How Our Consumer App Became a Pillar of our B2B Business

While most companies label themselves as Business-to-Customer (B2C) or Business-to-Business (B2B), we sell products in both categories, resulting in a synergy that benefits both our customers and our business.

Launching a Consumer App

In 2010, barely three years after the iPhone launched, we published Genius Scan on the App Store, a mobile app that put a scanner in everyone’s pocket. Genius Scan would automatically detect, crop, and enhance photos of documents, enabling our customers to easily create scans of their documents as PDFs. Genius Scan’s user base quickly grew to the millions, as Apple and the press commended it for its image processing quality, simplicity, and ease of use.

… That Gives Birth to an SDK

Soon, we started receiving inquiries asking if we could create white-label apps for other companies. At the time, our “team” was very small (just Guillaume and myself), and we were laser-focused on product and software development, so we decided not to go down the software consultancy route. Instead, we kept focusing on our product.

However, we recognized early that our mobile scanning technology was the future of scanning and could benefit many apps, every time someone had to digitize a document. We decided to modularize our scanning technology and extract it as part of a Software Development Kit (SDK) that other companies could license from us and integrate when building an app for their customers. We also integrated the SDK back into Genius Scan. From then on, every time we’d improve Genius Scan, the Genius Scan SDK would benefit from the improvements. From then on, we would develop our mobile app Genius Scan and its SDK hand-in-hand.

The SDK quickly gained steam, as it was recognized for its quality. While it’s easy to create a “document scanner,” it’s different to implement an image processing pipeline that checks all the marks: high-quality output, efficiency, user-friendliness, working in all lighting conditions, on a wide range of devices.

At this stage, the growth of our SDK was quite impressive, and we had to juggle where to allocate our limited resources every day. Some of our competitors chose to go full B2B and dropped their consumer app, but we knew our consumer app was an important stepping stone for the SDK. Also, we were and still are passionate about creating a product that we put in people’s hands and get their direct feedback.

A Unique Synergy

And as it is, we dogfood our SDK as part of a mobile app used by millions of users every day and rated 4.9* on the App Store; every 25 seconds, somewhere in the world, a happy customer scans a document with Genius Scan. This ensures that the SDK is battle-proof, up-to-date to the latest mobile app standards and that we see any issue with the scanning feature very quickly.

When a problem arises, be it because of a new device, an OS update, or, god forbid, a bogus update of Genius Scan, our mobile app customers let us know almost immediately.

As we address the issue in Genius Scan, we can immediately push an SDK update that reaches our SDK customers’ hands before they are even aware of the problem.

Most of the time, our SDK customers don’t even notice that their users have a problem in production.

This feedback loop would be much slower without a large-scale mobile app as a sidekick to an SDK, something only the Genius Scan SDK offers. First, a company integrating a scanning SDK generally has orders of magnitude fewer users than Genius Scan has, so any problem will have less occurrence and less likelihood of being taken seriously. After a few back and forths with the customer, the app editor will need to have a few conversations with the Scanning SDK company; they will likely request more logs or details that need to be channeled through the company integrating the SDK, leading to lengthy reaction times, far from the responsiveness we can offer with Genius Scan.

An SDK such as Genius Scan is integrated into mobile apps with all kinds of constraints (App Review requirements, usability, accessibility, very wide range of devices). As mobile app editors, we experience these constraints when publishing Genius Scan on the App Store and Google Play, so we know exactly what our SDK customers will encounter. By now, we know Apple and its notoriously changing App Store rules like the back of our hand. We understand what you can and cannot do with your UX to pass through App Review with flying colors. The fragmentation of devices is real, in particular for Android. Camera APIs behave differently on those devices. With millions of users worldwide, we know extremely quickly when a new device appears, and we can make sure our SDK works flawlessly on the broadest range of devices.

Last but not least, Genius Scan showcases our SDK and generates inbound leads for us. As a consequence, we are very lean for our sales operation; we can maintain a small sales team. We’re also fully self-funded, so our customers just pay for the best mobile scanning technology, not for a large overhead or investors’ ROI. We can offer very reasonable pricing relative to the value that we offer.

What’s Next?

We’re closing in on 15 years of continuous improvements and innovation for Genius Scan and the Genius Scan SDK, and we are extremely happy with how both complement each other. This benefits our business and, more importantly, enables us to offer the best mobile document scanning technology SDK in the world at a reasonable cost.