Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Ash Maurya, the founder of Austin-based WiredReach which makes CloudFire, BoxCloud, and CloudStack. Ash launched CloudFire a few months ago, and we decided to check in with him, the company, and how the product lunch has been going.
Q: Give us the elevator pitch for your new product, CloudFire?
CloudFire lets you share ALL your photos and videos in under 5 minutes. It’s like flickr and YouTube minus all the work of uploading and reorganizing files. CloudFire works with your existing applications like iPhoto/iTunes, and you can also share straight from your desktop folders.
You can try it at: http://www.getcloudfire.com.
Q: What gave you the idea for the product?
Having kids creates a true appreciation for free time. After our daughter was born, we were constantly bombarded by family for regular photo and video updates. Seeing my wife spend hours babysitting uploads, researching video transcoding tools, or finding the safest place to post baby pictures, I realized that sharing photos, and especially videos, was still not as easy as it could be for a lot of people.
The problem wasn’t a shortage of online sharing sites but a shortage of time. WiredReach already had a file sharing product, BoxCloud, that allows small businesses and freelancers to share large files easily with clients. I decided to adapt BoxCloud for media sharing and set a goal of being able to share all 10 gigabytes of my existing photos and videos in under 5 minutes. I’m happy to report we met that goal and CloudFire was born.
Q: How has the customer adoption been so far?
We launched the service in December 2008 and adoption has been good. Last year 50 billion photos were taken but less than 10% of them ended up shared – so there’s probably a lot of people with this problem. That said, we are initially targeting and validating the same segment I found myself in – as a busy parent with kids.
Q: How has WiredReach been surviving the current economy?
WiredReach primarily services small businesses and freelancers which inherently brings stability to the business. We aren’t vulnerable to the loss of any single customer and are seeing the business grow even in this economy. We try to stay more focussed on revenues and margins than number of unique visitors. For instance, last year, we switched BoxCloud from a freemium model to a paid only model which seemed risky at the time, but in retrospect, it was the absolute best thing for us. Not surprisingly, our total number of users went down, and our conversion rate went up. But more importantly, we were able to focus more attention on the needs of paying users and build stronger relationships with our customers.
We are using a paid-only model for CloudFire too.
Q: What can we expect to see in the future from WiredReach?
Our files are constantly getting bigger and so is the need for sharing them. The good news is so are our pipes. Both broadband penetration and connection speeds are going up – way up with the likes of FiOS, uVerse, DOCSIS 3.0.
While most of the attention seems to be on moving all our stuff to the cloud, I don’t believe putting everything in the cloud is the answer. You can expect to see more hybrid desktop/cloud solutions like BoxCloud/CloudFire from us. We are also working on partnerships to more seamlessly integrate these services into existing appliances and media devices in the home. A pro version of CloudFire is also not out of the question.