PageCloud

Craig Fitzpatrick, a self-described child nerd who had been writing code since he was nine, was running a company that relied on WordPress. Every small change to the site was a struggle. He found it so difficult to move an image one inch that he wanted to pull his hair out. Having lived through the arrival of graphical user interfaces and desktop publishing, he saw web publishing stuck in the mud for about ten years.

What began as a hobby became a prototype. Craig started by opening his browser and writing a few lines of code to drag a red box one inch to the right. Over two and a half years of evenings and weekends, he added rotation and other desktop-style features. He was winding down a company at the time, a social marketing tool business run by a friend, and the team was being laid off. Craig was not a founder there. He was head of product development. He then began showing the prototype to people, and it took off from there.

Craig described the core idea as a rejection of the template model used by Squarespace, Weebly, Wix and WordPress. Templates get users to 60 or 70 percent of what they want, and that is never good enough. PageCloud instead offered a blank page where users could drag or paste content and publish it live, with the hosting handled for them. The company opened in September 2014 and used the early year as an R&D period.

PageCloud was a TechFest finalist in spring 2015. The stage demo was professionally recorded and turned into a strong promotional video. The team built a landing page around it and ran a pre-sale campaign with founder pricing at $99 per year, about $8 a month, two-thirds off the regular price. Early buyers received early access and founder status.

The team spent about $5,000 on Facebook ads in the first month and got $10,000 back in cash. They then spent $20,000 and got $80,000 back, a four-to-one return. Craig said the campaign pre-sold $1.2 million before launch day. The video was reportedly seen by more than 200 million people worldwide, and the team spent around a million dollars on advertising that first year.

The pre-sale worked because of the demo video, the discount, and the idea that people were supporting a founder. Front-loaded annual billing also brought cash in quickly, with payback within about 30 days. The team learned how Google AdWords, Facebook, and SEM behaved differently, and how messaging and click-through rates shaped results.

Retention was harder. Monthly churn started around 50 percent and fell to about 12 percent before rising to 16 percent. Craig paused spending and launched retention programs, bringing churn back to around 6 percent. Customer acquisition cost was roughly $300, against a lifetime value that was being pushed toward $1,000 through a mix of monthly and annual plans, with annual plans making up about 35 to 40 percent of customers.

By early 2017, PageCloud had roughly 8,000 to 8,500 customers in around 100 countries, a team of more than 25, and about $8.5 million in funding raised across several rounds. Average revenue per user was about $28, and the company was reportedly doing around $150,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Craig's stated 2017 goal was $2.5 million in annual revenue.