?
A) In a world in which only 80% of corporate documents never touch a corporate document management system, we believe we're easily looking at a billion-dollar opportunity.

Q) Have you received funding? If so, how much and from whom?
A) We're bootstrapping the business at the moment.

Source: FrostFireBuzz