Jason Nazar from Docstoc has created a site where any form of the document can be uploaded or downloaded without spending a dime. You’ve probably visible the Docstoc viewer on TechCrunch.
It sounds uninteresting till you recognize that the documents get a variety of seeking visitors (e.g., humans searching out loan paperwork, criminal forms, and many others) and that they end up a super tool for lead generation.
Adrian: I’m right here with Jason Nazar. He is the CEO of Docstoc, a website doing lead-technology via offering free documents and templates. It’s an interesting version I’ve in no way heard of that truly sounds quite smart. Before we talk approximately Docstoc, Jason, why do not you inform us a touch bit about who you’re and where you come from.
Jason: Sure. I’m an LA native. I went to university in Santa Barbara, and I actually have an MBA in law from Pepperdine in Southern California. I’m a serial entrepreneur. Docstoc is the third agency I’ve commenced and the primary one on the Web. I commenced my first company out of university. For about years, I went to the u. S. A. Doing motivational speaking to high school and college students in addition to corporate sales education and communique seminars. After that, I turned into the Director of Marketing and Sales at a non-tech begin-up in Southern California.
While I was going through grad school, I started a consulting agency with one of my classmates, Michael Sheridan. We were consulting for the start-united states of America and small organizations in the Los Angeles location. That’s surely where I got the Docstoc concept, which had its one-yr birthday on October 30, 2008. I would spend hours a day searching out documents online. I constructed this definitely first-rate repository of digital documents on my own personal pc. One nighttime at 1:00 a.M., I thought to myself, “It’s clearly difficult to locate first-class files. There should be something like YouTube or Flickr for documents.”
I desired to construct an area wherein all of us could get any document rapid, clean, and without spending a dime. I began self-financing Docstoc once I turned into a pupil in regulation college and working by myself. Then I met Alon Schwartz; quickly afterward, he got here as our CTO and the co-founder of Docstoc. I maxed out my credit score cards, took out a few scholar loans, and used all of the cash I had saved, which wasn’t lots. I essentially attempted to construct Docstoc with a company in India. Then to keep it, I raised an angel spherical of capital as I completed regulation school. We are backed with the aid of the assignment capital firm Rustic Canyon and feature quite a few top-notch traders from the LA network, which include Brett Brewer from Intermix, which is the discern organization of MySpace, Kamran Pourzanjani from PriceGrabber, Matt Coffin from LowerMyBills, and Robin Richards from MP3.Com. Michael Jones, who sold Userplane to AOL, is also one of our board participants.
Jason: We intend to build the biggest repository of expert and productiveness files anywhere. The fee proposition is that you could get any felony, commercial enterprise, an economic, academic, or creative file you want fast, clean, and without spending a dime.
Conceptually, it’s similar to YouTube in that it is consumer-generated content material. People everywhere in the global add their Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files. You can preview all those files on our site, after which you could download them. The manner we monetize that is that we have a variety of expert content material, so we’re excellent at taking pictures of what any individual’s motive is. If anyone involves our website and appears for an LLC operating settlement, a partnership agreement, an invoice template, or a fixed of financials, we recognize a lot approximately what’s happening in that person’s lifestyles and what they’re looking for.
There’s the possibility to have clearly centered marketing against those files as well as do lead-era. We’ve spent a maximum of the primary yr looking to build a great product with our revenue model in thoughts and grow the site visitors. Now that those two things are going quite properly, we have refocused our interest to developing a hit lead-era model.
Jason: Yes, we’ve been on the front web page of Digg lots. I’m a truly lively Digg user myself and have long passed there for years to study and get opportunity resources for information. Our content has been highlighted no longer only on Digg but on Reddit, StumbleUpon, and different websites.
Because we are a content aggregator and deal in such a lot of distinct subjects, now not simply felony, enterprise, and economical, our content material has a manner of locating itself everywhere on the Web. We additionally get numerous people linking to us from blogs, and our content additionally gets promoted on social media. A lot of websites even use us to embed documents. Instead of having a hyperlink to mention, “Click right here to see this PDF or this press launch,” you may preview that document right to your web page. It’s an exciting higher-viewing revel in for users, and in a variety of instances, it is a higher way to share or promote documents.
If you go to TechCrunch, Huffington Post, or Chicago Tribune, they may take documents on our site. For instance, Huffington Post ran a story on the Senate Bailout Bill that got here out with the United States Congress’s proposed bill to bail out $seven hundred billion for private enterprise. They embedded the Bailout Bill using Docstoc.
Jason: We essentially get site visitors from individuals who come immediately to the website. We get site visitors from numerous referral websites and blogs that link back to us. For example, one of our documents is embedded in a TechCrunch post that Erick Schonfeld wrote approximately whether or not iPhones are better than BlackBerrys. People see that and that they click thru to our website. Many of our site visitors also come from herbal seek as our documents get listed in search engines like google and yahoo. For instance, if you visit Google and kind in LLC working agreement, we’re the first herbal result, no longer paid result.
Jason: I’m tied into plenty of networks and social sites. Some people make version airplanes. Other people play basketball, and others go to movies; it is what you revel in doing. It’s now not the totality of what I do in my loose time. The fact is that I am an Internet geek, and I actually revel in diving into other people’s products. It also gives me a better feel of what builds a great product and an amazing community. It’s a touch hypocritical if I’m asking people to get engaged and use the Docstoc enjoy if I’m no longer doing something like that on the Web myself.
Jason: Sure. The day Docstoc went live, a bit of our content material made the front web page of Digg. Our website was close down for 20 mins because of that. All of a sudden, a lot of human beings noticed this website that nobody else had. Right now, Digg isn’t always an, in reality, vast part of our visitors anymore.
The truth that you’re tapped into a social media network and into folks who are evangelists on the Web and blogs, use social media websites, and get the phrase out virally is truly a big deal. When you first begin and don’t have a price range, you attempt to discern a way to get humans to recognize you. I clearly threw myself into figuring out how human beings pressure visitors on the Web to get as many people understanding approximately Docstoc as viable.