Gopniya does one thing
A customer saves their passwords, documents and letters in Gopniya. Everything is encrypted on their device, and we cannot read it. The one exception is what they set aside for the people they name, which we can open only at handover. If the customer is inactive for a period they choose, we deliver what they set aside to the people they named, online or in person.
Gopniya earns money in one way: customers pay for this service. They pay a monthly subscription, a charge for storage, and a fee for each handover delivered in person.
Every customer signs a contract with us. It binds us for as long as their account exists. A customer who joins at forty may need their handover at eighty, so many of these contracts will last for decades.
What Gopniya will not do
A promise that lasts for decades can be kept only by a company that stays in one line of work and spends carefully. So we have decided what Gopniya will not do, and we will write these limits into the shareholders’ agreement.
- Gopniya will not add products outside saving and delivering secrets.
- Gopniya will not show advertising, and it will not sell or share anything about its customers.
- Gopniya will not spend more on finding customers than those customers repay.
- Gopniya will not be sold to a buyer who does not take on every customer agreement unchanged.
These limits mean Gopniya will grow slowly. We accept that.
The return we expect
Gopniya is not built to return a hundred times the money invested, and we will not try to make it one. We do not plan to become a very large company, to go public or to be sold.
We expect Gopniya to become a steady and profitable business. Most of its cost is fixed: the staff who hold the keys, security, audits and legal work. The cost of storing and delivering each customer’s secrets is small. Customers who save their secrets rarely leave. Once Gopniya passes break-even, profit grows with the number of customers, slowly and predictably.
Investors are repaid from that profit, through dividends and through the company buying back shares. This begins once Gopniya is profitable and its continuity reserve is fully funded. It takes many years.
If you need to sell your shares by a fixed date, Gopniya is not a good fit for you.
Customers are protected first
Part of every round we raise goes to an independent trustee as a continuity reserve. If Gopniya stops growing, the reserve pays to run the service, so every handover still happens. Neither the founder nor the investors can draw on it, and no lender has a claim on it.
Fees that customers pay for in-person handovers are also held by the trustee until the handover is delivered or the fee is refunded. They are not used to run the company.
Profit is used in a fixed order. It goes first to the reserve until the reserve is fully funded, then to running and improving the service, and then to investors.
We raise money in stages
Each stage pays for a fixed amount of work and ends at a fixed number of customers. We raise the next stage only when the last one has reached its number.
- The first stage pays to build Gopniya, pass an external security audit, launch, and serve the first 1,000 paying customers.
- The second stage pays to fund the continuity reserve in full and to grow to 10,000 paying customers.
- After that, Gopniya is meant to pay for itself from its own revenue. We raise again only if growth is faster than our plan.
We do not borrow to run the company before it earns enough to repay a loan.
What we report
Every quarter, we send each investor the same report. It gives the number of paying customers, how many cancelled, revenue, costs, cash, the balance of the continuity reserve, the handovers we delivered, and any security incident.
Every year, we send the report of our external security audit, along with our audited accounts.
The risks we know of
- People may be slow to trust a new company with their secrets. Growth may take longer than our plan.
- A serious security failure would end the business. Our design limits what any breach can expose, but it cannot make a breach impossible.
- Laws on digital assets, succession and identity checks may change. A change could add cost or alter how a handover works.
- Most handovers are years away. Until many have been delivered, our cost estimates for them rest on rehearsals and partner quotes.
The investors we are looking for
We are looking for people who are comfortable holding their shares for ten years or more, and who are content with a steady return paid from profit.
Every investor signs the shareholders’ agreement, including the limits on this page.