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Pixily

Prasaad Thammineni, CEO of the $100,000, 12-employee Boston company that offers online document management service for small companies:

I was getting my MBA in 2007 and once I finished my last exam I had 8,000 pages of class notes. I didn't want to bring all that paper back to Boston [where I live]. I ended up making it all digital using a scanner, a shredder, an external backup drive, and my computer.

Classmates wanted to borrow my system. I talked to friends—some informal market research—and asked, "What do you do with your paper? What do you do if you want to find something?" I found some people are organized, some are disorganized. But even if you are organized, it takes time to do that. And you can't access your documents everywhere.

I also surveyed about eight small businesses. The solutions [already on the market] are too expensive, too complex, and target midsize and large companies. We did a lot of research. And we looked at how people find documents. They may do it by looking for certain letterhead for example. So our user interface mimics that.