2016 is gone and it’s very interesting to use the natural conclusion of the year to put things into perspective. It’s been a great year for marketgoo – but this is the usual fluff content you read all over the place at this time of year, don’t you? It’s quite easy to just focus on the past four quarters’ vanity metrics (and it’s easy for the ego, too).
At marketgoo we are goal oriented, and had things pretty clear from the beginning of the year, and yes, we’ve almost hit our main goal. We reached 94% of our MRR growth goal. That means that our MRR grew 79% over the year, compound growth. And that, for a SaaS bootstrapped company is gold!! 2017 is going to be a great year.
But I do not think that hitting just a metric gives a measure of the progress of our project alone. In recent months we are growing at a steady pace. But that was not the case in past years. (Again the slow SaaS ramp of death appears in the conversation). We’ve been preparing our company to reach this growth. And focusing on MRR growth in past years was not such a great idea to measure that progress.
The most interesting exercise I like to do with our team is to sit back and understand how much savvier we are today than exactly one year ago. That is for me, the true measure of success. And we are more prepared and with more intuition and tools and methodology to accomplish further things in 2017. So besides MRR and Revenue and P&L and headcount and all of that, we also measure our wisdom growth.
Wisdom comes from doing and lots of doing we did in 2016:
- Customer success: we launched our Academy to help our customers to be more successful, we’ve improved our customer support operations to hit high response satisfaction but the most important was to help our customers be successful like in these case studies. Customer success is at the epicenter of the tool and services we offer – it not only gives us a real time indicator of satisfaction, retention and loyalty, it also literally aligns with our mission to help small businesses succeed.
- Product improvements: SSL detection, WordPress readiness, new on-page score, a new product for Agency, new monthly emails, several UX improvements, competitor enhancement, new subscription plans, Swedish and Danish language and much more.
- Partnerships: partnerships are one of our more valuable activities and we are very glad to have signed great partnerships such as with One.com, SiteDart, Register.es, WebViking, ProfesionalHosting, Vocento and some others that wish to keep their brand private. Our partnership with Weebly is an important milestone in our integration capabilities and represents a very interesting segment of users that constantly enlighten us with their use cases.
- Culture: certainly our biggest accomplishment is to see what we have become as a team in 2016. Two weeks of retreats, thousands of Slack chats, Screenheroes, Skypes, etc but a great team more aligned and capable than ever.
2017 will be the year to consolidate our operations and be significantly profitable. We’ll launch our Version 3, we’ll implement a major innovation in UX, several impactful partnerships that are on the way and more profound product improvements.
We do all of this to help people like you being successful online, happy 2017 to you. We hope that our journey and mission inspires you, and to echo Neil Gaiman’s words, we hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
Go Goo!
