Shoeboxed Ail Your Receipts And Let Them Do The Rest

For the last three years, Taylor Mingos (Duke '07) has been busy juggling a triple major and his startup, Shoeboxed. During his junior year at Duke, he decided to transfer from the Trinity School of Arts and Sciences to the Pratt School of Engineering, leveraging the switch with AP credits and an enormous course load. During a semester abroad through Pratt, Mingos lived in Germany where he participated from the ground up in the development of StudiVZ, a German social networking site. Upon returning to Duke, Mingos leveraged his experience in Germany by assembling his own team to work in Germany last summer to launch Shoeboxed, an online receipt service.
 
Launched April 24th of last year, Shoeboxed is the latest startup that successfully fuses human services with a web-based accounting service. Users receive a monthly envelop in the mail and send away their receipts, where they are scanned and presented to the user in an online accounting program resembling a simplified version of Quicken. The service compiles accounting statistics and can even export them to more familiar desktop programs, including Quicken, so that the user can get a fix on his or her spending habits. Users can subscribe for a broad spectrum of services, but the price of the subscription tends to fluctuate most depending on what shipping service the user selects.
So far, the site has been a smash hit, currently registering over 10k new users a month, along with 40k monthly impressions. The site is a purely service-based revenue model, relying on subscriptions rather than advertising. More recently the site has rolled out a social networking option on the site, where users can view each other’s purchases and comment on them. Mingos’ goal is to attract 11 million users, or 10 percent of the online shopping market. In the meantime, the site is embracing its environmentally friendly side, offering to scan and recycle receipts for free on Earth Day.