Meet Chad Brown Co-Founder Of Orangedox – Redefining Document Protection

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Today we have selected Chad Brown to take his interview. He is the Co-Founder of Orangedox.

First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?

When COVID started, many businesses needed their entire office to go fully remote in a very short period. The good thing about Orangedox is that we have a distributed team that’s already remote and works from home. This meant that our team was able to continue working without interruption during COVID.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?

I’ve been self-employed since I graduated from University 20 years ago, first running a Business Intelligence consulting firm then moving into SAAS products. I helped found this company with the vision of providing a type of snap-chat for business documents. Since then, we pivoted to document tracking with a specific focus on how we can help companies and individual publishers protect their online documents.

How does your company innovate?

Orangedox has created a way to distribute documents online to ensure that they aren’t shared without the publisher’s permission. Creating a custom online viewer for PDFs, Google Docs, MS Office docs, and even audio and video content can prevent users from downloading and sharing content without permission. This gives the publisher the ability to fully control who has access to each document and disable access whenever needed.

How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

The business picked up during COVID-19, doubling our customer base. With everyone staying home, students and employees alike, there was a huge push to share documents and material online. During COVID, our free entry-level tool has allowed over 100,000 customers to get their business up and running online easily: from capital investment firms looking to move to an online Data Room to instructors looking to run their classes online.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

As a small start-up, we always have to make difficult choices. I think the hardest choice we’ve had to make this past year was accommodating users on our platform who we didn’t expect. For example, during COVID, we saw many users sign up to share their photography presets securely. One of the hardest decisions was to figure out how that community fit in with our overall vision for Orangedox. It resulted in a new spinoff product called dakolor that we launched a couple of months ago.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

We’ve been using Google Meetings much more regularly and Asana to help with remote project management. It can be a challenge to keep everyone aligned in the same direction; using tools like Google Meetings is key to running smoothly.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

One of the things we did early when creating Orangedox was to not overly focus on what our competitors were doing but rather create a kick-ass product that is a pleasure to use. With that said, we have seen a few competitors, like DocSend, acquired over the past year. This is great for us as it helps validate the market, and in some cases, creates opportunities for us to grow and capture market share.