GoldFynch empowers attorneys and other professionals to accelerate the process of sorting and reviewing integral documents or files.
Introduced to one another at the University of Iowa, GoldFynch co-founders Ross Johnson and Anith Mathai focused first on the potential for a photo and document management tool that would provide users with a unique mechanism to chronicle their lives.
The men, while trying to figure out how to monetize the idea at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, soon turned their attention to a set of technologies that could address the business end of large-scale data and document processing.
“The general advice is you don’t just go out and build something,’” Mathai said. “You figure out if this is a problem for multiple people. You look for layers of commonality among problems.”
How GoldFynch works
A number of GoldFynch’s clients are beta users who, over the past year, have been trialing the service throughout much of the startup’s customer discovery and development phase.
Rather than getting caught up in the technical aspects of creating a system to upload, aggregate and organize documents, GoldFynch allows information-dependent professionals to make the best use of their time by focusing on client advocacy – as opposed to waiting for search results or producing documents.
“It was designed from the ground up,” Mathai said. “The traditional approach had been to learn a complicated syntax or search language. Every document or file that mentions a particular person or subject could be important. With GoldFynch, users can easily type in what they want to get options.”
From DOC to PDF, JPG, ZIP files and more, GoldFynch can handle virtually any file type, including emails, as well as naming structures. All images of text are automatically scanned and recognized as each uploaded file becomes fully searchable. Entities such as people, places and dates are extracted automatically. The platform supports drag-and-drop functionality alongside data filtering, timeline reviews and keyword searches.
GoldFynch also maintains a hierarchy with regards to the exact same folder structure, eliminating another user headache that Mathai said most other software ignores.
“Until this point, we’ve been integrating feedback and adding features while increasing our capacity and optimizing all backend processes,” he said. “The idea is not only to make your search faster, but filtering and reviewing a lot faster, too. We created the whole thing to be automatic with tools similar those you may already use.”
Eliminating the learning curve
Armed with customer feedback and a brand story tied to both Iowa’s official bird and fictional character Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, GoldFynch is offering users a free trial throughout the duration of its initial launch phase in April 2016.
Mathai said the company has constructed a simple pricing model that is based on volume with tiers to suit small-to-medium sized offices or solo practices, which may not be able to afford a large investment in information technology.
“An expectation has been set with existing software that users tend to waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to operate it,” Mathai said. “There are other e-discovery software platforms out there that solve the problem, yet we’ve found that a high price and general lack of transparency tend to turn would-be users away.”
The company also sees high-friction sales experiences as another pain point for current users of other e-discovery software.
“With GoldFynch, there is no time wasted on a learning curve. We want people to take advantage of it. That’s the best thing for us,” said Mathai.
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Todd Razor is a Des Moines-based writer and multimedia storyteller who covers technology and innovation in the real estate, construction and manufacturing industries.
