Those of our subscribers who have been reading Boss News for a while will know that we feature regular “Business Leader” interviews, where we invite established business leaders from the ECM/IM sector to give an overview of themselves, their organisation and how they perceive things will develop in the future.  To give a balanced sector overview, we have now created a new series, focussing on start-up or early stage businesses, providing new, innovative, offerings relevant to the sector.  

In our travels and meetings we meet a variety of such companies, all of whom face their own specific challenges, yet there are also common themes. In general, such new entrants claim they have what they perceive to be a disruptive solution or solutions. However, the majority experience similar  challenges such as funding, cash flow, lack sales & marketing resources, routes to market, pricing & distribution models, market positioning  as well as which markets to target to gain the greatest traction and visibility.  Those that break through these challenges will likely reap significant rewards as this sector continues to evolve, expand and adjust to the changing demands of the new digital economy. Boss News recently sat down with Christian Marchsreiter, CEO of SmashDOCs, to find out about his start-up.

BN: Welcome to Boss News, Christian, could you start by giving us a brief outline of your background and what led you to create SMASHDOCs

CM: I was working in IT as a Project Manager and struggling every day with dozens of versions and hundreds of changes, comments and emails when I had to write and review documents together with my colleagues and business partners.

I was continuously searching for tools supposed to simplify my daily work but at some point I realized that all these solutions worked the same way. The ideas and concepts these solutions are based on were invented a long time ago (the first version of WORD entered the market in 1983!). Of course, every vendor tries to improve their solutions but it's like riding a horse - it's fine as long as you don't want to fly with it. The expectations have changed, but the tools have stayed the same - and are no longer the ideal choice.

Today, we expect so much more from word processing and document collaboration than we used to in the past (like a combination of version control, tracking changes, multi-party-review, real-time-editing together with others, intensive communication etc.) However, I only found tools which would fulfill some of these requirements, never all of them. This was mainly due to old-fashioned ideas, concepts and technologies that addressed some pain points, but never the problem as a whole.

I found out what we had to change in general so document collaboration could become way easier and faster compared to the status quo. The result of my research was SMASHDOCs.

BN: SMASHDOCs would appear to have developed an innovative approach to managing collaboration in document creation and version control; can you tell us a bit more about how it works in practice?

CM: SMASHDOCs is a web application made for collaborative authoring and reviewing. With SMASHDOCs you can write, discuss and review documents much more easily and up to 10x faster, when compared to traditional word processors like MS Word or GoogleDocs.

The essential difference is that SMASHDOCs is an intelligent document which lives, thinks and cares about the user.

Let me quickly explain two main differences compared to non-intelligent documents:

1. Version control
To-date, changes and comments were saved in dozens, sometimes even hundreds of versions of one and the same document, which is totally confusing. Even if you just change one word in a 200-pages-document and then click on "Save" you've nevertheless created a copy of all 200 pages. That's a totally out-dated and inefficient way of managing changes in a document.

SMASHDOCs however, remembers all changes and comments and saves them automatically in just one document - paragraph-by-paragraph. So, with one click you can track the full history of every section (text, images, tables) in your document. At any time. No more digging around in previous versions.

2. Track changes
Traditional documents always look the same to all users, so every user is forced to compare the latest version of the document with the last version he knows. And then everyone's wasting time with proofreading.

An intelligent document "knows" what's new to each individual user. It automatically highlights all new changes and comments for a user, so manually comparing versions and proofreading become completely redundant. It's incredibly fast and efficient compared to the existing process - and even works both for real-time and time-delayed collaboration on documents.

There are many, many more amazing features that simplify and accelerate document collaboration but version control and tracking changes were the biggest efficiency killers we encountered. We identified this problem and solved it with our completely new technology.

BN: What were the main obstacles you had to overcome in developing your product and winning your first clients?

CM: First of all, we had to accept that you cannot solve the issues people face when it comes to professional document collaboration by staying with the traditional way of understanding word processing. Sure, GoogleDocs is a nice improvement but it's nothing revolutionary.

We created a completely new concept and technology to manage changes and comments in web documents - and when we were sitting in front of our first prototype we knew we were right! It is a quantum leap in our eyes, and, once they have seen a SMASHDOCS demo, many experts from the DMS and ECM sector agree.

But, that meant that we had to build a completely new word processing application from scratch - based on ideas where best practices were not yet in place. So we made some mistakes along the way and it took us more than two years to develop the first productive version.

Very early in the process, we started to show SMASHDOCs to potential customers and resellers to get their feedback... and it is still amazing. Everyone confirms that the existing solutions are not solving the problems and that SMASHDOCs is the right concept... some even said, "When is Microsoft going to buy you?".

Getting good feedback is one thing but doesn't automatically mean it is easy to win the first client. But we made it - we closed the BITKOM (the German IT association) and VDE (the German association for the electronical industry) ...Wow!
 

BN: What were the biggest lessons you learned from this?

CM: First, stay focused and accept that you're maybe seeing things that others can't see. Personally, I don't listen to people who tell me, "This is not going to work". As long as it makes sense and helps to simplify people's lives you can always find ways to make it work. This is what we're working for.

Secondly, hire the right people. We didn't spend enough time in hiring developers and didn't recognise how important it is that these guys not only have excellent programming skills but also feel like co-entrepreneurs and act like team players. And, if you have to make changes in a team while you're in the middle of developing something, it's not only an incredible pain, but also super expensive and time-consuming. So, for my next project, I'll definitely take all the time necessary to find and hire the right people.

BN: What are the main market drivers for uptake of your solution?

CM: It's the every-day struggle of people when they have to collaborate on documents together with their colleagues or business partner.

The value of SMASHDOCs is almost exploding under the following circumstances:
 

• Number of pages of the document
• Number of contributors and proofreaders
• Number of changes, comments and versions
• Need for traceability and compliance

Think of a contract negotation: a WORD document with 50 pages, 15 contributors, thousands of changes and comments and an extremely high need for traceability and compliance. Jointly working on such a document the old way is incredibly expensive, inefficient and time consuming.

But even reviewing meeting minutes just 2 pages long can become very messy and time-consuming with 20 people producing about 75 versions.

Think of document collaboration in associations, political parties or commissions where hundreds of people intensively discuss papers for months.

Think of IT concepts that are created and reviewed by several people, where it's so important to understand every change made and to have all changes documented.

There are thousands of use cases for SMASHDOCs in all industries around the globe. So the biggest market driver for us is that people are frustrated with current solutions and are actively looking for new and better ways to collaborate.

BN: How do you differentiate your offering in an increasingly crowded, fragmented and disruptive market?

CM: We knew from the very first moment that it wouldn't be enough just to create an "a-little-bit-better-than-GoogleDocs-like-application". No one would be interested in that.

Our decision to create a completely new concept and technology to manage changes in documents is our biggest advantage. You can do things with SMASHDOCs which are simply not possible in WORD or GoogleDocs so far. Everyone loves the improved functionality and they don't want to go without once they've experienced it. People immediately understand the difference. And the most frequently asked question is: "Can I import Word files?". People are so frustrated by collaborating in WORD that they are willing to discard software they have used for decades and move to a new solution that is actually able to solve their problems. Otherwise they wouldn't even consider it.

BN: What are your plans for SMASHDOCs moving forward? Are you targeting specific industry sectors, applications & geographic regions?

CM: As I already mentioned, SMASHDOCs is a solution with thousands of use cases in absolutely every industry around the globe. So, essentially, there is no specific focus, but, we see a lot of interest coming from the publishing industry, from quality management (e.g. from airlines), the IT industry in general (for IT concepts and requirement documents), public sector (especially from associations, commissions and political parties) and the legal industry (These guys live in document collaboration).

Besides selling SMASHDOCs directly to customers, we also partner with resellers (like consulting companies) and work with software vendors (e.g. for document management, ECM, social intranet or file sharing solutions). Software vendors want to integrate SMASHDOCs into their solutions, both as a new type of content (the "intelligent web document") next to traditional files and as an collaborative editor for WORD documents.

Many people are already asking us whether we plan to create an intelligent alternative to Excel and Powerpoint. From a technical point of view, our backend is ready for it but we have to develop the frontend. Stay tuned to see what we'll deliver in 2017!