Pastecard State of the Company, 2012

Highlights

• 40% year-over-year growth in user signups
• Version 1.1 deployed in March to great success
• Revenue burn rate stayed constant

Inside the Company

History

Pastecard formally launched in Q4 2010 in Palo Alto, California, home of Facebook and dozens of other well-known companies. Culture is an important value at Pastecard: employees only show up when they think there is something to do, which keeps morale considerably higher than at competing companies.

Pastecard moved offices from a desk in an apartment in the College Terrace neighborhood of Palo Alto to a kitchen table in a condo in Jupiter, Florida in Q3 2011.

Executive Team

• Brian Sutorius, Founder and CEO, CFO, Engineering Lead, Policy Lead, Software QA Intern
• Hudson the koala puppet, Chairman of the Board

2011 Metrics in Review

* At least five card save actions per week, for a month
** Suck it, myspace band named Paste Card

Pageviews Deep Dive

Pageviews are an increasingly less-relevant metric for many reasons. The launch of version 1.1 in Q1 moved the initial software loading to AJAX calls, decreasing the amount of pageviews per card session. Interest around the new version actually caused pageviews to spike after the launch, even with the new architecture. They then continued to drop for the rest of the year.

Apple released iOS 5.0 in Q4, which broke Pastecard’s offline functionality on iPhones and iPod touches. Tests for the fix were run on the live site, which caused a brief spike in pageviews during this period.

The Twitter game “Where in the Tworld?” was hosted on Pastecard’s servers from Q1 through Q3. Removing the game files in Q4 had a visible negative effect on systemwide pageviews despite no one seeming to play it.

Conclusion: there was no real traffic to the site in Q4 2011, judging by pageview metrics.

2011 Financials

Operating Expenses

• Domain Registrations: $10
• Disk Space and Bandwidth: $25
• Employee Compensation Packages: $0

Revenues

• Advertising: $0
• Venture Capital Financing: $0
• Customer Payments: $0

Profits

• -$35

2012 Forecast

Growth

The company aims to maintain a 40% growth rate in user registrations. To accomplish this, the onboarding experience will be rewritten with more AJAX calls and simpler human language.

We are also working to continue driving down the average time spent on the site. Currently, over 75% of visits are under two minutes. We think we can get this cohort uninterested and off the site in under 60 seconds by the end of 2012.

Profitability

Operating Expenses are expected to remain the same, and have been cleverly spaced out with bandwidth billing in Q1 and domain billing in Q3 to avoid bankruptcy. The Board has recommended adding a marketing department to promote the company, which will add a new line item to our costs.

PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL

2011’s big product launch was version 1.1, a complete loading architecture rewrite and the introduction of offline capabilities in iPhones and iPod touches. 2012’s product initiative is physical Pastecards: blank business cards bought at Office Depot and resold at a significant markup. A successful launch will bring the company into profitability for the first time, and we anticipate a strong Q4 due to holiday shopping.