In early February this year, we gathered everyone in the company for some fun team-building activities. But that's not all we did. We have great ambitions at OVPN, which meant that we also spent a great deal of time discussing our goals, values, and the direction in which we want to take the company. This post aims to summarize that. Our vision of the future, if you will.
But first, we'd like to do a quick recap of 2016.
Summary of 2016
Back in January last year, only one person was working full-time at OVPN. Today, we have seven people working full-time at OVPN and intend to hire at least two additional developers in the near future.
In January, we only had two datacenters (Malmö and Stockholm) and had a traffic record of 806 TB — a far cry from our current traffic record of 2034 TB. Today, we have a total of five datacenters in four different countries.
Since January last year, the company has grown three times in terms of paying customers and is still growing. Our main focus last year was mostly domestic growth, with the majority of our customer base located in Sweden.
What's happening next?
Unlike last year where our main focus was on domestic growth, this year we look past the horizon and focus on becoming a more global entity. With a stable continued growth in Sweden, we feel confident that we can divert our marketing efforts to a wider market outside of Sweden. This does not mean that we will stop developing the Swedish market. Every product improvement, every update, and every new datacenter we open will always be available to all customers!
The first step, in order to increase our legitimacy abroad, is to transfer the website to a new domain — OVPN.com. While the website will be familiar to most of you, having a .com address appeals to a wider audience and will increase our online authority abroad.
The VPN service
We have an internal release cycle of about 4 weeks in all of our product areas. This means that we strive to release updates to all areas once every month. We still have a long way to go until the OVPN client runs as smoothly as we want to, and the upcoming months will, therefore, contain several releases that improve the overall stability and performance of the client, culminating in the client becoming open-source. In order to properly test the various aspects of the client, all new client updates will henceforth be released in open betas before we push it out to all customers. If you love to be among the first to test updates, keep an eye on our blog to participate in the open betas.
Furthermore, in the near future, we plan to upgrade our servers to OpenVPN 2.4.0, which comes with a wide array of improvements. One of the largest improvements you as a customer will notice is the introduction of additional ciphers, among them AES-256-GCM — an improvement over AES-256-GCM in both speed and security. OpenVPN 2.4.0 has support for several ciphers to be used simultaneously on the servers, so existing customers will need to download new configuration files when we upgrade to OpenVPN 2.4.0.
Our Public IPv4 add-on remains one of the most popular add-on services. We have received several requests from international customers for expanded server support for the Public IPv4 add-on service. In addition to purchasing more Public IPv4 addresses for our Stockholm servers, we have also begun the process of expanding support for the Public IPv4 add-on to Amsterdam and Toronto. More details about this will be released at a later date, but we believe extended support for Public IPv4 is a vital part of our international expansion.
OVPNbox
The OVPNbox remains the premium way to experience VPN security and it's a product we strongly believe in. Some of you have asked if we plan to stop updating it, but we can assure you that is not the case. Currently, hundreds of households all over the world use the OVPNbox and are protected by it. To further build and improve the box, we will most likely migrate away from pfSense. We believe this will lead to a more stable, faster, and much smoother user experience for both existing and future OVPNbox owners. We have a slew of new features and improvements slated for the box that we can't wait to release. If you've thought about purchasing the OVPNbox, we offer it 20% off during the weekend March 24-26 in celebration of announcing our domain change.
Announcing the OVPN Browser extension
In the upcoming months, we will also release a Chrome browser extension that will improve our customer's integrity when they're browsing the internet. More information about this browser extension will be released at a later date, but we are very excited about the possibilities this browser extension can bring in combination with the VPN service.
Where should we open new datacenters?
Currently, OVPN has servers in Sweden, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands. We aim to launch servers in an additional two or three countries during 2017, and we'll happily accept any suggestions. Feel free to contact us via support@ovpn.com to give us your suggestions!
Milestones & goals for 2017
It's not a secret that we are serious about what we do and that we expect a lot of everyone in the team. During our team meeting we discussed some of the goals and things we wish to achieve in 2017:
Product development goals
- Increase personnel in the client development team by hiring an additional C++/Qt developer.
- Decrease the amount of support related to the OVPN client by 75% by focusing product development on its key problem areas
- Hire an all-around PHP / web developer to support development in several product areas, including the OVPNbox, the OVPN client, the browser extension, and website.
- Divert resources to improve stability and add additional features to the OVPNbox.
Growth goals
- Cut overall support inquiries by 50% through product development, better information, and better internal tools.
- Increase our non-Swedish customer base by 200% by the end of the year through increased marketing efforts abroad.
- Increase our overall customer base by 250-300% by the end of the year through increased customer acquisition and decreased loss of customers.
2017 is without a doubt going to be the hardest, toughest, most demanding, and most revolutionizing year in the history of the company. But it's with the strength we gained in 2016 and without fear in our hearts that we dive in head first into whatever the year may bring.