India is the largest market for Alldox so far: Dippankar S Halder

Offering an enterprise-level security and privacy, Alldox is a document organising tool built for regular (non-techie) people. The venture, backed by a bunch of seed and angel investors, is headquartered in Singapore with its holding company ALLDOX Pte Ltd (established in 2015) and two subsidiaries viz. ALLDOX INC (front end in the US, established in 2016) and ALLDOX India (for back-end/development in India operational since 2016). Alldox is currently available in 219 countries and boasts of over a million downloads of which 400,000 are regular users. Dippankar S Halder, chief executive officer and founder, Alldox, in conversation with Ashish K Tiwari, talks about the overall business, market scenario, competition, fund raising plans and more. Edited excerpts...

How, when and why did you zero-in on this idea for your venture?

It was in 2012 when me and my co-founder Dipan Bhattacharya were evaluating options. The idea had to satisfy two criteria viz. it must improve the daily lives of regular people leveraging technology and it must have global scalability. Just before that, I had a painful experience in the family struggling to pull together past medical records of a family member in an alien land and undertreatment of a critical disease. This incident influenced our decision big time and ‘not finding important documents in time’ was the problem we chose to solve.

Time-stressed life, space constraints and convenience were forces that we saw driving digital documentation in the future. It was also the time when smartphones started showing signs of expanding consumption of tech-enabled services. So we took the plunge and the rest, as they say, is history.

How much stake do the existing promoters hold in this venture? How much have they invested?

Technically speaking founders have most of the company right now as most of the angel funding were convertibles. However, angels will have 10%-15% of the company when their investment gets converted into equity along with our incoming institutional investors. We have raised about $1.5 million in angel funding so far.

What is your current employee base like and what are your hiring plans in India and overseas over the coming years?

We are a team of 15, most on the technology side. In the future, India team will remain focused on the development and they will grow as the business grows and as work volumes go up. For our US subsidiary in the Silicon Valley, we will add engineers for product, innovation and UI/UX. In our Singapore headquarter, we will add a few business people, focusing on business development i.e. market activation and alliances.

For us it is about having a few rock stars aligned to our purpose who can do stuff they have not done before. We have set ourselves an ambitious goal of being a billion-dollar company with 50 or fewer people, and it looks quite doable at this point in time.

There seem to be established players already in the international markets offering this service. How are you competing with them for market share and user base?

There are people in the space of cloud storage like DropBox, One Drive or Google Drive and there are scanning apps and security apps. However, our target users, who are regular, non-tech and 30 plus matured people, needed a one-stop, secure and easy app to organise their important documents.

That’s where Alldox comes in to play. It has best practice documents management processes with enterprise-level security and privacy and that’s what has helped build traction and user base across the globe.

While it’s too early to talk market share, we are seeing a lot of users coming in from segments beyond 500 million cloud storage users. Big challenges are to build trust and to change habits. Good news is we are doing great on that at a steady pace.

Also, document scanning apps allow for digitising the documents and bundling it with cloud storage, how do you see these impacting your business?

For any large potential emerging whitespace like ours, convergence is natural and so are competitions. Frankly speaking, where digital documentation stands today globally, everyone is helping to build the category. To get to specifics, specialist apps playing parts of overall document organisation game do keep us on our toes and helps us to stay relevant and fresh.

We saw the relevance of security and privacy for our target segment through our consumer insight programmes, right at the beginning of our journey and much before others did so. Most of the others were on pure speed or just convenience so far and now they are getting into security stuff like encryptions etc. We do have a head start and architectural advantage on security and privacy for sure.

What kind of potential does this business offer in India and across the globe?

When it comes to documents any developing country like India has more complexity than other developed markets. For example, you need to safe-keep your warranties to avail benefits here, which may not be needed in the US. We also have a lot of paper documents here and remembering where we are keeping them gets tough. For example, Alldox has a process to tag storage locations, specific for this market segment. India still is the single largest market for us, especially after we launched Hindi and Bengali versions on mobile apps.

We see similar potential and trends in other Asian countries like Philippines, Indonesia or Bangladesh, Portuguese and Spanish speaking Latin and Central/North American countries like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico or Venezuela, in African countries and in the Middle East. We are also seeing a good traction in America and Europe where people love us for advanced convenience features like AutoDox which lets you upload documents simply by email forwards or account nomination to family members.

If we have to size the overall market, there is no reason why all of the two billion homes in the world will not need a tool like Alldox. It is only a matter of time and will depend on the quality of delivery by players in the space, us included.

How has the Indian market responded to this service?

India has responded extremely well, especially after we introduced the Hindi and Bengali versions of the mobile app. We are working on introducing a few more India languages – we have nine languages in total. Users are coming in not only from big metros but also from non-metros and Class A cities. India is the largest market for us so far.

How challenging was it to build a user base for this business? What are your doing to overcome these challenges?

We are a habit changing or transformational product. On one hand our challenge was to find features, workflows, UI (User interface) and UX (User experience), which will work, and on the other hand, it was about making our users get into the habit of organizing the documents.

The first one was a slow and iterative process. Our user traction, ratings and feedback indicate that we have done a good job there. For example, we were getting a lot of requests for help users to reset passwords, when we had a UI like every other app. Obviously, our users needed more simplicity and clarity. We tweaked a few things, created a demo video and it worked.

Having demo videos and other explanatory material and being super-responsive to user queries helps us to handle the second challenge. For example, we recently had a Brazilian dentist in her 50s, who does not use computers, found our demo video too fast to follow and needed written instructions to be read and understood. It was a pleasure to get her started with Alldox. Then there was a mid-size hospital in Oman who needed help to scale up usage. Two-way communications and continuous (and agile) improvement is key here too.

It is about active listening and embracing the culture of continuous improvement. We have a team with open eyes, open minds and they are ‘in love with the problem and not solution’.

Privacy and security of personal information is a huge area of concern these days.

When technology gets you everything in your hand, with convenience comes in vulnerability. While security is about not losing your stuff, privacy is about keeping your stuff for your eyes only. To be successful in this part of the game is to have a well thought and flexible strategy and agility to stay ahead.

In a related subject, I was hearing a security expert on TedTalk that antivirus solutions work only in 5% cases. Not going with the number, in my view, what they are missing is that a large part of their enemies is faster than them. We also must realise, it is not just about making an information safety plan that will work, but also how good you are on surveillance and recovery.

What steps have you taken to mitigate this issue?

Information security and privacy is core to our business and it had been on priority from day one. On the micro level, our account management follows bank-like security process including multifactor authentication (OTP). Every user gets their own encryption key and this key is used to do AES256 encryption before documents are stored on secured servers of Amazon. Then there is code locking for advanced privacy where documents can further be protected with asynchronous encryptions.

Alldox has zero tolerance on security and privacy. It is also possibly the only document app that does not allow the content-based search, ensuring that even our codes do not breach privacy. We have processes and audits in place to ensure enterprise-level security to all so that they can have their ‘peace of mind’ always.

Please provide details of user-base in India and other markets globally?

We have over a million downloads and close to half a million global users right now. We have reached 219 countries so far, from the smallest Vatican City to largest China. India is the largest in the block with close to 40% users.

Of the total user base how many are paid users at present?

We still are at the stage of building habits of document organization and thus focus remains on driving usage. Including redemptions and trial offers, a good 14% of our users are on the premium plan, the paid plan with advanced features. And the good news is that a small but growing part of this base has started paying up as well.

How do you plan to grow the paid user base in the coming years?

We have seen conversion to paid users growing with increased usage especially when Alldox becomes a habit. We must keep listening to our users, watch them to support on every step. We have advanced analytic tools like MixPanel helping us to understand usage and friction points. We are and we will stay focused on driving usage to build habits and that will get us more conversions.

What are your targets for overall user base and paid user base over the next 3-5 years?

We have a modest target of 25 million users by 2020 and we see 2-3% of them as paid users. We have also recently launched a specialist all paid version Alldox Business for small businesses. Its’ a new application that will be a focus is now, especially with channel partnership with biggies like Verifone, USA and AEVI, UK (a Nixdorf, Germany Venture). It is too early to put any numbers for Alldox Business, but our beta experience is showing great potentials.

Has the business turned profitable? When do you envisage a breakeven?

I wish it was. We should be breaking even in 2019.

What is the business and revenue model for this venture?

For home/ personal segment, it is freemium plus alliance revenue from partners (without touching content privacy). We already have one alliance with Tourmaline Labs, a cutting-edge analytics venture from Silicon Valley. Plus there will be revenue from Alldox Business.

We are a sticky business. All our users are staying with us, we have almost zero disconnection requests. There will be more monetisation opportunity as we go forward.

I believe you have already hit the road for Series A funding? How much stake are you off-loading?

Yes. We are raising our first round of institutional funding. KPMG has been mandated to help us on that. Valuation and dilutions are yet to decide. There are norms to arrive at those calculations. We are looking for partners who will support us in the long term and what they bring to the table beyond money will be important.

How much money are you planning to raise, what's the current status of the fund-raising plans?

We are raising $4-5 million in this round. In fact, KPMG has already negotiated with one large Indian venture capital (VC) to participate in this round of funding. We are in talks with a few more international players and should be able to soon close this round with one more investor.

What is the deployment plan for the money being raised?

We will augment our capabilities in India, Silicon Valley and Singapore, invest in technology and innovation, build alliances and scale up our base to 3-4 million users.