OrgPad
The Universal Digital Whiteboard
We want to make computers accessible to everyone. Even those who struggle with them. Our goal is to create a universal and still simple-to-use tool that allows you to do everything in one place. Visually.
Vít discusses background story how OrgPad was created, the biggest challenges and future plans. He also gives insight how we bootstrap our business and how we try to increase our profits. I really like:
"Building a functioning business is a huge and long-term challenge, so it's the people you go in with that matter most."
"As OrgPad is a self-funded business, advertising isn’t suitable for us. It’s a huge expense with an uncertain outcome that could jeopardize our ability to continue working on the project itself. Therefore, we’ve relied on building a strong community around the tool from the very beginning."
We are working on OrgPad for last three years and we have finally introduced pricing a few months ago. We are slowly growing the number of paying customers while improving the product as much as possible.
OrgPad is an iteractive whiteboard for your ideas. You can place your ideas right in front of you and connect them together. Arbitrary texts, links, pictures, videos, or even another websites can be easily combined together. At first it might seem similar to any other mind-mapping application but it offers much more. In particular you are completely free to organize your ideas and problems in any way you want.
We tried to list it on ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/orgpad. At the beginning, we just had a small number of upvotes from our community so it did not seem that useful. But today we suddenly ended up as Top #3 which landed us several comments and a first sale. An amazing Christmas present to us.
Do you know why this happened? How are top products on ProductHunt chosen?
With a tremendous year behind, in which we have grown 12 times to about 12.000 customers, we are finally introducing pricing. Learn more about it in the document below.
People may ask, why are we introducing pricing after such a long time. The answer is simple. We focused on a great product and building up a community around it.
We haven't even started selling subscriptions online yet, everything is for free right now. We are not in rush to get more funding since we are trying to make the product better.
We were contacted by two customers who love our product, and asked for a pre-sale. So we sold them licences for 2 and 3 years, respectively. It is an awesome feeling to earning the first money from our project! 😁
We launched OrgPad 10 months ago when we have about 50 people registered recruited from our friends and their friends. We have discovered that even convincing your friends to open your product is difficult.
We are growing ever since, steadily gaining new people. We just broke 1000 users while spending $0 on advertising, mostly our users recommend each other and we are writing posts to various places. Out of these people we have maybe 50 heavy users which is an amazing growth compared to the time when only three of us were using OrgPad.
What are your tricks to finding more users? We believe that building a great product comes first.
It took about one month of analyzing existing apps and touch interface, doing experiments, setting up our infrastructure and then optimizing the mobile experience. The support is very basic at the moment, only reading is available on mobile. In the following months, we will improve everything, allow editing as well, build a progressive web app which will work offline, and much more more. Really looking forward to have OrgPad on mobile as soon as possible.
In last two weeks, we have been working on supporting touch interface for OrgPad. It is quite tricky since one has to deal with multiple fingers, their velocities, gesture recognition, etc. But the result is superb and we are really looking forward to have this feature live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYj4OuCMCdk.
In our new landing page at https://orgpad.com/l/intro, we try to showcase how OrgPad works and that it offers a beautiful design and great UX. We spend a lot of time thinking how to design the landing page, and we decided to cover most of the landing page with mock-ups of OrgPad itself. The goal is to introduce OrgPad quickly and grasp user's attention by a different presentation of the tool.
The initial launch of OrgPad for public. We started developing OrgPad since December 2018 and we had first testing users in September. We made OrgPad publicly available when we bought our domain http://orgpad.com. The number of users is growing every day.