Find files you know you have, but can’t find, faster!
I started a software company originally called Attachment Cloud, now called File Finder, as a side hustle a few years ago as a result of Ivette (my wife) having a painful time finding files she knew she had but couldn’t find.
You might have wasted hours of your life on this as well?
She was switching accounting firms and needed to get every document ever sent to them over the last five years to the new firm so they had all the records.
She had to remember each person’s name in the firm, sort by name in her email client, then sort by emails with attachments and then open each one.
It took at least a week if not two. And by the end she didn’t know if she was missing files because she didn’t know if she forgot a persons name to be able to look up.
It was too painful to watch AND I had wasted countless hours of my life also looking for files I knew I had, but couldn’t find.
In some cases I embarrassingly had to email the person and ask,
“Will you please re-send that file you sent me at such and such time.”
Not being able to help myself to fix this problem, I sketched out an app that could do it in a few minutes time.
I had a friends software engineering firm build a very basic MVP (minimal viable product) just so Ivette could get the task done and to see if the idea would work.
It worked!
I ran it by some friends, they liked it.
I wanted to build it out into a full product and started and stopped it a few times over the years. Other projects just got in the way.
Last November I took all the ideas I had started and decided I needed to either do them or kill them to get the mental baggage out of my brain.
I reached out to one of the guys who helped on one of the starts. He said he was in and could work part time for some sort of equity, whether that was profit sharing or something else.
I asked another engineer friend. Walked him though the business case, the financial -marketing model I built and he said he liked it and was in for three months more than part time to help us get through our security audit that is required by Google.
One of the things that killed our momentum on the starts we had over the years was not having an engineer working full-time that could keep progress going.
Knowing that could easily kill this idea, that might turn out to be a good business, I decided to invest in hiring a full stack engineer to work full time.
It took a few weeks to find someone, but we found someone through our network who was a great fit. He started Jan 1, 2023.
In the last week we had another engineer join on some sort of equity basis who was involved on one of the starts. His main reason for leaving a while back was the starting and stopping just killed any hope of getting to the finish line. Seeing we have a full time person now raised his belief we can get there.
Now we have a team!
Sooo I’m trying something new with this company and going to pull back the curtain and share the journey. The good, the bad, the whatever happens.
I’ll include a short summary once a month in these weekly emails that I send out.
If you have questions feel free to reply to this email with them.
Progress Report for January 2023
Mail focus: Get our FT engineer up to speed, get his development environment configured, get him up to speed with the code, and complete the Google Security Audit.
Results: We got our FT engineer up to speed and 75% of the security audit complete.
January Expenses:
- Google Workspace = $68
- Workforce = $6,750
- Servers (AWS) = $373.86
- Slack = $43.75
Total = $7,325.61
If you have wasted hours of your life looking for files you know you have, but can’t find and want to stop wasting your time…join our waitlist here.
Warning: It’s a very basic website with the problem, how we solve it and a place to join the waitlist. I built it myself on a free site called Yep.so.
If you’re building something either full time, as a side hustle whatever, you can get a really simple website up and running in less than 30 minutes to capture people for your email list, no coding required.
🫵 Your move
If you enjoyed this article be sure to claim your subscription to the weekly email I send out. It’s full of great information and other articles just like this one. This piece is from my 3/1/23, Week 9 update.