Looking back on 2021

Another year has passed, so it’s time to look back and reflect on how things are going at PingPong.

It was a great year for us, one that has opened new possibilities for the next few years.

Let’s dive into the details, shall we?

Building the PingPong team

At the beginning of 2021, PingPong was a team of 4. We were working remotely, all based in Budapest, Hungary. Now, we’re a team of 8, so we’ve managed to double in size! 

We’ve hired people from 4 countries on 3 continents: my ambition is to build a diverse team where everyone can do their very best, develop their skills & learn new stuff while also having a great time.

Bootstrapping a company is hard. You want to move fast, but you don’t have the resources (money, that is). At last, we have a product team of amazing people who can execute fast, eliminate bugs & build new features.

As a result, we’ve shipped more in the past 6 months than in the last 2 years combined.

Testers, testers, testers

It’s no secret that our amazing participant pool is a massive part of our product – and our success. Last year, we hit 150,000 registered participants. This is a HUGE deal. 

Having easy access to research participants is the backbone of our vision to make research accessible to everyone. In 2022, we’re planning to  grow our pool further to reach 250,000 registered participants.

Widening our price offering with subscriptions

We’ve started offering PingPong as a subscription service. This is a very important step for us as a business: one of the biggest difficulties is if you don’t have predictable recurring revenue. 

When you’re building a SaaS, monthly and annual subscriptions make your business predictable. We were missing this trick, because credit purchases are hard to predict. We have pretty good customer retention, but sometimes repurchases can take up to 24 months!

Our commitment to security

As we talked more and more with our enterprise partners, it became clear how important  security is to them. Given recent data breaches and leaks, it’s no wonder that businesses want to do everything to protect their data.

We’ve managed to seriously level up our security: we’ve done a lot on the product side, and we’re also on track to get ISO27001 certified this year.

Growing our support

One of the most common compliments we receive is how proactive we are and how much we help our customers. 

I think the reason for this is that I’m personally super annoyed by bad customer service and I’m trying to empathize with anyone facing difficulties or being frustrated. And of course, we’re trying our best to offer a great service to PingPong users.

We’ve grown our support team of 1 to 3 people. This has allowed us to expand our support hours and offer assistance to our US customers as well.

Levelling up our marketing efforts

Another big gain is that we’ve hired a dedicated marketing person: Sophie brings a great deal of B2B experience and drives our content marketing efforts with the help of Wordit, our lovely copywriting agency.

Finally, our website is getting an update

Our website is our #1 channel for acquiring new customers, and we are finally in the process of updating it.

We’ve already revamped several pages: About us, a new Security page and our Product Overview.

We also have a new Pricing page and we’re now offering a proper Enterprise plan, which is great for businesses with a strong focus on UX research and human-centred design.