The birth of Sharebrand: a founder's journey

Hey there! I'm Santhiaroo, the founder of Sharebrand, and I want to share how this whole thing started.

It was around April 2024, and I was doing my usual thing — checking some files a team member had shared with a client. When I clicked the link, I was bombarded with pop-ups trying to sell me lifetime deals and limited-time offers. Is this really the first impression I want clients to have? A file sharing platform basically yelling "Buy our stuff"? No way.

So I thought, okay, let's try Dropbox. But for a team of 30 designers, both in-house and contractors, we were looking at $15 per user. Sure, there are some basic branding features, but they come with a ton of stuff we don't need.

Next up, Box. Again, $15 to $25 per user for 30 people. The starter plan tops out at 100 GB of storage and 10 team members.

We already used Google Workspace for emails and admin, but only a few team members had full accounts. The rest used Zoho because it's cheaper. Getting decent storage and team control through Google costs $18 per month per user. It was getting complicated fast. We wanted to own the files as a company, keep access even if someone left the team, but our budget was already stretched across Slack, Figma, Adobe, Deel, and Remote.

What I really wanted was one thing: a way to share files with clients under our own brand. Our name, our logo, our domain on the link. Professional file sharing for our business, not someone else's. That tool didn't exist at a price that made sense.

That's when the idea clicked. I landed on the name Cloudbrand — "cloud" for storage, "brand" for the branding layer. The .com was $15,000, so I started with the .co and .io.

I pulled Ben, one of our project managers, onto the project along with two product designers. Design work started in June.

Ben found a developer with MVP experience. We agreed to finance the project, signed a contract, and he got started. I was out of my depth on the technical side but the developer walked us through everything — tech stack, process, timelines.

Then came the silence. Weeks went by with little news. I kept reminding myself that good things take time.

While we waited, we built a landing page, put the site online, and created Dropbox and WeTransfer comparison pages for Google indexing. Might as well let it start ranking while we built.

A few weeks later, we searched our product name and found a staging page the developer had set up with our landing page on a domain we didn't own. He had started building and deployed it on his own server. When we saw the login page with our name and logo for the first time, we were over the moon.

My co-founder immediately started calculating future MRR. The app wasn't even ready.

We changed scope, negotiated a fair extension, and shipped significant improvements to the MVP. The first beta launched in October 2024. Seven months from idea to working product.

What happened next

After launch, the name kept causing confusion. People heard "Cloudbrand" and expected a consumer cloud storage app with sync, mobile apps, and all the features we never intended to build. That is not what we built.

We built white-label file sharing for businesses. Client-facing businesses — agencies, freelancers, studios, consultants, law firms — that want to share files with clients at their own domain, under their own brand, without a third-party platform's name on the link.

By the end of 2025, we officially renamed the product Sharebrand.

Then in January 2026, we sold Renlar, the design subscription agency I had been running for years alongside all of this. Managing a high-volume client service business was consuming everything. It was the main financial source, generating real revenue, but it was eating the time and focus we needed to build products. We decided to exit cleanly.

Revenue dropped after the sale. The agency had been paying the bills. But exiting forced a clarity I had been avoiding: commit fully to making Sharebrand sustainable, or stay comfortable running an agency forever.

We committed. In March 2026, we acquired sharebrand.com. We had hesitated on buying the .com for Cloudbrand back in 2024 — it felt like too much to spend before we knew what we were building. This time there was no hesitation. If we are asking businesses to trust us with their client relationships, we should own the address that reflects that.

The product has kept growing. We launched a reseller plan that lets agencies and studios run their own branded file sharing platform for their clients — their name, their domain, their pricing — with Sharebrand staying invisible in the background. It is the founding idea extended one step further.

Sharebrand is live at sharebrand.com. Alongside it, I am building Kontrable, a contractor management platform for businesses that work with freelancers and independent contractors. Both products come from the same place: tools I needed and could not find.

If you run a client-facing business and want file sharing that carries your brand, try it free at sharebrand.com.