Packetriot

Packetriot has been growing steadily through 2020-2021 and we've hit a pretty big milestone with $4.7K MRR. I'm hoping we can hit $5k by the end of the month!

The revenue for Packetriot comes from a few different sources. The first are monthly and annual subscribers to our SaaS. We host and manage tunneling servers that allow our users to host HTTPS and TCP application servers from any network, allowing developers to host and test their software as they add new features or to test bug fixes. Others use our SaaS to simplify self-hosting software using their residential ISP.

Another source of revenue is software licensing which is where much of our revenue comes from. Spokes is the name of the network tunneling server that we built and deploy to stand up our own tunneling network for our SaaS. Spokes customers use it to implement hybrid cloud strategies for their software deployments since it can connect software components running in containers, VMs or bare-metal.

Spokes is used as an alternative to VPNs to connect software behind corporate firewalls. VPNs are difficult to configure and maintain and also modify a hosts networking substantially where-as the client to Spokes is a simple background service that create a secure reverse TLS tunnel. It doesn't impact the network of the host and just provides access to the software/services running on it.

So far our ARR is almost 7x that of 2020 up til this point in the year!! Subscriptions to our SaaS is growing slowly since we have many competitors in that space but software licensing and working with companies and enterprises has helped us develop a niche and grow this area of the business.

In a short amount of time Packetriot grew from $500 to $1k MRR. Hopefully this growth is sustainable!

The primary reason for the growth in revenue is due to adding annual plans (a few months ago) which attracted more businesses to the site and subscribe. Packetriot also provides a fully self-hosted option that competitors like ngrok don't offer and businesses like being able to host on infrastructure they control and pay for.

The service and software has been consistently improving and traffic to the site is also improving. We're beginning to hit a tipping point where we have feature parity all the major competitors and some additional value and uniqueness. My hope is that at some point the developer and tech enthusiast community will recognize and experience this and create more organic word-of-mouth traffic to the site.

I think hitting this level of MRR, even if its not sustainable in the short term, helps validate all of my efforts working on Packetriot and building it up as a business.

I was hoping to hit $1k by the end of the year, so hitting it now is amazing!

We reached $520 MRR this month which is exciting since it's only been a month when we first reach $200+ MRR.

Packetriot is a SaaS that provides application tunneling similar to ngrok. You can host and test servers running locally or on private network.

We introduced annual plans last month and we hit $500+ MRR because a new customer purchased an annual plan priced at $275/yr! Our current monthly subscription revenue is ~$200/mo.

In this space ngrok is the leader and has been for many years. Packetriot has it's own unique approach and some unique features not found in that platform. I never had an intention to achieve feature parity with ngrok but I've found that parity helps the discussion to lure customers to change their behavior and tooling.

We have some useful features that are unique but customers still want the features in the platform they might leave. We will be releasing more features to help us reach this parity in the next few weeks and hoping this accelerates our growth.

Use ngrok? Experiencing any friction with the service or need more customer support? Please give Packetriot a try! https://packetriot.com

We reached $100 MRR in late December '19 and it took almost an entire year to reach that figure. Hitting $250 7 months later is exciting but there is still much work left to do to grow this business.

The biggest milestone we've reached since our last update includes completing our v1.0 build. It feels great to have finished building the original vision for Packetriot. We found some areas to differentiate ourselves and I have an ambitious roadmap to continue that differentiation and create more value for our existing users and hopefully future ones.

Growth is the most difficult part of this journey.

What is the difference between January '20 and July '20? A little more than double the users. We now have ~1300 registered users compared to ~600 then when we hit $100 MRR.

It's been difficult learning how users discover our website and service. I use analytics but it doesn't really provide the answers I think I need.

This month I've begun advertising at a small degree and I'm treating this as an experiment to see how useful it is.

With releasing our v1.0 of our service it does free up time to focus on user growth and acquisition. As an engineer this isn't my strong suit but looking forward to continue learning and pushing forward.

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.

In 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 :)

In November 2019 I discovered that someone wrote an article about their experience using Packetriot:
https://www.spokenlikeageek.com/2019/11/01/accessing-local-resources-over-the-internet-with-packetriot/

This was the first article written by anyone that shared their experience using our software and service. It was amazing! The author, Neil, expressed his thoughts kindly and in addition, he really enjoyed using the software!

I discovered it by routine searches that I do on Packetriot to see if anyone is uses it.

Usage metrics are helpful but someone documenting their experience gives you so much more insight. So thankful to Neil for writing his article. He is also an indie hacker as well and shares his projects and work on his blog, check it out!

My first organic customer signed up with a paid plan the other night. It was so exciting! The feeling when someone discovers your product and then chooses to pay for it is amazing!

Everyone building something and hustling to connect with potential customers knows the feeling of self-doubt, when you're not sure if your efforts will lead to something.

Work through it, take a break, but keep pushing forward, the feeling is amazing and worth all the effort.