My name is Matt Svetlak, and I’m the Product Director at iScanner, BP Mobile (AIBY Group). iScanner is a document management platform built on our proprietary AI technology and a mobile-first approach, making it easy for anyone to create professional-quality documents directly from their smartphone—effortlessly. iScanner holds the lead among mobile scanning apps in the US and consistently surprises its users with new, unique features.
Today, I want to share the journey of how iScanner came to life—how a simple idea evolved into the #1 US-based scanning and document management platform, trusted by over 125 million people worldwide.
My Path to the iScanner Team
I started my career in IT as a QA specialist in mobile app testing at BPMobile (AIBY Group). After two years in QA, I found out that the company had opened a job vacancy for a Product Manager of a new project, iScanner, and decided to take this opportunity.
I felt that I was ready for it. I’ve always wanted our products to be a high-quality and reliable solution to our users’ problems. From the very beginning of my career in IT, I’ve been developing skills that could help me broaden my understanding of what product quality is. For instance, I studied UX design, UX research, and data analysis. The same skills are required for a Product Manager.
Over the years of being a product manager, I’ve worked with several different mobile applications, but iScanner has always been and still is my main project. The need for a Vice President of Product in our company has occurred due to iScanner’s remarkable growth. This role involves strategic planning of product development.
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Where Did the Idea of iScanner Come From?
In 2014–2015, we saw an impressive rise of utilities on the mobile app market and decided to take a close look at this category. Surprisingly, there were almost no solid scanner apps. Like many other growing companies, we were looking for ways to optimize our internal processes, including document management.
So, our search for an all-in-one solution for our business needs resulted in the creation of iScanner—a simple and quick scanning app that does a perfect job of digitizing documents. iScanner was first launched on the App Store in 2016, and was later rolled out for Android users as well.
Eventually, AI has become a part of the app which helps us improve the quality of scanned documents. Thanks to our AI algorithms, the average photo of a document turns into a professional-looking digital document. Plus, users get a wide variety of editing tools to work with their scanned documents. Users can crop, add or rearrange pages, add signatures, text, or images, and more.
Our Lessons From the Pandemic Era and New Strategies for Development
From 2018 to 2019, iScanner was demonstrating steady growth. However, the dynamics changed remarkably in the winter–spring of 2020. Coronavirus was the reason for that. During this time, we had an upsurge in the number of new users.
Before COVID-19, small business owners were our core audience. During the pandemic, in-app user surveys showed that, apart from the office workers who now had to adapt to working remotely, several other prominent user groups appeared in the app.
The first group consisted of people who wanted to digitize and manage their personal documents efficiently. Users were actively scanning medical documents, personal documents of their elderly relatives, and other paperwork.
The second group was students and educators. With the rise of remote education, they had to scan a great deal of notes and textbooks. Before the pandemic, this segment of users was rather insignificant.
Especially for students, we’ve added the Math feature that helps to solve math equations. Math scanners exist as separate apps. But in iScanner, the math solver is supposed to streamline online learning and let students not only scan and submit their homework but also test their knowledge, all in one app.
Next, we’ve added a QR-code reader. Coronavirus has changed the daily routine of students and their parents, and QR-codes gained a new life. A great deal of entertainment, cultural, and social establishments have implemented contactless processes (e.g. access to menus in cafes, ordering and payments, informational leaflets, sharing of links). Our QR-code reader has helped to drive retention and improved several other product metrics.
Given the new audience which had new needs, we decided to switch to the R & D process where everyone involved not only works on the app’s main features but also helps generate new ideas. Everyone on the iScanner team engaged in creation of new, potentially useful features that we could implement quickly.
As a result, our normal steady routine of working on a mature product has been replaced by the lively stimulating atmosphere of a new product because we were basically developing new apps within our app. At the same time, our team was actively working on the AI-based border detection automation and crop feature.
All in all, the global pandemic has become a time of active growth for iScanner. Our swift and timely response to the app’s organic growth, the flexibility of our processes, and focus on users’ needs have helped us redistribute our resources and find new points of development for the app.
Our Vision and Mission
At the moment, iScanner is developing into a document management platform, however, it remains a mobile-first product. And this is a key advantage because the app’s team fully understands what our users need when they work with documents on the go. Our main focus is to give people the freedom of creating high-quality professional documents exactly where and when they need it. As they say, working remotely, you never know when you’re going to need to scan and send a document.
Our mobile app is relevant for literally anyone because everybody has to interact with documents in some capacity from a very young age. We try to develop the main functionality of the app as well as some features for certain market segments.
At iScanner, we use cutting-edge technology and features of our own design in order to make any work with documents as easy as possible, giving our users confidence and inspiration and creating new opportunities for their personal and professional growth. We spare no effort to make iScanner a solution that helps create PRO documents effortlessly and sustainably.
Basically, iScanner is a full-cycle document management platform that can replace office equipment and help cut down on paper. If you’re able to make changes to your document and share the updated version from your phone, then there’s no need to print it out or make copies.
It’s also noteworthy that we have made iScanner completely ad-free. Imagine how annoying it can be when you only have 5 minutes before the deadline to scan a document and a pop-up ad appears. This is not what we want. We understand that our users value the quality as well as the convenience of our app.
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About the iScanner Team
In order to be the best on the market, consistently following a strategy and adapting it according to constant market fluctuations and the most recent tech innovations is not enough. Every single person on the iScanner team believes in our product and its value for the users.
Everybody understands their own contribution and shares not only their knowledge and expertise but also their energy. This is why iScanner, a product well-known to the market, is always surrounded by the stimulating atmosphere of active interest and new ideas.
Today, the iScanner team is a team of over a 100 people scattered across the globe. It doesn’t make any difference where someone is located if they are enthusiastic about the project. We manage to stay on the same wavelength thanks to our regular calls, engaging online activities organized by our HR team, and occasional offline corporate events in locations where a significant number of our team members are located.
For example, in November on World Paper Free Day, our marketing team organized a paperless-office challenge to encourage the team to cut down on paper. They were supervising all the printing in the office and checking whether people had a good enough reason to print or they were doing that simply out of habit.
Incidentally, our online campaign for World Paper Free Day was pretty popular with the users. People were actively sharing our special banner with the call to help save forests and go paperless with our mobile app.
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