I haven’t been sleeping very much for the past few weeks, but I’m certainly not complaining. These are very exciting times in Dashlane’s trajectory. We went from private beta to public release last Monday, April 16, and since then we’ve been really pushing forward on everything from every angle. Here are some key Dashlane updates:

• TechCrunch interviewed Dashlane’s original visionary and seed investor, Bernard Liautaud, in a detailed feature write-up: Dashlane Speeds Up The Web With Instant Logins, Automatic Checkout And More
• BetaBeat‘s Kelly Faircloth wrote about our coming-out from a different angle, emphasizing Dashlane’s commitment to personal data privacy for our users
• Alan Henry at Lifehacker followed up on his review of our beta product with a great post on Dashlane’s new features
• We were psyched to read Neil J. Rubenking’s incredibly detailed review of Dashlane in PCMag, where he wrote: “If I had to describe the new Dashlane (free) password manager in a single word, I’d call it elegant… It also boasts features you just won’t find in the competition.” Plus! He awarded our very first public release with the esteemed PCMag Editors’ Choice Award in the password management category.
• Our CEO Emmanuel Schalit blogged for the Huffington Post on why Dashlane chose Silicon Alley over Silicon Valley — and New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg retweeted us, no big deal:

• On that note, yours truly wrote a post for NYTechDay on why I think New York is the best place for tech start-ups right now
• The Dashlane team was on-hand at the NYTechDay event on Thursday last week to demo our product, celebrate our launch, and meet others in the local tech start-up scene; check out our photos from the event
• Fittingly, after everything we’ve been through recently, our CEO wrote a piece for Forbes about seven lessons we learned by releasing Dashlane publicly, a solid read for all entrepreneurs out there
• And finally, yesterday we launched our Board of Users, a way to involve our power-users more directly in the development pipeline and other key decisions we’ll be making as we grow Dashlane. (By the way, if you want to join, send us an email at community [at] dashlane [dot] com!)

And we’re off!

Here we are. Public launch day. Hello! Wow, we need to get some sleep.

Anyway, as the team prepared for this day, I focused on getting our story straight. I always knew that by taking the marketing reins at Dashlane, I’d have to eventually deal with a way of coming up with a simple and easy way to describe our product.

See, this is so daunting because our app has various functionalities — which is, ultimately, a good problem; we’re no one-trick pony. So as we worked to relaunch our website with a brand-new marketing story that we felt did the product’s myriad functionalities justice and would speak more clearly to our users and website visitors, I realized I’d finally have to sit down and really think about our tagline.

Prior to my official start at Dashlane, the tagline used was: “Every Login, Every Checkout, Simplified.” This is not inaccurate. Dashlane does simplify every login and checkout experience online, but I felt that it didn’t really get at the core of our app.

So I took stock of all the different ways we could describe Dashlane’s functionalities. These included, but were not limited to: “smart wallet,” “password manager,” “shopping assistant,” and “personal data assistant.” (And then of course, for that last phrase, there are the infinite permutations: “personal data locker,” “personal data dashboard,” “personal data vault.”)

These are all true — and we are likely to use them from time to time moving forward — but none of these speak to our underlying mission, which is to place personal data in the hands of users, in a super-secure and private way. Further, not only does Dashlane empower users to store their data safely, it also allows them to use that data conveniently.

That’s how we ultimately got to framing our new website. We’re currently rotating a few different taglines which illuminate the overarching Dashlane philosophy. Because while yes, we do make it easier for you to shop and pay online, to login and register for web accounts, and to use all kinds of key personal data in ways that save you time while at the same time making you more secure — all of these benefits are really in the service of empowering users to take control of their personal data because, well, it’s theirs.

Of the three taglines we’re currently testing, the one in the screenshot above is my favorite: “Make your personal data work for you.” But the other two — “All your personal data and purchases, in your hand” and “All your purchases and personal data, in your hands” — also speak to the greater purpose that informs our work here at Dashlane. (By the way, if you have any opinions or suggestions, please share them with me. We can always use a fresh pair of eyes.)

And as the Dashlane team discusses the exciting enhancements and new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks and months, we’re committed to ensuring they’re all directly connected to the spirit of securely empowering users to save and use their data however they’d like.

P.S. If you want to know more about how secure and private your personal data is when you enter it on Dashlane, read our Security and Privacy policies, which include basic points as well as techy white papers that spell everything out. If that doesn’t appeal to you here are the basic points you ought to know:

• All of your personal data is locally encrypted on your own computer (and other devices, when our mobile apps come out soon), and is accessible only to you via your master password, which no one else has access to and which we do not store on our servers.
• Not even the Dashlane team can see your personal data. We’ve basically built a secure vault for you and thrown away the key. (Again, the key is your master password.)