1000+ Users

We reached 1000+ registered users in April. I launched Packetriot around Feb 2019, so it took less then 1.5 years to get to this number. However, I probably could have reach this milestone much sooner.

Packetriot is a application tunneling service. You can host a local or private server to the Internet from your laptop or from any network. It's great for hosting an MVP, software dev and testing or just self-hosting applications over your residential ISP.

This kind of service, which is similar to ngrok, serveo, or pagekite, is ripe for abuse if you're not vigilant. To combat this I monitor for bad behavior. I've had tons (hundreds...) of fake emails and bots that sign up and I routinely prune.

Here are my most interesting numbers. From the 1000+ registered users there are ~250 that use the service monthly. Around ~150 use the service daily. I have 25 monthly customers with paid plans and several customers, mostly businesses, who purchase annual licenses to self-host my software for their teams.

So far experience very little churn. Users that subscribe to monthly plans use the service a lot! This is really encouraging. My focus is trying to attach more user to try the service. I've been creating a lot of content to accelerate this but I'm not sure how well this is working. It's possible it just takes time.

After a year+ of launching I feel like it's beginning to gain some steam. Our product has evolved a lot and the roadmap of features continue to grow and we continue to ship often.

Packetriot has several entrenched competitors that the dev community loves, like ngrok, but we have many features that are not available and new ones coming soon that I hope will demonstrate value and convince all kinds of users to give us a try.

My hope and focus is to attract the next 1000+ users in half the time, or even more quickly than that. Patience and persistence is really necessary to build something and make it successful.