Ahmad Parvez built ToolVaultly around private, no-sign-up file tools
Ahmad Parvez, an environmental manager and founder of ToolVaultly, built free browser-based tools for PDF editing, file conversion and calculations. This conversation traces the problem that sparked the site, its search-led customer growth, and the lessons he learned about improving core tools before adding more.
Solve one real problem completely, then make sure people can find the solution before building more. Parvez learned that a useful tool has little value if it does not reach the people who need it.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
It started with my own problem. I needed to fix a PDF, went to the big sites everyone uses, and each one wanted the same thing — upload the file first, make an account, then pay if you want the real job done. For a personal document. I didn’t like that, so I built one tool that did the job inside the browser instead. Then I built another one. That’s basically how ToolVaultly started. I have a day job, I’m an environmental manager, so all of this was nights and weekends.
The difference is not complicated. On my site your file never leaves your device, there’s no sign-up, and I don’t charge for the parts the big sites put behind a paywall. Free is not a trial version here, it’s the whole model. Maybe that sounds crazy. It’s also the point.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Honestly, I didn’t win the first users, Google sent them. I built tools for exact problems people search for, the kind of thing somebody types at midnight before a deadline — how to edit a scanned PDF, that sort of thing. If the page answered it properly, a few people came. Then a few more.
It’s still mostly search today. Some users come from directories where I listed the site myself, one by one, and a couple of interviews like this one. I have spent zero on ads, I don’t have that budget. Growth is slow and I won’t pretend otherwise. Some weeks I open Search Console and feel like giving up, then one page starts moving and I keep going.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision came from an embarrassing moment. A colleague opened a 116-page PDF in my editor and it just stopped — the limit at that time was 50 pages, and it failed right in front of him. My first thought was to patch the limit a bit. Instead I rebuilt the editor properly, page by page, and the limit went from 50 pages to 500. That changed how I work. Fix the real problem, not the small version of it.
The mistake was building too much, too early. I kept adding new tools while the ones I had weren’t even getting found. In October my impressions fell from around 2,000 a day to almost nothing, and that was a hard lesson — a tool nobody finds does nobody any good. Ranking and backlinks are half the work. I learned that late.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
People changed. Two years back, most users would upload a bank statement or an ID to any random website without thinking twice. Now they ask where the file goes. And because of AI, everyone expects things instantly — nobody has patience for a five-step process anymore, upload, wait, sign up, pay, download. That whole flow feels broken now.
I didn’t respond by adding AI to everything like everyone else. For fixing a file, people don’t want a chat with a bot, they want the file fixed. So I kept it simple: one screen, works on a cheap phone, and the file is processed on your own device. Nothing gets uploaded, so there’s nothing to worry about.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Start with one problem. Not a platform, not fifty tools — one problem that genuinely annoys people, and solve it completely, free. Then test it on the worst phone you can find. Mine is a Redmi Note 11, nothing fancy. If it works there, it works anywhere.
Ignore the feature list of the big competitor, you’ll exhaust yourself copying people with a hundred employees. Ignore ads until search is bringing you people for free. And don’t build the second thing while the first thing still doesn’t rank — I did exactly that, and it cost me months.
Thank you to Ahmad Parvez and the team at ToolVaultly for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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