Startup Spotlight #86: Taonga

Taonga allows you to securely store and share your personal documents.

Feb 15, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Aashni Shah, founder and CEO of Taonga, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Aashni Shah is on a mission to build a better tomorrow. She is the Founder and CEO of Taonga, letting users take back control of their personal documents using an end-to-end encrypted app to securely store and share documents, like their passport. She understands the pain points of trying to manage digital backups of personal documents, especially since she's a multinational resident of 4 countries from 4 different continents. Aashni is a former software engineer from Square, Microsoft, and Amazon, and started Elixir Labs, Virtual Quiz Night Fundraisers, and UofTHacks in the past. Aashni has also been recognized as one of the top 50 most inspiring women in STEM in Canada and Top Emerging Leaders under 40 in Canada.

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Startup Spotlight: Taonga

Problem: Prior to, and accelerated by COVID, people are looking to organize digital backups of their personal documents (like passports, rental agreements, and taxes) to share with family, friends, and businesses. Without realizing it, many people are using insecure tools, making it even easier for bad actors to steal the data, committing Identity Fraud, and other issues.

Market: 41% of the world's internet users have shared a scanned copy of their personal document using email, that's 1.8B people. These are stats from 2019; however, in light of the accelerated digital transformation due to COVID, and increasing policy changes to protect privacy online, these numbers have increased.

Solution: Taonga is focused on creating a one-stop app for users to securely store and share all their personal documents. Taonga provides additional benefits such as document expiration date reminders, track and revoke access to documents, and setting access time limits before sharing a document

Team: Shah is a Software Engineer and multinational citizen that faces this problem regularly.

Recent Success:

Shah: The inspiration for Taonga came from a product that I needed. I started conducting user interviews to see what other travelers, immigrants, and families needed and found a lot of synergy between their use cases and mine. I started these interviews before designing the first version of my product, and have continued conducting them with beta users and potential future users as well. Taking the feedback from these users, converting them into changes that my team can implement, and then rolling those changes out have made the product significantly stronger. It's no longer a product that serves my single use case, but rather serves many additional use cases - some of which I would have never thought of if it hadn't been for these user interviews. This feedback has helped redesign parts of the app and will go towards launching the next major version of the app to users in the next month. Recent Struggle:

Recent Struggle:

Shah: I'm a bootstrapping solo-founder. Fortunately, I'm technical and was able to build the early version of the app myself. I'm learning the importance of delegating and distributing the workload so that I can focus on my strengths, and delegate the other tasks out. However, this also leads to one of my biggest struggles which are how to balance doing the work myself, hiring someone to do work, or outsource it to a contractor - both of which are tricky with a small bootstrapped budget.

Founder Advice:

Shah: Find your community and make the most of it! In the early days of exploring the Taonga idea, I reached out to a few friends that were interested in starting their own things. We meet every week to share updates, successes, and struggles - and have continuously offered each other support, feedback, and introductions to early customers too. Being a founder, especially a solo founder, can be extremely lonely, but having this community of founders that were on a similar journey to me has been extremely powerful!

Two Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Shah: Here are two founders you should check out next!

Pavla Bobosikova, Founder of WFHomie: WFHomie is a remote employee engagement and distributed team culture building platform.
Sophie Wyne, Founder of ariglad: ariglad helps HR create a happy culture and retain talent by enabling anonymous communication channels.

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