Behind the curtain

The last year has seen a seismic change in our company, on pretty much every front. As you can see from the Geckoboard shot, we celebrated an important milestone recently: 12,000 paying customers! As you might imagine, we had a bit of a party at FreeAgent Towers with a glass or two of champagne and a wee slice of cake.

To be fair, reaching that milestone is probably more interesting to us than to you, but a more telling story is told by the shape of our subscriber numbers curve below:

This shows that the hard work we’ve put into the product, and into building relationships with key partners, is really starting to pay off. Exponential (‘hockey stick’) growth like this is every company’s dream, and I’m just super proud of the team, infrastructure and product that we’ve built that’s allowed us to get here, and will serve us well as we accelerate into the future.

Perhaps more importantly it reinforces that there really is a sea change in the way businesses (and their accountants) think about managing finances, driven by tools like FreeAgent. We’re in the privileged position of having the know-how and the resources to make this happen even faster.

Anyway, rather than crow too loudly about this achievement, I thought it would be worth describing how we’ve got to where we are and more importantly, how we’re planning to move forward.

I don’t imagine for a minute that we’re suddenly world-experts on building software companies, but over the next few weeks we are going to write a few blog posts which let you peek ‘behind the curtain’ a bit. We’ll be talking a bit more about, for example:

• Our plans for scaling our service from 12,000 to 120,000 customers and beyond
• A sneak peek of our new shiny offices, as they take shape
• How we think about management, and the importance of company culture
• Why we think great customer service is utterly critical
• Our experiences in financing the company
• Our philosophy of product development

I hope that each of these will be more of a conversation than a lecture, and so I’m very much looking forward to our little chats.