Entrepreneur Spotlight - Shoeboxed.com

If you have been looking for a service that would securly scan and store your receipts, business cards or other documents than you need to take a close look at Shoeboxed. They are the NetFlix of document scanning!

Shoeboxed scans and organizes paper documents into a secure online account for businesses. We unlock the data on the pages with OCR and human-verified data extraction and make the documents available in the user's account to be downloaded in popular formats or exported to useful tools like QuickBooks, Outlook, Salesforce, Constant Contact, Outright.com, Evernote, FreshBooks and dozens of others. 

Q&A

Q. Why did you start your business and what niche does it fill?
A. Shoeboxed was started with business owners in mind. Our founder and most of our management team have all run businesses before, and by far the most annoying and distracting part of business management is organizing, scanning and filing documents for the IRS, taxes, accounting and contact management. Shoeboxed makes organizing pesky documents like receipts, business cards, bills and invoices effortless and affordable.

Q. How did you finance your business?
A. Shoeboxed is an angel-backed company, with investors in the US and EU.

Q. Who are your customers?
A. Our typical customer is a micro-business with 1 to 14 employees. Companies of this size don't have massive admin departments and don't want to shell out huge bucks to pay accountants to scan receipts or assistants to type in business cards and invoices for them. Starting at $9.95 per month, Shoeboxed is by far the most affordable and easiest way to have documents scanned and organized online.

Q. What are the most critical things you have done to grow your business?
A. Started building an inside sales team. As our sales team has grown, so have our numbers! We have also expanded our marketing channels, especially our affiliate marketing program and see great results from this work.

Q. How have you used social media tools like LinkedIn to grow your business?
A. We primarily use Facebook and Twitter for the simple reason that all of our existing and prospective customers are there. It's just another great place to reach your target market. We use Argyle Social, another Durham-based startup to publish and track our social media campaigns.

Q. What are three pieces of advise you would offer entrepreneurs starting out today?
A. 1) Put together the right team. It's all about the people you have working with you on the ground level.
2) Get finances in order. If you're not a finance guy or don't have experience doing finance rounds or raising funds, don't worry, there's plenty of people out there that are willing to help. Startups and entrepreneurs LOVE to help out other startups and entrepreneurs. It's an amazing community resource particularly in the Triangle.
3) Get a business/revenue model in place early. Don't miss any opportunities to drive revenue.

Q. How does your business "give back" to the community or to society?
A. We are a part of the paperless movement, which is freeing up businesses (and trees) to be more productive and rely less on paper. Going paperless is a great thing for the environment and society at large!

Q. How and why was it important to base your business in the Triangle area?
A. The Triangle has an incredible HR base to start a company. With our amazing universities, plus the dozens and dozens of other startups in the area, expanding your team, raising funds, and getting the right advice from the right people is can be easily accomplished in the Triangle. There are only a few other areas in the entire country that can boast similar networks and opportunities for startups.

Shoeboxed would love to offer all readers and recipients a 30 day free trial of Shoeboxed. Please visit shoeboxed.com/linkingthetriangle to learn more and sign up. Thank you for supporting a local business!

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