$100+ MRR Reached
by John BorakIn December '19 Packetriot hit $100+ MRR! I quietly launched in late January of 2019. Almost three full months past until we had our first paying customer. This is was really exciting milestone!
Since then our user base has grown to 600+. Each paid user that has come on board has continued on with almost zero churn. I'm so thankful to our paid users!
Throughout the first year I slowly began measuring user activity to get an idea of much our free and paid users utilize Packetriot. Users with paid plans will use the service almost 24/7. Many are developers hosting code or projects they're working and some are self-hosting applications along with any software development they do.
Among our free users, I found about 25% continue use after downloading our client and trying the service. Half that group use our tools daily with the rest having infrequent use.
Attracting users is a challenge... As a engineer the outreach and marketing is not my core skillet. There are alternatives to Packetriot that have been around for some time that have committed users. I think customer service can be a differentiator so I plan on putting service upfront with all of the features and functions we provide in our software.
In 2020 we're working on new and differentiating features that will broaden the scope of the business. In addition to providing application tunneling we plan to add more cloud-like features to Packetriot such as object storage for hosting and serving static assets, certificate management services and domain name services.
Our goal at Packetriot is build tools and provide services that make it quick and easy to host a project while it's an MVP, through development and initial hosting needs, and then serve as a platform for iteration and testing when it's more mature and requires a production environment.
If you haven't check us out yet please give us a try, we provide enthusiastic support :)
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1
John this looks very nice!
Can you identify what is your USP? In what ways is this better than for example ngrok? How would I decide to choose between ngrok and PacketRiot?
Thanks!
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Thanks for checking out Packetriot!
What makes PR unique compared to ngrok and similar tools is that we remove many of supporting tools you need to serve and test a typical application. These tools normally include: a separate web server (nginx/apache) for your app, certbot if you're using Lets Encrypt. In addition, we support Lets Encrypt and automatically manage your certs in our client.
We also support packaging for RPM, Deb and containers. So if you want to use Packetriot to serve up API callbacks in your CI/CD environment, you can setup and build a container that takes care exposing the services and apps your testing in your CI environment.
There are some smaller differences as well.
When I set out to build what's available today, my goal was to remove the need for small-to-medium sized VMs for developers, replace VMs with Application Tunnels. In 2020 when we add object storage, it'll make it easy for users to host static sites or SPAs (backend served through tunnel). It'll give users even more flexibility and value, and less need for traditional cloud services while they're writing code.
That's the goal :)
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