Docstoc

» see docstoc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the closest thing to a personal connection here is the shape of the site rather than anything that was in it. docstoc's inventory was legal instruments keyed to a jurisdiction i do not live in. an llc operating agreement, or a california commercial lease. turkish paperwork does not have those shapes and a turkish accountant would not know what to do with one of them.

jason nazar and alon shwartz launched it in october 2007 out of los angeles, straight off a demo at techcrunch40, a month after founding the company. the initial pitch had nothing to do with business at all. it was a place to put a.doc or a slide deck and get back an embeddable viewer you could drop into a blog post, which in 2007 was a real problem worth solving, since browsers did not render either format and nobody wanted to make a reader download one.

what actually happened is that the uploads sorted themselves. people were not embedding essays. they were uploading and searching for the boilerplate of small-business life, and by february 2010 the database held thirteen million documents pulling twenty million visitors a month against a million downloads. the company took the hint and stopped describing itself as a sharing site.

~ the record ~

~ how it filled up ~

docstoc came out of beta on 13 may 2009 with an api and a revenue share, which is the moment the incentives changed. doccash split advertising money fifty-fifty with whoever had uploaded the document, so the people with the best templates had a reason to keep posting them instead of keeping them on a hard drive. the seed funding was small by the standards of the era, seven hundred and fifty thousand in november 2007 and three and a quarter million the following april, and the company was claiming profitability by 2010.

the search traffic was the whole business. somebody typing "independent contractor agreement template" into google in 2010 was not going to a law firm, and docstoc was there when they landed. that is a wonderful position to occupy and a fragile one, because it belongs to whoever ranks, and ranking is not an asset you own.

~ the store ~

the docstore marketplace opened in february 2010 and turned the free pile into a shop. lawyers and accountants could sell their own documents on the site and split the money, with every listing reviewed before it went up so the paid shelf stayed better than the free one. in 2011 docstoc went further and started producing documents itself, ten thousand of them targeted for that year alone, sitting on top of the twenty million users had already uploaded.

by then it was a subscription business. docstoc premium sold credits against the curated shelf and turned the ads off, an ipad app arrived in may 2011, and the registered user count went from three million to eleven million in a year. thirty-odd employees against revenue that was doubling, with no obvious reason for any of it to end.

~ what intuit did with it ~

intuit announced the acquisition in december 2013, reportedly around fifty million dollars, and the logic was legible from the outside. intuit sold accounting software to small businesses and docstoc sold paperwork to the same people, so you bolt one onto the other and the customer never leaves. that is the slide. what followed was a change of strategy at intuit, which spent 2015 selling off or closing everything that was not quickbooks.

the notice went up on 3 september 2015 and read: docstoc will be closing down effective december 1, 2015, please download all of your public and private documents before november 30. new registrations stopped, which meant anybody without an account could no longer read anything. jason nazar found out shortly before the announcement and long after the decision, and said publicly that neither he nor his team had been part of it. archive team got a partial crawl. twenty million documents, most of them somebody's actual working paperwork, and the useful ones had all been copied a thousand times over anyway.

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