This month Zendesk celebrates its 3rd birthday (and you should join us for our bash on the 14th).
I have two small girls, one just turned four and the other turns three this December, so they’re practically the same age as Zendesk!
There are a lot of parallels between having children and building a company. Both are equal parts exciting and terrifying. Certainly, I might be a little crazy for doing both at the same time, but looking back I wouldn’t do it any other way.
Three years ago, in 2007, Alex, Morten, and myself launched Zendesk. We were three guys sitting with our laptops in Alex’s loft in downtown Copenhagen. We had an idea, a product, energy, and we believed that we could simplify support processes and even make them elegant. We launched and were so thrilled when we had one customer, but soon we had 100, and our userbase just kept growing.
Two years ago, in 2008, we were pitching to VCs in the midst of the ‘Silicon Valley nuclear winter,’ and I was spending one day on the road for every two days I was spending at home. We had hired a small team placed all over the world. This core group was tied together by the energy around the product created by our customers rather than by a paycheck.
One year ago, in 2009, we were setting up our brand new offices in San Francisco and about to start a hiring surge. We were figuring out how to attract some fantastic people to our team so we could continue to deliver an outstanding product with exceptional service to thousands of customers all over the world.
Today, Zendesk is a team of more than 50 fantastic employees in San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Argentina.
Since, birthday stats are always fun, here’s what Zendesk looks like today:
- Our core customer base has surged to more than 5,000 customers.
- More than 12M people have interacted with a Zendesk system since we started.
- More than 100,000 new support requests processed daily through Zendesk.
- More than 1,000 companies, large and small, from all over the world, sign up for a free 30-day Zendesk trial every week.
At this pace, I’m excited to think where we’ll be in one year from now. It’s going to be fun, hard, and probably much like when we began: still equal parts exciting and terrifying.
On behalf of the entire Zendesk team, I’d like to personally thank our customers for their business, our investors for believing in us and mentoring us, and our friends and families who have supported us through bootstrapping and beyond.
Please join us in celebrating our 3-year anniversary on Thursday, October 14th at a local watering hole called Mars Bar. We’re celebrating with appetizers and drinks from 5-8 PM and would love to see you there.
