When perseverance pays off: After five years of toil, document sharing startup Edocr hits momentum

When a startup fails to gain traction in its first couple of years, the usual course of action for the founders is to tear it all up and begin again. Now in its sixth year, business-focused document sharing startup Edocr has traveled a rocky road but appears to have found direction by means of a number of high-profile platform integrations and has doubled its user base from 25,000 to 50,000 in the space of six months, and doubled its number of paid customers in three months.

Many people involved in the UK startup scene will be familiar with Edocr’s Manoj Ranaweera. Founding the startup with two friends in April 2007, the Scribd-like service launched in alpha in October of that year. Although early on, things looked promising, taking part in a tour of the US along with other then hot UK startups like Huddle, Skimlinks (then known as Skimbit) and WAYN.

However, in 2009 the other co-founders had left and Ranaweera was left piloting Edocr solo. While trying to find a new technical lead for the company, he outsourced development to India which didn’t work well. Meanwhile, competitors such as Scribd and Docstoc raced ahead and, certainly from the outside, things looked bleak for this small contender from Manchester.

However, Edocr has turned itself around in the past year, with a small development team in Sri Lanka working on integrating a number of high-profile services into the core offering. Zendesk, HootSuite, Buffer and more now supplement the service with additional features.

Edocr is currently taking part in online-based accelerator program nReduce, and is today rolling out integration with fellow nReduce startup Thetaboard, which offers a simple project management solution for teams. The integration means that Thetaboard users can share documents hosted on Edocr within their projects.

With its product now stable and functionality boosted, Edocr is shifting its focus to sales. Many founders would have given up before now, but it appears that Ranaweera’s faith in his business is starting to pay off.

➤ Edocr

Image credit: John MacDougall / Getty Images