Late this evening Ed Kless from Sage US and Verasage turned me on to Shoeboxed. It’s a US based mail receipts mail-in service that digitizes receipts and spits out a spreadsheet for later use. My initial impressions were favourable. The site is clean, simple to use and offers a sensible pricing model. It backs up its value add story with a calculator from which you can see the potential savings from using the service. As a concept it is fine but late last year, they switched focus away from being a business oriented play to one that embraces consumer spending.
TechCrunch thought it was pretty good but a stream of comments about how it has a string of reps and affiliates running around college campuses attempting to sign up users got me worried. But then I thought about Ed’s drawing it to my attention.
My guess is that Shoeboxed didn’t get a ton of takers after its initial pitch to business and despite it getting plenty of press coverage. Right idea, wrong timing. It’s Facebook group only has 543 members. It therefore made the innovators’ classic error of switching course and relaunching. The ever watchful blogs took this as a sign that all is not well and they may be right. WIth a staff in excess of 30 for what is an incredibly simple service, but VC backed, this is not surprising.
The US is still very much postal driven and claims a high delivery rate. The UK’s postal service as we know is another story. That puts up doubt in my mind. As a business idea, it has promise. Pity about the infrastructure upon which it relies and the inevitable need to incur charges for registered or recorded delivery.
