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It’s no exaggeration to say that this Montreal startup’s success is dazzling. Since launching their app on December 28, they’ve experienced a snowball effect: more than 1,000 user sign-ups from more than 500 cities around the world.
GetCastor gives users the ability to create a dashboard from the data we’re interested in, such as calendars and the weather. “It’s a point of view that we developed internally for our own needs, and then we realized we could modify it and put it on the market,” said Richard Forsans, CEO of GetCastor, a subsidiary of OctHuber, a Montreal startup created a year ago with teams from Montreal and Paris.
Easy to use, it’s a simple matter of targeting the type of data you want to import, creating or selecting widgets, and finally adjusting them according to visual importance — the dashboard will adapt to any screen. The application then retrieves the data via the user’s web browser and updates it.
GetCastor is free for the creation of a single dashboard, but the application generates revenue through its Pro version which, for $4 per month, allows the user to produce a multiplicity of dashboards and also to share them.
The fact that GetCastor was featured on Product Hunt and Hacker News certainly didn’t hurt. “It started with Product Hunt, and then we crossed the barrier of 1,000 registrations…we didn’t expect that to happen either,” said Forsans. “We are very pleased with this first response.” The product undoubtedly addresses a need: no campaign was necessary, everything was done by word of mouth, entirely online.
The team of seven employees and associates, who chose to develop GetCastor without a fundraising campaign, still intends to contact VCs within the next six months.
GetCastor was one of the startups included in MontrealNewTech’s Demo Night on January 10th.