It turns out he doesn’t want to share the company strategies in print, but he’s happy to do so in the setting of the coming Roadshow. “You can stop advertising or increase advertising - and there are services out there that let you do a burst, or pay to drive a certain amount of downloads in a certain country services that help you obtain the rank you’re looking for in any given market.”Īs to monetization, Jeffrey pauses, and gets a bit silent for the first time in the conversation. Organic downloads help you keep your rank up, but once you start slipping, that’s the time to bolster rank by spending a bit of money on mobile advertising and up your rank once again. “It’s no secret that the better rank you get, the more organic downloads, and the better those downloads are.” “Trying to maintain a good rank is the priority,” says Jeffrey. (To make some noise about the Intel acquisition, the company is currently offering new and current users a free six-month upgrade to the premium account.)Īcquisition for Jeffrey is a bit of a yo-yo strategy between organic and paid downloads. The password manager is free for its basic-level service of storing up to 25 passwords, after which users can move to the premium level offering storage of unlimited passwords and additional features. Growing PasswordBox’s base and funneling them into the paid premium version of the password manager app is now Jeffrey’s focus. And a lot of people overlook the fact that in this day and age you can be building your business in Montreal - and travel once a month to San Francisco or New York - and build all the relationships that you need in order to build a successful business straight out of Montreal.” “Just because there’s less of it, doesn’t mean it’s easier to get capital in San Francisco or New York. ![]() While he acknowledges there’s less overall capital in a smaller city like Montreal, for him it’s all a matter of scale. ![]() He challenges the assumption that the Valley is the best place to raise capital. With as much as 70% of engineers’ salaries refunded in tax credits through programs like the Scientific Research and Experimental Development Tax Incentive Program, Jeffrey says: “For the same price you’d pay a top developer in San Francisco, you can probably pay for two amazing developers in Montreal.” Like others in the Canadian startup scene, Jeffrey is quick to credit the generous financial incentives available through both the Canadian and Quebec governments. Its 14 million downloads during that time certainly got the giant’s attention. ![]() Launched in June 2013, PasswordBox was just recently acquired by Intel last December, only 18 months after launch. ![]() On his return, Jeffrey launched FounderFuel, the first Canadian mentor-driven accelerator for early stage startups, before joining PasswordBox to lead the growth and acquisition team. “When I moved back, I was expecting the same thing as when I left but I was really, really surprised to see that there was a ton of activity, and I jumped right into it.” “In 2006, Montreal was pretty much a dead start-up community, not much was happening,” says Jeffrey. The startup scene in Montreal has burst open, seeing the emergence of some significant startup successes such as Beyond the Rack (receiving almost $100M to date in several rounds of funding), Frank & Oat (just completed a $15M second round), and OmSignal (completed a Series A funding of $10M last year). On returning, he was pretty much blown away by the transformation in the city during those four short years. When native Montealer Ian Jeffrey moved to Silicon Valley in 2006, he helped launch two separate startups (Radar and Wink) before moving back to Montreal in 2010.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |