From Evitt to Share Securely: A New Journey

I’m Andrew Jarvis, one of the co-founders of Share Securely.

Our product gives you a custom link that your clients can use to securely send you passwords — without them needing an account.

We provide consultants, freelancers, and dev shops with the ability to keep passwords out of their email inboxes and text messages where they can be easily compromised.

Who we are

We are a team of three technical co-founders based out of Ohio who have been working together for almost two years (full-time since January 2019). As software dev consultants ourselves, we use Share Securely regularly for our own work and continue to iterate it based on our needs and the needs of our clients.

Our story

In November 2017, our team began pursuing a project called “Evitt”. Evitt gave organizations the ability to cross-promote their events with their partners, and also offered an easily embeddable website calendar to showcase community events. We started our journey with the University of Akron I-Corps program, where we interviewed 50 potential customers and honed in our value proposition and target market.

In early 2018, we collected over 15 letters of intent from various non-profits and economic development organizations in the Northeast Ohio area after showing them a prototype of Evitt. Having validated our solution, our team developed and rolled out an MVP that summer.

Overall, our initial rollout was a success. Our users seemed excited, and we even had our first paying customer! However as the months progressed, we encountered several roadblocks that kept us from getting traction with Evitt. After a period of stagnation, we decided to explore several pivots that were ultimately unsuccessful. In fact, our research deeper into the event discovery space led us to this fantastic blog post by Hugh Malkin, which acted as a source of clarity when making substantial decisions about Evitt’s direction.

After many pitch competitions, investor meetings, and even an accelerator program, we realized a few things:

• The vast majority of our users would only use Evitt at the end of each quarter (when they plan their event schedule for the upcoming quarter).
• Most of our users were organizations that we had close relationships with before on boarding them to Evitt — which means they often gave us “vaguely positive” feedback vs. critical, actionable feedback.
• Our morale was low and getting lower every day. Our users weren’t excited about the product and its direction, and neither were we.
• We worked very well together as a team, however we did not possess the skill set required to grow this product quickly, primarily due to a lack of direct sales experience. In fact, conversations with investors and mentors often ended with “You have a great team, we just wish you were working on something else”.
• We were running out of money — fast.

After seeking investment for 2–3 months to no avail, with maxed out credit cards and even taking a personal loan from one of our co-founders, we decided to pick up some software dev consulting work as a team in order to extend our runway.

When onboarding new clients, we often asked them to send us credentials to services we needed access to in order to begin work (hosting, domain provider, dev tools, third-party APIs, etc.). However, we noticed that they’d almost always send us this sensitive information via email and sometimes text.

We initially tried to onboard some of our clients to LastPass to remedy this, which requires them signing up for an account, verifying their email, adding passwords for every site they want to share, and then sharing credentials with us. Most of our clients didn’t have the time or the patience for this, so they decided to send their credentials to us via email anyway.

We looked for solutions that made this process both secure and simple for us and our clients, but we couldn’t find anything that suited our needs. After awhile we started to ask ourselves “Is it just us having this problem?”. We decided to talk to several of our peers, independent consultants, and dev shops, and realized we weren’t alone — most of the people we talked to regularly experience this problem and have also failed to find an adequate solution for it.

That’s when we decided to build Share Securely.

Today

Our team is proud to say that we’ve just officially launched version 1.0 of Share Securely! With version 1.0 we provide you with a one click way for clients to securely send you passwords — without them needing an account.

Sign up for a 14 day free trial at https://sharesecurely.to/.

What’s next?

Right now, Share Securely allows individuals to receive credentials, and we are currently expanding our offering to support teams, two-way sharing, and document sharing.

Conclusion

Going forward, we’ll be shifting all of our focus to growing Share Securely while taking on additional contracting work. We’d also love it if you kept up with us during our journey! You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Together, we can simplify and secure the way people share information.