(overheard at ETRE – more insights here)
Some of you have asked me on twitter and facebook how things are going at Passpack. I know, the underlying question there is really “Will you guys still be standing?”
The short answer is: Yes.
How We’re Riding Out the Recession
1. We Sell
The Pro account release added a revenue stream to help support the company beyond our funding. Break even wasn’t planned for at least another year, but we’re quite happy to be spot on the forecasted free/paid ratio.
We’re also bumping up the release of a Black Box appliance for small enterprises originally planned for much later in 2009. This is still under construction, but go ahead and ask me for more details if you’re interested in beta testing or a taking part in case study.
2. We’ve Cut Spending
Back in late December, we made some tough choices, moving our staff from full-time permanent positions, to on-call and consulting work. Only recently has our new formation stabilized: Francesco full-time on the product, Dani part-time on customer support, Olga part-time for the administrative tasks, Louise chipping in on the blog and me straddling the fence between product development and general administration.
I’ll be pruning the company page over the next couple of days to reflect this.
3. We’re Aiming for Slow & Steady
Rather than pouring resources into trying to get “magic traffic spikes”, we’re focusing inward on the product instead. It’s the better investment.
Right now we’re working on improving the experience for new users just getting started, and on completing those key developments we’ve already got underway. Are we going as fast as we originally wanted to? No (especially given #2). But slow and steady, we’ll win the race.
4 Comments
Sorry to hear that you’re having to tighten your belts a bit but I’m glad that you are playing it smart. It’s getting tough for all of us. I plan to purchase a pro account later today to help support you guys even though I probably won’t use the extra features right now. Please let us know if your avid users can help other than in buying pro accounts and trying to spread the word.
Levi
Any news on browser extensions/plugins similar to Lastpass.com? I really think that’s a killer feature. Even as an early adopter of PassPack, I found LastPass’s convenience so compelling that I’ve switched entirely. That said, I still find PassPack’s UI design and communication with the community worlds ahead of LastPass. Best of luck, and hoping for the next killer feature from PassPack.
Was curious about traffic, so I looked up Compete:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/passpack.com+lastpass.com/?metric=uv
@Levi – Thank you. We’re working on Passpack 1.2 (didn’t it sound more exciting when we called the versions beta5, beta6 etc… wonder if we can call this Passpack 7?). But I digress… The next release will incorporate the long awaited sharing feature. I hope that’ll make your Pro account purchase worth while for you.
On other ways to help out – see below my reply to Password Nut.
@Password Nut – Both you and Levi hit important points. We have a plugin in the works, but we also have a bottleneck of work to finish. Personally, I think the best solution is to look to the Passpack community, and see if we can’t get some of these add-on tools rolled out. This way we concentrate on core features and an API, while the community builds out third party apps.
If you’d like to participate, drop an email here.
I really enjoyed reading this post, keep on creating such interesting posts.