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What happens when your potential customers have just accepted the status quo, have given up on finding a solution to the very problem you are trying to solve? That’s exactly what personal cloud provider Younity is running into, Erik Caso, CEO of Entangled Media (the company behind Younity), said.
“When it comes to user acquisition for us, the market is really, really big and the demand to solve the problem is equally big; we never wonder, ‘Is there a market?’” Caso said. “What is a problem is that people have come to terms with the fact that there is no solution. People say, ‘Well, I’m just screwed. No one can solve the problem.’ People don’t know where to look.”
Instead of realizing that Younity fills the void, many potential customers have given up hope on finding a way to store all their content across all their devices. Instead, they have settled for fragmented personal storage solutions like combining free Dropbox and Google Drive options.
But there is good news: the team behind Younity is quickly changing people’s perceptions, adding tens of thousands of users weekly. This rate of growth is impressive considering the tricky feat of making a product spread virally when that product is “so inherently personal” like a personal cloud, Caso said.
The problem of people creating more content than ever before across more devices than ever before, while still needing to store it easily and cheaply in one place, was a risky venture to take on. The challenge was made quite clear, Caso said, when they were raising capital.
“The road behind us is littered with corpses,” Caso said. “People asked us, ‘Why do you think you can do it?’ Probably because we are really foolish, we are just stubborn.”
During the first year of embarking on this endeavor, Caso and co-founder Mike Abraham were just trying to figure out if they could tackle the problem. When they realized it wasn’t impossible, but “just very, very hard” they decided to go in for the long haul and looked to raise capital. Quickly recognizing they had to raise funding outside of Boulder, where their team was based, they headed to LA.
“At that point, we realized LA is great for something and Boulder is great for something,” Caso said. “Neither is perfect for both things that you need: growing a company on the non-tech side and growing a company on the tech side. We found out that LA and Boulder are the best two markets for us and that makes sense.”
While their entire R&D team is still based in Boulder, the rest of the dozen-person team resides in LA and visits the Boulder office about once a month. Despite the team being split between two cities, they are all laser-focused on the same goal: providing users a single personal cloud solution for all devices.
To accomplish this, Caso said his team has a plan of attack this year which includes increased third-party integration, raising a Series A round and testing a freemium model sometime in Q2.
These developments show just how far Caso and Abraham have come since they decided to “take a stab at this” problem in 2010. But even four years later (while still facing the same tough problem), Younity’s team is still “excited about the right way to do it, not the easy way to do it.”
Carlin Sack contributed writing to this story.
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