When we started working with organisations on document management and workflow automation, we noticed something that surprised us.
Most businesses were running critical processes on a combination of spreadsheets, shared drives, email chains, and manually generated documents. It worked — until it didn't. Files went missing. Versions multiplied. The process of generating and filing documents was slow, inconsistent, and entirely dependent on the people holding it together.
At the same time, we had one eye on serverless computing. The question we kept asking was whether usage-based pricing — paying for what you actually consume rather than buying seats — could be applied to document management. That idea became the starting point for APDocs: an enterprise-grade system of record available to organisations of any size, not just those who could afford the traditional alternatives.
The real problem wasn't documents
At first glance, the problem looked manageable. Businesses needed document templates, file storage, and a way to generate documents automatically. We thought we were building a document tool.
We weren't.
After digging deeper, it became clear that the real challenge was workflow orchestration. Documents are rarely standalone files. A proposal sits inside a sales process. A contract belongs to a compliance workflow. A report is the output of a data pipeline. Each of these requires structured data, version control, storage, permissions, and automation — all working together reliably.
The real problem was connecting those pieces. The document was just the visible surface of something much larger underneath.
Why existing tools didn't solve it
There's no shortage of document tools. But when we looked at the landscape, they fell into two camps that left a significant gap in the middle.
On one side were generic file storage tools — Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox. These were built to store documents, not manage the workflows around them. On the other side were complex enterprise systems that could handle workflows but were expensive, difficult to customise, and heavy to deploy. For smaller organisations, and for teams building on low-code platforms, neither option was right.
What was missing was something flexible, scalable, programmable, and cloud-native — something that could sit underneath a workflow and handle the document layer without becoming the thing that slows everything down.
Designing APDocs
When I started designing APDocs, I anchored it around three principles that I've held to ever since.
The first was cloud native. The platform needed to scale without requiring infrastructure management. That led directly to a serverless architecture — AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and S3 — where the system scales automatically and there are no servers to maintain.
The second was automation agnostic. Early versions of APDocs contained their own workflow logic, and it quickly became a barrier. The market already had excellent work management platforms with rich APIs. Rather than compete with them, we chose to complement them — initially Smartsheet for spreadsheet-style workloads and Caspio for database-centric ones. APDocs became the document layer that sits alongside those tools, not a replacement for them.
The third was being a trusted system of record. The goal was never just to store documents. It was to make document storage genuinely reliable — tamper-evident, searchable, version-controlled, and protected. That led to features like an immutable blockchain history ledger, AWS AI-powered search, ransomware protection through immutable versioning, and structured filing systems that hold their shape over time.
What building it taught us
Three things became clear that I hadn't fully anticipated before we started.
Architecture decisions made early have long consequences. Many systems hit walls later because the hard decisions were deferred. Designing for scalability from the beginning — even when the scale isn't there yet — saves a significant amount of pain.
Simplicity is almost always the right choice. Serverless infrastructure removed an entire category of operational problems. There are no servers to patch, no capacity to provision. That simplicity compounded over time.
And perhaps most importantly: documents don't exist in isolation. They belong to workflows, data models, and business processes. The systems that recognise this connection — rather than treating the document as the endpoint — are the ones that actually change how organisations work.
Where APDocs is going
The platform is still early. Future development is focused on extending the range of low-code platforms we can work with, building more flexible template systems, and scaling the multi-tenant infrastructure that lets us serve organisations of very different sizes from the same foundation.
Document automation is consistently underestimated. In most organisations it sits quietly at the centre of critical operations, held together by people and workarounds rather than systems. Building a reliable layer underneath those processes is the work we're focused on.