The PaperFree Office – Free Your Paper and Your Mind will Follow !

Drowning in a sea of paper? Then we are on a mission to help you !

My name is Jason Patton and I’m the co-founder and CEO of PaperFree - The Search Engine for Your Paper. What we exist to do is to save you time, save you money and save the planet by PaperFree’ing your business:

We free your information from the paper it’s printed on (ever tried to Google your paper archives?)
We free your paper from your offices and archives, feeding it back into the recycling cycle
We free you from your paper problems

In October 2008, PaperFree co-founder Wayne Butcher had had enough. He was moving house yet again, and was frustrated at having to blow the dust off several storage boxes and lever arch files full of paper. You know, all those myriad papers that for the most part he would never take a second look at, but just had to keep, either for his business internally, or to satisfy the tax man, or for any other reason.

He thought to himself “in the age of space tourism, genetic fingerprinting and nano-manufacturing, there must be a simpler, better, and d*mnit, a greener way to deal with all these papers! With mobile ambitions, the thought of storing the boxes in his dad’s shed didn’t quite cut it. (His dad was none too keen on the idea either!) And with a lean budget, the big-end-of-town pricing of a traditional archive storage and retrieval firm didn’t fit the bill either. The PaperFree seed had sprouted…

The concept:

You give all your paper files/archives/records/forms/docs to us (in envelopes or boxes that we provide)
We securely digitise (scan) them and store them online
You and your trusted service providers can search them – anytime, anywhere

Wayne’s story and basic idea hit a strong chord with me and after running it by as many people as would listen, we soon realised that there was a ready army of paper slaves out there, just waiting to be ‘Freed.

So we are building it – PaperFree - The Search Engine for Your Paper.

Let’s be clear about one thing upfront – we are not proposing to turn yours into a “paperless office”. The paperless office was a dystopian myth of the 80s that we suggest is best forgotten (along with a few other things from that decade…)

On the contrary, we REJOICE in paper. Paper can be so incredibly useful – handy, quick, simple, often even beautiful (if sometimes just a little dangerous…paper cuts – ouch!) There will always be a place for it – we can think of at least 13 legitimate uses for paper right here. It’s just that it gets put to use in PLENTY of inappropriate, unsustainable ways as well, and that simply cannot go on. For example, one of those inappropriate, unsustainable and just plain unnecessary uses is stored tax records. The ATO has ruled on this, and it is quite clear that if done right, a digitised copy is just as good as the original. So, let’s free up that paper and put all those scrappy receipts back into the recycling cycle!

PaperFree the service is all about “lean & green” – good for your business and good for the planet. A very important thing to us about PaperFree, the company behind the service, is that it itself be started up, run and of course prosper, in a lean fashion. That’s to say we don’t like waste. Wasted paper, wasted energy, wasted time, wasted resources of any kind.

I tell you this here because we are currently pre-launch, running a Test User Group (TUG), and looking to form a community of like-mindeds – please get in touch with us if you, like us, are keen on lean & green!

If you know already that this is just you all-over, then we have a pretty sweet deal for the 100 founding members, so please sign-up here.

Help spread the word!