This week I had a chat with Nelson Pereira, CEO of TOPDOX about their company and the documents collaboration platform that’s been lately getting attention, funding, and growth.
How did the idea for TOPDOX come about?
All started with the “boom” of the mobile devices. I got excited by the new possibilities on these new devices. But when I tried to replace my laptop by the tablet and the smartphone to work “on the go” I’ve faced a lot of issues, especially documents compatibility nightmare, cloud files management and working offline. So I decided to look for tools and solutions and noticed that a lot of people all over the internet (blogs, forums, etc.) were having the same issues. So I decided to build my own tools to deal with it, I’ve challenged Miguel (my co-founder) and he said yes right away. And that’s how TOPDOX was born.
How does TOPDOX compare to the competition? What are your main strengths?
TOPDOX is the only platform that allows people to collaborate and share any kind of document from any cloud. For example, two people using different cloud platforms (like Dropbox and Google Drive) can collaborate and share documents, even edit them. We support Microsoft Word, Google Docs and OpenOffice Documents.
With TOPDOX you can work faster and with no barriers on mobile devices. Create, edit and share anything, with anyone, from anywhere.
How has the recent funding helped your growth?
We started to fund the project ourselves, with our own money and with a bank loan. Later we had a pre-seed investment from Rockstart Accelerator and then we raised €1M from Portugal Ventures and 2bpartners. This founding allowed us to grow the team from 3 to 20 people in 6 months. Now we are building our platform and the apps for multiple platforms like iOS, Android and Windows 10. We now have a much more stable and feature rich product and currently we have more than 175k registered users and we are growing steadily on a monthly basis.
Of the several international initiatives you were a part of last year, which would you say you learned the most from?
We got many insights from the Asian market with our presence at RISE Conference in Hong Kong. China, despite huge and growing is a very special market that it’s not a fit for us, but Japan and South Korea can be opportunities for the future.
Also, we collected great positive feedback and advice at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco from companies like Samsung, SAP, Microsoft and many others.
What do you wish you’d have known when you first started?
When we started this company, we were very naïve about business models and costumer acquisition on the internet, but we knew how to build products and that was the base to start knowing our costumers and learn from them. We keep on learning every day about user acquisition, retention and more.
What’s your take on the Portuguese startup scene today?
The Portuguese Tech Startup scene is booming. We see things happening now that we though were only possible in Silicon Valley about 3-4 years ago. We see a lot of successful startups popping up like Farfetch, the first Portuguese unicorn, Unbabel (at Y Combinator), Talkdesk closed more than $20M in founding and has many big clients in the USA, Uniplaces and much more. 4 years ago we had almost no ecosystem, no acceleration programs, not many investors, but a lot is going on these days and it will still be evolving in the coming years.
TOPDOX Website: https://topdox.com/
iOS App: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/top-docs-multi-cloud-mobile/id589014207?mt=8
Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=topresearch.topdocs
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