Sharedocview.com vs Docsend
We often get asked the question of how does Sharedocview.com compares to Docsend. The last person to ask me this question was my old San Diego friend AL Bsharah.
1 Pricing: Be the most affordable solution…ALWAYS!
One of the reasons we started Sharedocview.com was because we felt that Docsend price was too high and unaffordable in most parts of the world.
The Bay Area is a magic place, though a coffee can cost $10 and a monthly rent for a studio is at $4,000 a month…which makes it one of the most expensive areas in the world.
We feel that too many Bay Area companies are forced to increase prices due to pressure from their local environment and from investors that see affordable prices as a curse.
The world is a big place and a lot more people need affordable software, actually after COVID even many other Americans feel this need. Plus as #prahalad says “ Wealth is at the bottom of the pyramid”.
Of course we do aim to build up ShareDocView.com to be extremely robust for enterprises as well and thus go upmarket but we also want to keep an affordable entry point, also thanks to constantly decreasing server costs. We work with #aws AWS Startups, the market leader in cloud solutions.
2 Deliver unique features and benefits
We already built features that we always missed on Docsend and we will keep building more innovative features with our customers
For instance the ability for others to immediately view your document yet to ask for email when they want to download, which we have seen really helps to get more leads since “Seeing is believing”.
Or the ability to add your own company logo, corporate colors and even a custom URL on top of the logo when sharing presentations as you can see here on the left.
As of March 2022 we delivered the ability to embed presentations or landing pages on your own website. Check out vincenzobelpiede.com/docs to see an example.
Of course we just got started with delivering unique features and as you can see on the next point we will figure out what features to build with our community on our Public Trello roadmap…see next point!
3 We take product co-creation with our customers very seriously
We have a public roadmap where we co-create our next features with our users, we’ve never seen something similar by Docsend
Check out our public Roadmap here on Trello
We are excited to see so many people joining our public roadmap in voting and proposing new features. We feel much more confident and motivated i delivering our next features.
In November 2021 we hit 300 customers, so to know that over 50 people are contributing to our roadmap is extremely exciting.
In March 2022 we hit 500 customers, and now over 70 people are contributing to our roadmap.
DISCUSS: Sharedocview.com can have a positive impact on the environment by reducing email attachments
While Docsend delivered the same benefits they never seem to highlight this topic (truth to be told it has become exponentially more important in the last 2–3 years)
I’ve never heard Docsend making a point about their solution is greener and more environmentally friendly than attachments. Indeed most people don’t even know that. As we all know doing something sometimes is NOT enough, you must be good at communicating.
DISCUSS — Bay area vs Worldwide…using Docsend for Pitching your Startup vs ShareDocView for selling and marketing your products
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 3 years so I’ve experienced the “bubble” which makes you think that fundraising is so important to everyone around the world.
We are focusing more on rest of the world instead of just Bay Area, we are focusing more on sales and marketing use cases instead of startups raising funding as we feel it’s a much more niche use case.
OTHER TOPICS
We are the underdog
We are an independent startup, hungry for growth and innovation while Docsend was recently sold to Dropbox
We’ve all seen how many times after M&As the speed of innovation goes down since both the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are reduced after acquisitions.
Furthermore we are wondering if a startup that raised over 15m and sold for 165m is a good exit for Silicon Valley standard where VCs are always looking for 100x exits. To be honest we really hope for Docsend founders that they had a good exit and are happy, since they worked hard for many years.
FUTURE: Become a central hub for Doc sharing
Start with Document Sharing then expand to Signing and ability to sell documents
Document Sharing alone always felt a bit too narrow of a scope, and while there are a few document signing solutions out there there is no single solution that allows you to share docs with links to get leads, signatures and get paid from ONE place.
Especially after COVID many more professionals ranging from coaches to trainers need to get more leads, sign more contracts and increase revenue.
DocuSign became one of the largest SaaS companies just doing signing, so we definitely believe there is a large market opportunity.
Companies like elopage have raised 38m Eur pitching itself as a #fintech #saas company as they allow to sell documents.
Still, much love and respect to Docsend
Having said this, we realize that Docsend, which was started in 2013, raised over $15m USD and recently sold to Dropbox has been a pioneer in the document sharing space so we very much respect their work. We hope we can keep building and expanding on the work they began in order to move the whole industry forward while democratizing access to these amazing solutions worldwide.
