This last month I had the opportunity of interviewing Yaron Samid, Vice President of Product Management for Pando. I found out about Pando from a colleague of mine, while I was looking for a solution that would let me email podcast recordings (which are usually very large files) to others.  The two things that excited me about Pando were (1) Pando’s technology that allowed me to share large files with colleagues and (2) the company's rapid success.  In a period of less than three months of a public beta, Pando reached over 1 million installs.  For a collaboration start-up this is very impressive. 

Here are four key areas Samid attributes to the successful launch of Pando.

1. Cater to an existing need of a consumer market. Samid’s experience in file sharing at Desksite taught him that customers had a very simple need: they wanted to share large files with other users quickly and without a cumbersome server architecture that added additional costs and traffic overhead. Consequently, Samid and the Pando team created a peer-to-peer solution that allows you to easily share family photos, music videos, or other files with another person quickly and freely. Pando was dead-on in meeting the needs of their customers. Because of this, one million customers quickly adopted and benefited from Pando’s focused offering.  

2. Require users to invite other users. In order for someone to use Pando, they need to invite another person.  This requirement is key to the viral spreading nature of Pando.  Prior to reaching a million users, Pando did not invest in marketing.  They let the viral requirement of their product do all the marketing.  Collaboration software has this great advantage, and companies who make it easy for users to invite other users, can get a lot more users for a minimal or no PR and marketing investment.  I am surprised that Pando’s word of mouth marketing has spread Pando to all major countries in the world.   

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