“What if Google builds it?”

A couple of days back, Google launched Google Stack App — an app that helps people organize their documents automatically. This is exactly where we started our journey 2 years ago — building Sorted AI, an app that helps people organize their documents automatically (and do a lot more with it).

Google Stack App (Left) vs Sorted AI App (Right) — Document categorization done automatically

(Google Stack is right now not available in India, so while you may want to wait for it, you can try out Sorted AI and get a sense of the potential of AI in making your life very easy! It is right now available for Android. You can download it from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sortedai.docs.organizer&hl=en_IN&gl=US)

As a startup working in Utility & Productivity Tools space, we very frequently get asked, “What if Google builds it?”. This is literally that moment for us, Google has actually built something that we were building already!

So now what? Honestly, we are not worried or scared. We are in fact feeling quite excited & definitely feeling ‘Validated’. Not in the sense of “We said so” or “We did it first” but in a lot of different ways as a team, trying to build something useful for its users.

1. Validated on idea 💡 — We always believed in the idea and didn’t need any validation as such, but Google building this will give validation to others who were not sure of what we were trying to do. A Big Tech company doing something definitely creates a lot of interest around it. Hopefully we would need less explaining of what we are doing in future 😊

Google Stack App (Left) vs Sorted AI App (Right) — Important information extraction from the document

2. Validated on approach 💪🏽 — We started Sorted AI, as an intelligent documents organizer but we soon realized, “Most people don’t want to organize their docs but everyone wants to scan them” & we decided to build Kaagaz Scanner. Google calling Stack as a Scanner app that ALSO has AI capabilities to organize docs, suggests that our approach makes sense. For our target audience (the next billion users / Bharat users), it makes even more sense.

3. Validated as developers 🙇🏽 — The most fun part of checking out the product has been, looking at the reviews written by the users for Google Stack App on Playstore. When you see a Google product having reviews like — “It is not loading”, “Not working on my device”, “Need a dark theme”, “You should look at how Adobe Scanner does it” — you realize that a developer has same struggles whether she works for a startup or Google! 😬

While, the validation feels good, what does it mean for us? It for sure doesn’t in anyway mean that we have succeeded. But it definitely gives us confidence as a team:

1. The confidence that if we think from first principles, we can also do what a large company with all kinds of resources can do.
2. The confidence that the large companies also don’t know everything.
3. The confidence that if you build a product that solves user’s needs, a product that they love to use, they will support you with all that they have. It doesn’t matter if you are a small startup or a large company.

One of our key learning from Sorted AI has been that, “Everyone wants to be organized but most people don’t have the motivation to do what is required to get organized”. It will be super interesting to see how does Google addresses various issues that we faced with product adoption, retention & distribution.

This gives us even more motivation to build a world class product that is better than the best of the products being built globally. If not, atleast its name is taken in the same breath as a BigTech product for being in the same league and serving its users very well.

It is a long way to go for us from here but we are definitely fired up for what lies ahead!