Getting closer to launch

It’s been an amazing journey working on WikiPack. I’m so grateful to everyone who’s signed up for an account, pushed the site to it’s limits, and helped develop it into a solid product. There’s still some polishing to be done, but the time to shed the “beta” banner and go live is drawing nearer.

What’s left to be done?

Going live will require some significant work around making a great marketing site, and implementing the billing mechanism, so during that time there will have to be a feature freeze. It shouldn’t be for long, but these kinds of things often take longer than expected, so ask yourself “If I could add/change/remove anything, what would it be?”, and have your say in the forums and the feature requests page.

Setting up a company

Why are these things so complicated? It’s not that bad really, the hardest thing is thinking of a company name. From my research, it seems that most of the software apps & services I use have a parent company name, and register their product names as trademarks.

Any ideas or suggestions? Tweet them to @wikipack.

Growth so far

The response so far has been phenomenal!

• In the last week alone, 150 new wikis have been created
  • The growth rate from Jan-March was around 35%
  • The growth rate for April & May has been over 100%
• In total, there are over 11,000 pages on WikiPack
• WikiPack has performed over 13,000 Dropbox sync operations
  • 99.23% of Dropbox sync operations have completed successfully

Humble beginnings, but I’m very pleased! The proof though will be whether this kind of growth can be sustained when it is no longer free…

Business model & pricing

The business model is simple, build an awesome product and ask people for money to use it. The challenge is deciding on the pricing.

I’m a realistic person, and I appreciate that most people who would even consider paying for a service like WikiPack would prefer the price to be as close to zero as possible. At the same time, the cost of the resources required to operate the service even at it’s current user base are beginning to stack up, so I need to find a comfortable pricing point that makes it appealing to you as a user, and viable for me as the operator. Maybe you’d like to help me decide?

My goals are humble: a few thousand people paying a few bucks a month would support future development of the platform. That would be awesome!

As always, send any questions/comments to info@wikipackit.com, or @wikipack.

Thanks,
Mark