[someonedan]

Hi Jaysonelliot, thanks for the terrific comment. It's really helpful for us to get this kind of insight.

Onboarding your team to any software is a risk. Our focus on being the easiest and most engaging task manager is aimed at being the least risky. We want to remove as many of those hurdles for business users as we can through simplicity and making team members feel more interconnected.

It's easy to say Google was also once "new and unproven", but Mahn's response below is an excellent one. I guess the issue is epeople want tools they can trust which here is "only after they've been around long enough and achieved mainstream adoption". But then, Slack was launched in August 2013 with 0 users. By June 2015 they had 1M+ users and a valuation of $2.76bn. (Source: WSJ). So new entrants to this market like us can establish themselves quickly but they need to be very good at what they do and they need to earn trust.

We aim to do just that and as jipiboily points out elsewhere, a payment solution is the first step to sustainability, which we've been developing with our research partners and will be rolled out at the end of the month.

[jaysonelliot]

For us, the preferable solution is to let us pay for it and install it ourselves.

For every Slack or Google that reaches mainstream adoption, there are a hundred smaller, often amazing companies, who don't.

Rather than rolling the dice on an all-or-nothing SAAS strategy that requires a big hit to get people to feel comfortable committing a whole organization, you can sell something people can buy, install, and own.

It doesn't mean you can't offer the freemium hosted option. What it does do is give you a chance to see organic growth in the early days. With subscription-based support services, you can even book more revenue — just the kind of thing a startup needs when they're looking for traction in the bootstrapped / angel funded days.