The printer in our office has been low on toner for over 18 months — it’s a sign of success.
At Branchfire, we’ve embraced being paperless, in large part by using software that we designed. Now we’re releasing our newest product, Folia, to Chicago startups for free so you can ditch the printer and go paperless too.
Picture a project manager reviewing her team’s work related to a new product offering: she’s received a host of documents that require her feedback —PowerPoint files, Word documents, spreadsheets, and even a few Google docs. Her team created those documents digitally. But to give them feedback, she finds it easier to print a stack of paper and pull out her red pen.
Folia has brought the fluidity of writing on paper to the digital world. You can markup any type of document (not just PDFs), work from any mobile device (tablet or phone), and collaborate in real-time with anyone. Even if that person doesn’t have Folia, they can follow along from any web browser. It’s an amazing way to organize and share ideas.
But Folia is more than digital annotation. It has a host of new capabilities, from searching for specific annotations to identifying document hotspots based on annotation density. Folia is also a hub that lets you quickly access the documents you want to work with. We already have several integrations partners (including Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive), with others on the way.
Branchfire has been bootstrapped since we got started in 2011. That reality has encouraged us to partner with our customers on small, methodical improvements to our products. The approach has worked well for us.
We started with a true “minimal viable product” — iAnnotate, which lets you mark up PDFs on the iPad. Our impact has been substantial. To date, over 1.5 million folks have marked up 100s of millions of documents, making billions of markups — it’s a huge amount of paper saved.
Hollywood actors on The Walking Dead and Modern Family use iAnnotate to make notes on scripts. Production staff of live award shows like the Emmys and the Oscars use it to coordinate stage directions. Teachers use it to explore the benefits of tactile learning for students with autism. NFL teams use it to markup playbooks. iAnnotate has taken more than one prominent university program paperless. And, it’s used by government agencies and Fortune 500 companies the world over.
Feedback from this diverse group of customers led us to reimagine how we work with and review documents. With Folia, we are laying the groundwork for the future of productivity.
If you work at a Chicago startup, we’ll give you a year of Folia for free. We’re eager to get your feedback. We know we’ll build a better product by collaborating with fellow Chicago innovators. Besides, going paperless is the intersection of all the things we should care about — preserving information, protecting the environment, and devising more efficient ways of working. Get started here.
