Cyprus 4.0: ‘Bring your idea to life in no time,’ says Proto.io

“We took the decision internally not to pursue any outside funding. We have been profitable and cashflow positive from the very beginning, because we self-funded all development.

The initial software, and then the overflow portfolio started selling very quickly,”notes Alexis Piperides, CEO of proto.io and overflow.io.

“We are now 35 people in the company working on both products,

with sales in the millions. And the majority of our activities now for marketingare done in Cyprus.”

Alexis Piperides, CEO of Protoio Inc., a US-based company with offices in Nicosia, has a knack for improving product team communication and collaboration.

Alexis Piperides and his co-founder Alexis Odysseos started a consultancy company in Cyprus, doing custom development work for big companies.

“We built a content management software that we used in all of our customers’ projects. We had offices in Cyprus and London, serving many customers in Cyprus, the UK, and Europe for more than ten years.

In 2009 we started offering mobile app development for large enterprises. At that time, we needed to validate our mobile app ideas and show them to the customer before we build the code for their apps. We couldn’t find any software available in the market that would satisfy our needs, so we decided to create something for our team and customers. That’s how Proto.io was born; it was essentially out of necessity,” Piperides explains.

“We initially built Proto.io, just for us. We could create a working prototype with no code in just a few minutes and show it to the customer so that they could get a realistic feeling of how the app will look, feel and work on the actual mobile device, which was very important for us,” he added.

Piperides and his team saw how much the customers loved it; they asked themselves, why not make it available for every company out there?

“And that’s what we did in 2012. When we released Proto.io to the market, it immediately received great traction, especially in Silicon Valley. We started getting hundreds of notable customers and multiple enterprise customer requests. For that reason, we decided to put Proto.io under an American company. In 2013, we set up a company in San Francisco called Protoio Inc.”

“Proto.io was one of the first, if not the first, mobile app prototyping platform,” Piperides says.

Shortly after that, the business grew so big that the two founders decided to drop the consulting firm and pivot to their new software startup focusing entirely on Proto.io.

As growth continued, in 2018, the company decided to create a second product based on customer feedback from its first product.

“We were researching what our customers would like to see next. And we came across the need for user flow diagrams,” Piperides continues.

A user flow diagram displays the user’s complete path or user journey when using a digital product. They are essential to web and app makers to manage how the viewer interacts with the website or app.

“We first attempted to implement user flow diagrams as part of Proto.io. We were not satisfied with the result because turning a prototype into a user flow diagram is not ideal. We were fascinated with the need for such a solution, so we decided to develop software that accommodates this need for every customer, not just Proto.io customers. A few months later, we released Overflow, the world’s first user flow diagram tool tailored for designers. Overflow integrates with the most popular design tools and enables people to build user flows and design presentations in minutes to communicate their work and get feedback,” Piperides says.

Since 2013, Piperides and his team have been growing the company, with thousands of customers worldwide.

“The majority of our customers are in the US and Europe, in big startup and technology hubs. Recently we experience significant growth in the Asian market, in countries like Japan, South Korea, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and also in emerging markets like Brazil,” Piperides says.

“Protoio Inc. has been profitable and cash-flow positive from the beginning as we self-funded the development of the initial software from our previous business. For this reason, we continued to bootstrap without the need for raising venture capital. We are currently more than 35 people in the company, with the majority located in Cyprus, with sales in the millions.”