A birthday bonanza as FreeAgent turns six

Here at FreeAgent Towers we’re normally not given to sentimentality. We prefer tangible metrics and we adore cold, hard data.

But this week, we’ve come over positively dewy-eyed as we celebrate an important milestone - exactly six years ago myself, Olly and Roan officially started a company called FreeAgent Central Limited and set out on our journey to make accounting better, easier and more intuitive for small businesses and freelancers.

Back then we didn’t call our goal ‘Democratising Accounting’ as we do now. But we believed that we’d found a great idea that would resonate with people like us - those small business owners that were struggling to manage their finances effectively and were getting frustrated with using spreadsheets to do their books.

We imagined that we might find a fair number of customers for our online tool, but we’ve been delighted and thrilled to see FreeAgent resonating with so many people.

Now we have more than 25,000 happy customers, we’re the market leader in online small business accounting in the UK, we have customers in 82 other countries, investors in both Europe and the US, and an awesome team helping us make our product even easier to use and ever more useful. We’ve built something we’re really proud of and the great thing is we’re only really getting started.

Looking back, it’s clear that 2007 was a big year for ideas. It was the year that the first iPhone was launched, and also when we learned that Viagra helps hamsters recover from jet-lag. We like to think the idea of FreeAgent ranks right up there as well.