I’ve been super quiet the last 6 weeks or so. Ever since my 2011 predictions post, I’ve been both a bit burnt out and super freaking busy. So what’ve I been busy with? Well for the most part we’ve been busy building like crazy a bunch of products here at Infinimedia, headquarters.
We are starting out the year with PressBackup, our new website (WordPress only for now) backup and restoration tool. PressBackup lets you automate site backup, restoration, and migration of your WordPress sites remotely to the cloud (powered by Amazon). PressBackup takes the pain out of backing up your site. Oh and its available now.
So enough about what it does. What I find more interesting is why we built it. In my previous startups/products we always ASSUMED a problem existed and tried to build a solution for it. StartPR was a perfect example. We had a real problem, we had a hard time tracking and responding to twitter, blogs, etc. but what we failed to take into account was that the market for this was nowhere near as big as we thought, and we made silly decisions that we’d pay for later. I’ll cover these issues in a post later on. What we (the team here at Infinimedia) needed was a REAL tangible problem, one we had experienced first hand. Without that we couldn’t “eat our own dogfood.”
So why did we build PressBackup? Well despite having what I thought was a secure copy of WordPress, my site was infected with malware. I had to go through and manually clean out the site and the posts until it was clear of all these issues several times. This would have been much easier if I had versioning of my files and content on the server (I have versioning locally, but not of everything). On top of that I’d also experienced server crashes in the past on cheap shared servers which resulted in data loss. Thus came the realization, I can’t be the only person experiencing these issues. So I asked around, many of my web developer friends had experienced either data loss or had their sites compromised.
Next up I started looking around to see if anyone was doing this already in the market. Too many times I’ve met people who are doing something they think is 100% unique only to have them realize they weren’t looking correctly for their competition (google keyword suggestion tools are your friend). There was a rather large elephant in the room, but no other serious competitors, especially not using our same biz model.
So now that we’ve put out our first product in a while (we were just way too busy working on other people’s products last year), what’s next? Well we’re taking a very lean startup approach to the site. We’re measuring a lot of key metrics, tracking our conversion funnels very closely, and listening intuitively to user feedback.
I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say about PressBackup itself or the freemium biz model we’re trying out.
pressbackup stinks!!! Stay away.