062-stefan-diasti

Scanners: Necessary Equipment in the Small Business Environment

A discussion with Raven Scanners CEO Stefan Diasti

John DeBevoise:

Greetings everyone and welcome to another serving of Buziness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Buziness Soup. I’m your host, John DeBevoise. If you’re like me and every other business owner, our desks reflect the chaos within our heads, and trying to find something is seemingly impossible. Well, I tried the file cabinets. I tried my desk. But you know what I found works best? A scanner, and not just any scanner, a Raven scanner. It’s a new startup and it’s american based, the ability to scan all of your documents regardless of size and put them neatly in their assigned position. Oh my gosh, beam me up. Stefan Diasti is going to be joining us here on Buziness Soup. So sit on down, grab your receipts. Let’s organize and categorize everything in your office. Make it digital right here on Buziness Soup. Stefan, welcome to this serving of Buziness Soup.

Stefan Diasti: Hi, John, great to be with you.

John DeBevoise: Stefan, you have a company that is called Raven Scanners. Now the scanner population is quite prolific out there. There are a lot of fellows out there of which I’ve had many of them. What is the value of a Raven Scanner? This is a document scanner. And of course I’m talking about to my audience of small business owners, the value that a scanner has in the business environment.

Stefan Diasti: Absolutely. Well, I think we differentiate ourselves in a few ways. The first being that our scanners are true standalone devices, meaning they don’t require a computer to set them up. They don’t require a computer to use them and can scan to virtually any destination, be it cloud services, email, fax, USB, or shared folders instantly and within minutes using the large touchscreen interface. So it’s quite different probably than the look and feel of any scanner you’ve experienced traditionally.

John DeBevoise: And I have experienced several of them. Years ago, I had a house fire and I had one of your competitors. And I learned the value of making sure that everything is scanned and not in the sense of having it scanned and saved in files in your house, because it didn’t matter that I scanned everything. It wasn’t onto a computer or into a cloud environment. And so I ended up getting one of those multipurpose scanning printers, fax machines, did everything, but make my coffee. What it did was that it did everything okay, but nothing well. And when it came to the scanning, it was lift the lid up, put the paper down, close it. It was scanning on an individual basis. Yours as a standalone, doesn’t require a computer interface. I put multiple documents, receipts, documents and things into the scanner, and it does what?

Stefan Diasti: Our scanner is very automated. Very simple to use. Again, on the touchscreen interface, you’re going to tell it your settings that you want, and it’s going to scan those pages. It’s going to scan front and back at the same time. It’s going to show you previews on the screen if you decide you want to make edits or name documents or reorder, remove pages, you can do all of that before you send it off. And it’s going to do automated AI powered OCR. So it’s going to recognize the handwriting. It’s going to recognize the text in virtually any language and

package that up into a nice OCR layered PDF and send it straight to your destinations of choice. And you can send it to one destination or many at the same time. So it really takes a lot of those steps that you were describing out and just throw the stack of paper into the scanner, hit the button and let it go.

John DeBevoise: OCR for the listeners out there is Optical Character Recognition. It’s kind of like facial recognition, but for documents, much easier. So where does this information go? Does it go into a hard drive, into the scanner itself? Or can I direct it to a cloud location?

Stefan Diasti: You can direct it to a cloud location of you’re choosing. So we hook up to all of the major cloud service providers, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, SharePoint, et cetera.

John DeBevoise: And it’s my choice as to which one I want to do, or multiples?

Stefan Diasti: Absolutely. You can connect to one or many. You can scan to a USB flash drive. We do include TWAIN and ICA drivers. So should you decide to use an application on your PC or Mac, that’s a capability as well. But really it’s versatile. It’s flexible for our users to try and make that as simplistic and efficient as possible.

John DeBevoise: One of the areas that I wanted to get into was what made you think that you could do a better scanner than the highly populated one, but I’m still fascinated with how yours works. I have not experienced this one personally. One of the things that frustrated me in the past was not every document is perfect. Not every receipt is truly clearly legible. And also, what about if you spill something on the receipt or you write something across it like Stefan and I went out to lunch here and I wrote it across my receipt. How is your scanner going to differentiate between the receipt and my chicken scratch?

Stefan Diasti: Well, that’s where that AI powered optical character recognition comes into play. So it’s continuously improving as scan data comes through. So rather than having some OCR software that was, or firmware that was embedded into your device and is just there to stay, we push updates on a regular basis to your scanner. So it’s like getting a new scanner, if you will, every couple, two or three weeks with new features, new functionality and improvements. And that way it really does continuously get better in terms of recognizing that chicken scratch. And I think you’d be surprised whether it’s cursive or text written. It really does a phenomenal job of picking that up.

John DeBevoise: Well what about those receipts that I stuff in my pocket. And then I take them out and flatten them out as best I can and hope that they don’t jam in the scanner when I put them through?

Stefan Diasti: Yeah, that’s a great question. We use ultrasonic multi-feed detection technology. And so those ultrasonic sensors detect if there’s risk of a jam and

stopping that page before it gets jammed or hopefully ruined or eaten by the scanner. But of course the cleaner the paper the more high quality, the better.

John DeBevoise: Well sure. You know, but then again, we’re talking about my receipts. So with your scanner, you decided at some point in your life that things just weren’t the way you wanted. And this is what got my attention is that you’re a small business, but yet this is an arena, a business segment that is highly populated with some very high dollar items. And scanners that are standalone are always more expensive because the multiple features and what they can do, as opposed to the printers. What made you decide, “You know what, I’m going to decide to go out and go up against these billion dollar companies with your product, Raven Scanners?”

Stefan Diasti: It was again kind of born out of necessity. When I looked at the competition, there was really nothing else like what we’ve built on the market today. And you’re seeing a trend right, with small businesses and households moving towards cloud-based technologies for the reasons that you described, document retention, security and accessibility. And so there really wasn’t a true cloud-based scanner on the market. And certainly not one that was fully standalone. You’re also seeing an increase in incompatibility issues. Apple upgrades their operating system to the latest version, and suddenly all of the old scanners get bricked. And so we wanted a scanner that could give users the freedom to not have to worry about driver and operating system compatibility longterm. But again, really focusing on the standalone nature. And we thought that bringing that to market was differentiated enough that we could do well. And that’s proven to be the case.

John DeBevoise: Most scanners like such as this are, are primarily designed for documents and such. Is this something that I would run a photograph through and expect some good outcome?

Stefan Diasti: Well, we can scan up to 600 dpi, which is extremely high quality and full color. However, the scanners are optimized and designed for documents at this time. So that’s something that, over time we’ll include some more features and functionality for high resolution PNG and JPEG outputs that will optimize for photos. But they are automatic document feeders, which means that the scanner itself will feed those pages through. You don’t have to do that manually. And so, ideally you don’t want to run brittle old photographs through an ADF driven scanner.

John DeBevoise: And I mentioned that, because the type of photograph that you may run through there may be suitable to be posting up or as something on your social media, perhaps even your website where you don’t have to go with high definition ones, but it would be perfectly acceptable to run that through, save it, and put it up on a social media post.

Stefan Diasti: Absolutely. And we have customers that use it for general photo scanning like you described, the magazines, other sorts of color documents.

John DeBevoise: As far as putting documents through. One of the things that I’ve always been impressed with is being able to put different size papers, receipts, and things in all at the same time, and then let it do its magic. I’ve always been fascinated with its ability to do that. And yours does that.

Stefan Diasti: It does, yes. So we can automatically crop, deskew, orient pages based on detecting those document types and the edges. We can take legal size paper, letter sized paper, business cards, receipts, even ID cards, credit cards are capable of being scanned with our Raven Scanners.

John DeBevoise: You decided out of necessity you’re going to create this company. As my audience knows, there’s the idea, the plan, the people, the execution, and the solution. All those must be in place in order to have your business succeed. So you had the idea, what was your next step after you had this great idea? How did you build it?

Stefan Diasti: I come from a technical background.

John DeBevoise: I can tell.

Stefan Diasti: So a lot of time spent building software and technologies for different industries. And so this is really a software problem, as much as it is a hardware challenge. And so of course we spent time analyzing competitive models, but really assembling a team in Houston Texas, where we’re based to go out and build the software that would ultimately be embedded on these devices. Building an API and a cloud-based technology that would allow us to push updates to customers remotely, be able to connect to all of these cloud services and add those as the list grows over time. So then after that, we did a lot of product market testing and user testing and prototyping to make sure that again we were addressing the needs of businesses and households. And so that took about two and a half, three years of just software development before we actually introduced it to the market. But we’ve been in the market now for about a year and a half.

John DeBevoise: Just a year and a half? How are sales going?

Stefan Diasti: Sales are great. You know, we’re still in that hockey stick growth stage, and it’s a lot of fun. We’ll be introducing additional models here at the end of the year. So super excited about that. And we’re expanding internationally as well. We’re seeing a lot of demand, even outside of the U.S., based on the differentiation of our technology. And so it’s been a lot of fun over the last year and a half to see it grow from the ground up.

John DeBevoise: You mentioned that a lot has to do with software. What about the hardware? How did you come up with the system that you had and how did you have it built?

Stefan Diasti: So that is a sourcing challenge. And looking for industry experts on document scanners, of course some of the billion dollar companies build this themselves, some source that out with partners. And so it was really traveling around the world, meeting with experts in the scanner hardware technologies to find the right partners to help us come up with hardware that will meet the needs of our product, as well as our customers. And be able to grow with us as we develop new product technologies, new hardware innovations. So it was just a lot of searching and meetings and conversations and testing to identify the right partners, the right manufacturing, to bring our Raven Scanners to market.

John DeBevoise: There’s a lot of moving parts to these things. So building something from the ground up would be quite time consuming and what a huge project. So what you did was you traveled the world literally to find places that could produce the type of scanner that you wanted, and then to integrate it with your software that you have a background in?

Stefan Diasti: That’s exactly right.

John DeBevoise: So you decided that you had the idea and then you came up with this plan to bring the hardware and the software together. Where did you find the people? Because there’s the idea of the plan and the people. I’m going down through our five points here. So you had the plan. Now you brought it together. How did you get it out there with the people?

Stefan Diasti: We did a lot of sourcing. Talent is sometimes the hardest part of the equation and is a recurring challenge as you face new technical problems and challenges to overcome. But a lot of sourcing, a lot of industry experts to try and figure out how we put all of this together, right? What’s that architectural approach to having a hardware component, to having a software dev and an API to all of these integrations, how do we bring all of that together? But once we understood the architecture and how we wanted the system and the technologies to be built, then it was a matter of going out and sourcing the right talent to be able to put that into place. I mean, we wanted to do that locally here in Houston Texas, to really have that team environment and have that team in-house. And so we’ve never contracted out any of the development.

We’ve always done that within our own teams. And so we really built out a front end team, a backend team, UX and UI designers, so that we always have full prototyping before we go into software development to know how this is going to function before we start doing the work. But then over time building out additional teams like our customer support and customer success teams, to make sure that we’re having regular conversations with customers as we bring it

to market and improve it through those automatic updates that we have available to really again, service the needs of our customer.

John DeBevoise: Let me back up for just a moment, because you used a couple of terms and I know you’re the technical guy, UX and UI. What does that mean?

Stefan Diasti: Absolutely. So UX is user experience and UI is user interface. So we use a user-centered design approach. So what happens is these are different talents. You may be familiar with visual designers or graphic designers.

John DeBevoise: Sure.

Stefan Diasti: UX and UI is a little bit more specialized. And so they’re really focused on optimizing the user experience, rather than just the look and feel. And so things can look pretty but not be easy to use. And so this approach really focuses on user-centric design, and that’s kind of been part of our secret sauce here and what you see if you look at our reviews. And our feedback from our customers is that they can bring this out of the box and start scanning in a matter of five minutes without any technical background, even including hooking it up to these cloud services. And that really is a function of the design process and the simplicity of our user interface.

John DeBevoise: If I am a restaurant owner, and I talk a lot about small businesses, restaurants are the prime example of a small family or home-based business. I scan all these documents, all my supplies. From the foods to the napkins and everything as well, all receipts. And I put them into a scanner and we’ll use the Raven Scanner as an example. It interfaces with a software application. Is it going to be able to recognize where those documents, those receipts and or documents need to go to and put them away efficiently?

Stefan Diasti: Great question. So, as mentioned earlier, it will go through the OCR process and make those documents fully searchable. And the user can choose to scan those into particular folders or destinations. That’s something that we’re working on building on the Raven Scanner side is some auto categorization, auto filing capabilities using that AI powered OCR to be able to even embed metadata right into the document to make it even more useful and retrievable. So in part, we can do that today with a little bit of help from the user telling the interface where they want it to go, but it won’t be long before we can start to fully automate that process. And there is other software, for example, with receipts, there’s a lot of receipt management software, whether you could scan directly into that software from our scanner and that receipt management or accounting software does some of that lifting that you’re describing.

John DeBevoise: And that has been my experience is that you scan something and it will go into what it believes to be the appropriate boxes. And it gives you the opportunity obviously to edit. It gives me the opportunity to change the numbers if perhaps

it was blurred for whatever reason. I can double check from the receipt to what has been scanned and is in my spreadsheet.

Stefan Diasti: Absolutely, yeah. And that’s an important element, even as good as the AI technologies are, they’re learning. And so it’s important to be able to give the user the ability to verify, validate correct information as it’s being put into the system.

John DeBevoise: Well, I’ve learned that the OCR is much more accurate than my voice recognition on my phone. I don’t know if voice recognition is purposely trying to screw up my conversations or my text or get me in trouble, but it does a very good job. Unlike the OCR, the Optical Character Recognition is much clearer and much more accurate most of the time, but like anything else you got to double check. Kind of like having employees, you got to make sure they’re doing their job right.

Stefan Diasti: Absolutely.

John DeBevoise: So in the case with the restaurants, I can have my own personalized software or one, perhaps my tax planning software that I have, that everybody on my show knows about that I can direct those documents or those receipts that are going through it, into those various categories in my files and documents versus the receipts into my tax structuring software, correct?

Stefan Diasti: Yes. And we have a lot of restaurants, convenience stores, retail shops and the like, where the owners have purchased Raven Scanners to put into those shops. That way they don’t have to go around, right. They may have three, four or five, 10 locations. And rather than having to go around and collect those invoices, their staff is trained to scan those as they come in with deliveries or with customers. And they go to a dedicated folder or destination that’s configured on their scanner. And that way the owner has real time access to that information. If they choose to go file it somewhere else, or need to get clarification, they can do that remotely. And that’s become even more important given the current climate with the pandemic and the remote work element.

John DeBevoise: Yes, and one of the reasons why I asked Stefan on the show to talk about his scanners is the importance of documentation. I tell everybody that everyone should have a home-based business. It doesn’t matter what it is. It can be anything. And perhaps you just heard the horses in the background. That’s my home-based business. Have one, because you can convert ordinary expenses to deductions. And I’ll tell you what, the most important part of doing all of that is keeping accurate records in a timely fashion. We all know that. So we’re talking with Stefan from Raven Scanners about the importance of the ability to scan your documents, your bills, your records, everything, and get them into the computer. And as I recommend put them into a cloud in the event that something happens to your records moving on and your business model, we have the idea, the plan, the people. So you finally got all these pieces together.

How to you flip the switch on and say, “All right, everybody here we are.” Was there a rush to your door? Or how did you get the message out?

Stefan Diasti: We actually went to one of the largest technology conferences in North America called Collision comp. And we formally launched there. We had a large booth on the trade show floor and launched alongside other billion dollar technology companies. And so that was kind of our splash, to be able to make ourselves known. And we had a overwhelming response to that launch. But from there, we really spent a lot of time and dollars of course, advertising domestically to get this out in front of small businesses and households. But we really used Amazon as a major channel to be able to facilitate that. So we do a good majority of our sales on the Amazon platform, and it’s actually been great for a product like ours to be able to kind of get the word out very quickly and to get feedback very quickly as well in the form of reviews and customer comments. And so those have kind of been our primary ways that we got the word out, and over the last year and a half was through sales marketing, and then some of these conference and exhibits.

John DeBevoise: And of course with the pandemic, you’ve had to rely more on the online presence. For those of us, all of us that listened to the show about marketing. What have you found to be the most effective online marketing resources? Has it been through Google? Has it been through Facebook, LinkedIn, through the combination of that? And do you do that internally?

Stefan Diasti: We do. We have our own marketing teams internally. And so we manage all of that in-house. I’ll tell you it change. It evolves over time in terms of what marketing channels are most effective. For us it’s a combination of some of the eCommerce channels, like I mentioned with Amazon, you mentioned Google. So there’s paid search, rather PPC advertising that most are probably familiar with. There’s also Google Shopping and merchant center ads. So when you have actual physical products, you can market them on that shopping banner that you see on Google. But what I’m seeing increasingly is that video is one of the growing and more effective forms of marketing. And so that could be with major influencers. It could be with paid video presence on YouTube and the like. Video has become an overwhelmingly, popular and effective medium for advertising our products.

John DeBevoise: As well for everyone else. In fact, Buziness Soup is going video, but not today. I’ve been forced to come out from my padded cell, my sound booth, and become part of the video craze. And of course with the distribution of what’s known as 5G is going to make for video presentations just like audio. It’s going to be uninterrupted. Good for you. You got my attention through your presentations in social media, and I’m happy to see that you’re here on Buziness Soup because you got my attention.

Stefan Diasti: Happy to be here.

John DeBevoise: We’re talking with Stefan Diasti, who is the CEO of Raven Scanners, and there’s a lot of other scanners out there, and this is not an infomercial, but an information about how you took a company and a billion dollar industry, came up with your spin, your different applications to it and brought it to market. And congratulations on your success on that. It’s been interesting to hear you talk about the process, the steps, and all the five key points of the success of business. That’s the idea, the plan, the people, the execution, and the solution. Congratulations, Stefan. Thank you for being a part of this serving a Buziness Soup.

Stefan Diasti: Thanks again, John.