Meet the startup whose file-sharing app is hitting 15,000 downloads a day

Send Anywhere CEO Yoonsik Oh / Photo credit: Send Anywhere

South Korean startup Estmob is the brain behind file-transfer service Send Anywhere. Set up in 2012, the service has since exploded in popularity. As of October 2018, its mobile app was hitting an average of about 15,000 downloads a day – and that’s not even the most impressive stat.

Its “monthly unique device figure” – or the number of devices using Send Anywhere each month – grew from 2 million in 2017 to 3.6 million in early 2018. While it’s not the most widely used file-sharing tool yet, user engagement has skyrocketed. It has sent 2 billion files totaling 5 petabytes so far, up from 57 million files totaling 520 terabytes just two years ago.

With growth going well, the lean team of 19 people has turned on the monetization faucet this year, offering an ad-supported free tier along with Send Anywhere Plus, a premium experience that has more features, no ads, and costs US$5.99 per month. Estmob will also be raising a series B round soon, with a modest US$5 million target.

Tech in Asia spoke to Yoonsik Oh, Estmob’s CEO and co-founder, to find out more.

What inspired the idea behind Send Anywhere?

I was working as a lead developer at a respected IT company in Korea, Estsoft, when I encountered a small problem. My colleagues and I, as well as third-party vendors, had trouble sending and sharing large files easily and quickly. While I used file transfer protocol (FTP) the most, it just didn’t work when I was working with non-engineers. The cloud took forever to upload the files and handling USB sticks compromised company security protocols. This small nuisance inspired me to develop Send Anywhere.

Send Anywhere isn’t prominent on the web, according to estimated site traffic by SimilarWeb.

Send Anywhere is first and foremost a file-sharing service. In order to stand out from the competition, I wanted to develop a service that’s suited to a mobile-fast and multi-device world. It would be easy to use, secure, and most importantly, fast no matter the size and the type of files.

Can you elaborate on what edge Send Anywhere has over its competitors?

We take great care in assessing and analyzing the network environment the user is in. Our competitors employ one or two ways to send files because they are constrained by many variables they face in diverse network environments. Send Anywhere, on the other hand, automatically discovers the most optimal path to send your files quickly based on the user data we’ve accumulated over the years.

Specifically, we compile data on geography, transfer speed, as well as network environment and its stability. Using these data, we make incremental improvements to guarantee that Send Anywhere’s performance is not compromised.

This technical advantage allows Send Anywhere to be faster and simpler than our competitors.