Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What drove your decision to focus on PC drivers as the first aspect of SlimWare Utilities?

Chris Cope: There were a lot of people who needed a solution. If the driver solution worked well when no other products did, we would attract the hardcore PC enthusiast group to use our other utilities as well. We felt that if we gave that user base a platform that they could rate objects on computers, then we could aggregate their feedback pertaining to the objects found on PCs. It was a give and take.

Our hope was to get users to adopt one of our utilities, and then once they have had a positive experience with it, we anticipated that they would want to use our other PC utilities. We have a PC utility to update drivers, a PC utility to clean the PC, and a utility to remove uneeded programs and items. Our utilities are called SlimCleaner, SlimComputer, and SlimDrivers.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you sell the utilities for?

Chris Cope: Our utilities are offers as free utilities. Some of our utilities, such as our SlimDrivers utilities, do have a premium upsell version. The primary difference is that the premium versions offer more automated features to make them easier to use. We will always have core offerings that will be free because they allows us to get user traffic as well as relevant data. However, there will always be an end user who does not mind purchasing an application for extra convenience.

Sramana Mitra: Have you achieved a favorable cost structure to allow you to be profitable with a freemium model?

Chris Cope: Our costs are minimal for a few reasons. First, we are using so much bandwidth on Amazon that we get the best possible rate. We built in that environment to allow us to leverage that cost. We transfer terabytes of drivers all the time. Second, we leave the manufacturers drivers alone; we just wrap and compress them. That keeps our costs down and allows us to offer free versions of our products.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you release your PC cleaning tool?

Chris Cope: In July 2010 at Blackhat, we came out with our public beta for the driver application, the cleaning utility, and SlimComputer. We built that last utility to help people deal with bloat ware. If you are small business and you buy a laptop, that utility will tell you all of the trial ware and add ware based on our community feedback.

We put all of those out in beta at the same time and started collecting user feedback. We then made improvements and started releasing them from beta one by one. The last one to get released is our cleaning utility, SlimCleaner, which just left beta in May of this year.

Sramana Mitra: And all of your utilities are free?

Chris Cope: All utilities have a free version. SlimDrivers and SlimUtilities have premium versions in addition to their free versions. We do generate revenue from our driver application and from our optimization suite. We generate more than $5 million in revenue.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope
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