Out of curiosity, what exactly are non-technical people doing with PDF's, and why does there need to be a universal tool in the space? What would the tool do with the extracted data?
All kinds of things. PDF is the unifying data exchange format for a lot of businesses who use computers at some end to manage things and need to exchange documents of any kind without relying on the old "can you open Word files?" type problems.
There is a wide world outside of consumers of SaaS products for every little niche problem.
Sometimes they are baked in processes that still use PDF's to share information, sometimes they're old forms of any kind, sometimes even old scanned docs that are still in use but shared digitally. A lot of the businesses that carry on that way are of the mind that "if it's not broke, don't fix it" which is quite rational for their problem areas and existing knowledge base. They might be a potential market at some point for a new solution, but good luck selling them on a web-based subscription SaaS solution when a simple form has been serving their needs for 30+ years.
OP's problem of the PDF being the go-between to digital endpoints is more common than you might think.
The universality I was referring to was the wide range of possibilities for how a given form might be laid out. And old documents contain a lot of noise when they've been added to or manipulated. Look inside an old PDF form from some small-medium sized business sometime. Now imagine 1000 variations of that form one standard problem. Then multiple that by the number of potential problem areas the forms are managing.
Also like OP said—it's not sexy, but it's very real and having an intelligent PDF form reader and consumer would be a time-saver for those businesses who aren't geared to completely alter their workflow.
The tool could do anything with the extracted data. If it allowed you to connect to any of your in house services (like payroll or accounting) either with a quick config/API or a custom patch, or Google Drive, or whatever without complications like online-required and web accounts especially. No whole solution like that exists to my knowledge. At least nothing accessible to the wider market.
Thanks for the comment, this is really interesting. I guess i'm still confused what people actually do with these PDF's though. Are people looking at a PDF sent to them and manually entering that data somewhere else (like payroll or accounting), so this tool would take that data from the PDF and pump it in there automatically?
Thanks again, I just want to make sure I understand.
