Today we’d like to introduce you to Steve White.
Steve, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
In some ways our story really begins back in the late 1990s when I first started my own I.T. company. Though the years I became more and more dependent on remote access applications to do my job. For an IT person, the ability to access a customer’s computer remotely without getting in the car and driving across town just to do something that might take 5 to 10 minutes online.
By 2014, most of my work was done from my home office through LogMeIn’s free remote desktop access software, but in January of 2014 with no warning they started charging a significant amount of money for what was originally free. That event inspired the creation of RemoteToPC. My son Aaron White was working with me in the IT company at the time, and was a gifted programmer who liked to work with open source software at night in his off hours.
By the end of 2014, we had created a minimal product that could automatically create remote connections through a corporate firewall just by installing our host software a computer. In addition to that, we did something that was not being done by any other remote access company. We provided basic system health monitoring and alerts with every remote access host installation.
As we surveyed IT companies, and in-house IT department staff we found that they were very enthusiastic about a simple zero-configuration remote support tool that provided both remote access and monitoring & alerts, and so we applied to Google’s pre-accelerator and were selected to participate in Google Startup Next Dallas in 2014.
That was a great experience, and we had the opportunity to continue to pursue acceleration, or funding, but chose to keep our equity and grow this as a family business. So we incorporated, and out of 6 family members who all own part of the company, four of them are involved in the day to day operations of it.
We self-funded, and bootstrapped RemoteToPC into a full time family business, and are excited that a little startup in Fort Worth Texas can build our own high-tech product and compete with and win customers from large companies who spend millions per year on marketing and development. We now have happy customers all over the world and are proud to represent the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of Texas to the rest of the world.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The biggest challenge for us would have to be the technology. How do you make a commercial quality high speed secure tunneling connection to provide remote support sessions though all the diverse environments with all the different routers and firewalls out there in the world?
How do you monitor computer hardware for bad states, process that information, and send out email alerts when necessary for thousands of computers?
How do you scale all of that so that as thousands more systems come online, your platform keeps up?
These are all problems that we’ve faced, however there has also been the challenge of doing all of this on a shoestring budget. Since we’ve self-funded, and bootstrapped, it’s taken us much longer than it would have if we had taken funding and given up equity, so the flip side of the technology hurdles has been sustaining ourselves, and our business while things moved forward taking longer, and often requiring us to burn the candle at both ends to continue to stay in business and advance everything to where it is today.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
RemoteToPC is a remote support tool that offers remote desktop access for PC’s plus monitoring and alerts built in. IT people need to be the first to know when there’s a problem on a computer, and they need to be able to get to that computer wherever it is in the world, and wherever they may be. The problem is that this often requires two separate programs, more complex installations that have a learning curve, and it can cost up to ten times as much money as what RemoteToPC costs to be able to do that.
While fortune 500 companies might be able to afford the extra staff and the big budget expenses of doing this, many companies simply don’t have the budget for that, or the time to implement it. That’s where RemoteToPC comes in. Now even the smallest IT consulting company can come into a potential customer and let them know that all of their computers will be actively monitored for trouble. Many of the larger Managed Service Providers only monitor servers, and leave the customer to let them know when there’s trouble on workstations.
Because of this we consider RemoteToPC to be disruptive, which is a good thing, because it drives up the quality of service that IT people are able to provide either in-house or to their customers. Nobody offers what you get with RemoteToPC at anywhere near the price point. Unlike many of the other remote desktop access solutions out there RemoteToPC is built by IT people for IT people.
What were you like growing up?
I grew up playing prog-rock guitar. I still love to compose new music and have jam sessions with friends. I was never very good at school, but preferred to learn on my own. One thing I really loved was computers. I remember that in Jr. College, the one class that I aced was programming, so it’s no surprise that my fascination with computer technology grew into a career in IT.
Pricing:
- Pricing is annual and based on the number of remote computer endpoints. $99 for 10 systems, $179 for 20, $299 for 100, $549 for 250, and $899 for 500, etc.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://remotetopc.com
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