CrankWheel

We reached $600K ARR a couple of days ago, 5 months after $500K. Great feeling!

For this recent growth, it's mostly been smaller plans, although we have some big enterprise customers in the pipeline and doing proofs of concept. I'm hoping for even faster growth going forward, but am happy with the roughly 4% month-over-month growth we've had recently.

Last Saturday, we pushed the 100th public release of CrankWheel, that was pretty cool. It has a big new feature, the ability to share your webcam along with your screen share, or standalone, and just like all things CrankWheel you can do that independent of what type of device or browser your prospect has, even really old ones, it simply works every time.

I wrote up a blog about the road to 100 releases, kind of a lessons learned, road so far type of a ramble. Hope you enjoy it!

From the start, CrankWheel was a Chrome extension, with a web interface for some aspects such as administration and billing. We then extended support from Chrome to pretty much all other Chrome-based browsers like the new Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi and others. Viewers have always been able to use any browser (including really old ones) on any device without any install.

We wanted to start supporting more browsers for the presenter side, and to break our dependence on the Chrome extensions marketplace as Google has started making life quite difficult for extension developers recently.

Earlier this winter we launched a pure web edition that didn't have all the features of the extension edition, but a large portion of them. This last Sunday we added our remote control feature to the pure web edition, which brings it to about 95% feature parity with the extension edition, with the remaining features only possible by
using the additional privileges that an extension can bring.

Next up, changing our extension around so that it is only an addition to the pure web edition, rather than its own separate addition. This is a big project but will mean that most features only require an update to the web edition, which will let us update more frequently and with less dependency on how quick or slow Google is to update stuff in their web store.

With the advent of COVID, some of our largest customers needed to move big parts of their salesforce to work remotely, and many new customers were onboarded, both big and small, for similar reasons.

It's great to feel that our product can help companies keep selling in these challenging times, and it also allowed us to add about $130K ARR in just a few months. Of course, we hope the COVID situation does not last too long as that would hurt a lot of our customers very badly.

We built remote control functionality into CrankWheel and launched it, in a small way, to our mailing list (of over 20K subs at that point).

The bit that I'm most proud of with that feature is that it works on pretty much any browser, without any download, and that text input from a mobile device works just as you would expect it, with autocomplete / predictive typing on the phone working correctly.

Appsumo approached us and we decided to go for it. Tiny revenue but lots of exposure, their mailing list was at about one million subscribers at that time.

I think we sold about 1400 lifetime plans in those first few days, and then Appsumo Briefcase came along later and we sold another few hundred at least. Since Appsumo keeps a big percentage this was never big money, but it got us some demanding users who helped drive some important features, and lots of exposure and word of mouth through the years.

After our initial MVP, this was a big step for us where we added a smart lead capture mechanism that would very quickly find an agent to call the prospect back (within seconds rather than hours), and let them screen share back with zero friction.

We launched this at a tiny startup booth at the Dublin Tech Summit, where we were pre-selling access to the feature although it wouldn't be ready for another couple of months, just based on a quick proof of concept demo. Ended up selling 8 pre-orders at $123 each, which was a one-time fee for being first to access Instant Demos and would cover their first two months of usage.

The leading yellow pages in the UK signed up as a customer, with hundreds of agents. They are still a customer. They had discovered CrankWheel quite by accident, had seen it used by a trial customer we had in Italy, when that company was trying to sell them something, and this led to them considering us when choosing a communication solution for their telesales team.

At this point we had iterated quite a bit on our product, we could screen share with multiple viewers, had integrated phone conferencing for scheduled meetings, and more.

We self-hunted which is probably not the best way to go about it, but we did a good job I think on letting people know about the launch and getting folks to comment and vote, made it to the front page of PH and it drove quite a lot of traffic and sign-ups for a while.

A couple of weeks before this, we manned our startup booth at the Slush conference in Finland, and demoed CrankWheel to a lot of folks. One of the contacts we met there turned around pretty quickly and became our first customer outside of Iceland, the leading yellow pages in the Netherlands. They really liked that they could get a fully white-label solution so that screen sharing would look and feel like a part of their online presence.

We launched an MVP about a month before this, and our marketing site about two months earlier than that, although we'd had a simple beta list type of site for months before then.

Our MVP was a Chrome browser extension, it let you share your full screen, an application window or browser tab with exactly one viewer. No audio (and none yet today - because we are niched to telesales, where it's always a phone call) and pretty slow video, but it worked reliably.

We'd founded the company officially on February 10th, and had our first two employees, Jóhann and Henrý Þór, both join on May 29th, so things were moving quickly.

Our first customer was the old national telco in Iceland, and they are still customers today.