This week Techopia Live sat down with one of Ottawa’s newest chief executives, Greg Evans, to hear about his vision for the future of PageCloud.
Craig Fitzpatrick, founder and original CEO of the web-building software firm, announced last month that would step down from his role at the top of the well-known Ottawa startup to pursue other projects. Fitzpatrick has been the face of PageCloud ever since the firm took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015 to pitch the intuitive, drag-and-drop web editor.
Evans, PageCloud’s first employee and previously the vice-president of strategic partnerships, told Techopia Live that he’s a natural fit to take over the CEO role as he’s been “part of the DNA of the company” from the beginning. He was also involved in PageCloud’s early fundraising efforts which saw the firm raise more than $11 million through angel, seed and series-A rounds.
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Evans said that Fitzpatrick “evangelized” the value of visual editing solutions during his time at the top, and performances such as the TechCrunch pitch caught the attention of both customers and competitors.
“Fast forward four years, I think (visual editors are) becoming the standard,” he said.
While PageCloud prides itself on its intuitive interface – the company’s mission has always been to “allow anybody to publish on the web,” Evans said – earlier this year the firm launched a channel to court web-building professionals. It’s a bid to win customers that don’t have time to maintain their own websites and want to outsource the job to freelancers or agencies.
Evans said he expects PageCloud to continue to push the strength of its visual editor while branching out into other aspects of web design. That could mean building out landing page creation or customer reporting modules, or partnering with other solutions in the industry that would benefit from the firm’s solution.
That’s a taste of what could be coming down the line at PageCloud, but what about the founder Fitzpatrick? Earlier this week, he seemed to have found a pretty good place to figure that out.
