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Work · March 12, 2013

MS

My second startup; solving the problems from my first startup

A little history first. Back in Jan 2011 I quit my day job after saving up my $ for a year and began my first startup, a hardware + SaaS business. It was exciting and at the end of 14 months I had a handful of customers but not enough incoming to keep me going so I went back into the workforce full time, running it on the side. Naturally my time is pretty limited. Users kept signing up and I had to constantly print and post them unique welcome forms, direct debit forms, post out monthly invoices etc, the list goes on. The paperwork alone took me hours. I'd have just coded up each form into a…

Alternativestop 24% of March 2013

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

A little history first. Back in Jan 2011 I quit my day job after saving up my $ for a year and began my first startup, a hardware + SaaS business. It was exciting and at the end of 14 months I had a handful of customers but not enough incoming to keep me going so I went back into the workforce full time, running it on the side. Naturally my time is pretty limited. Users kept signing up and I had to constantly print and post them unique welcome forms, direct debit forms, post out monthly invoices etc, the list goes on. The paperwork alone took me hours. I'd have just coded up each form into a batch job if the content on them didn't change so drastically. I needed a mail merge system that worked. So I checked out the offerings from MS and Libre Office much to my dismay. 36 steps, an excel file, stand on a sheet of alfoil and hit merge and you've got your mail merge done hopefully. Finding them not quite capable of doing what I needed I did what any coder with a few spare evenings does and I wrote my own that spat out PDFs from a csv file. I shot the idea past some business connections from startup 1 and got back a lot of positive feedback from. In fact so much feedback that the recurring theme was that they were shouting at me "How do I use this, my secretary/wife/monkey spends hours hand editing our invoices and still half of them are inconsistent. Sell me this now!". I realised hardly anyone except MS Word pro's and well trained office staff actually know how to do a mail merge. Usually not the kind of people you find in a small business. So why not make an app out of it. The spare evenings turned into 6 months and a few banking headaches but finally it's ready for it's first release. www.rocketmailmerge.com Any and all constructive feedback is welcome. I've got plans to put an intro video on the front page when time permits and add some extra features, but I'll see how the feedback goes first before stretching the MVP boundaries too far.

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