How a small fish swims in a big pond

Transylvania. When you think of it you think of Dracula, beheadings, and spooky castles in the mist.

The reality is far less scary — and far more beautiful.

Transylvania is a district of rolling hills and deep forests. It holds one of the world’s largest salt mines, a strange place that has been used for centuries as a sanitarium and source of seasoning.

And it is also home to Gabriel Ciordaș, one of Romania’s unsung entrepreneurs.

In 2004, Gabriel Ciordas created Jumpeye, a company that used to develop a series of important Flash tools. Many animators and Web designers found these tools to be critical for their work, and by 2008, Gaby saw that Jumpeye’s customers could benefit from a different kind of tool, one that would help them streamline their workflows and create banner ads more quickly.

Bannersnack was the answer. Gaby and his team started it as a subscription-based Flash design editor that was completely online, with no download or installation required. Bannersnack enabled anyone to create ads and pioneered the idea of banner downloads.

The company’s first month was a challenge. They made less than a thousand dollars of revenue. But next month, the revenue nearly doubled. Four months in, the company earned almost $8000. Its customers proved that a faster, easier way to create banners was a good idea.

Fulfilling Their Needs, Listening to Their Wants

Continued growth depended on providing customers with tools that were helpful, not just exciting. Bannersnack took the time to listen to users. It built feedback channels to understand what its customers needed, what they really wanted.

Getting the basics right is critical. Bannersnack is in a fast-moving industry with some much larger players and it’s easy to chase the latest trends without refining core tools. Instead, Bannersnack focused not just on innovating but also on building a solid foundation, making sure that users have the best tools for their workflows, even when those tools are not the most exciting. Because Bannersnack builds everything in-house, it can directly address users’ needs and create the tools that will serve them best.

Building on Success

In 2010, Bannersnack reached its first million users and two years after that, it reached its first million dollars of revenue. For any software service, these milestones are significant indicators of user interest.

What’s remarkable is that Bannersnack reached them with less than a hundred employees and without outside investors.

Instead, it simply provided good features that users wanted.

In the years since, Bannersnack has continued to innovate and grow. Going global requires global thinking. It requires a broader understanding of users’ needs and a vision for the future.

Today, Bannersnack provides many powerful creative features: AMPHTML Ads, HTML5 drag-and-drop banners, Magic Animator for one-click preset animations, Timeline, collaborative design and more. As Google recently noted at the 2019 AMP conference in Tokyo, Bannersnack is one of the few tools on the market offering AMPHTML technology. It has also added a revolutionary new Smart Resize feature for automatically scaling banners.

But despite success and increasing recognition, Bannersnack hasn’t forgotten its origins. It is still listening to customers and learning how their needs are changing. Just like a decade ago, it still builds all of its features in house, in a building amid the rolling hills of Transylvania.

Can a company with just 90 employees and no investors compete in 2019?

Bannersnack is proof that it can. Being successful depends not on how large a company is or how much money it can throw at a problem.

For Bannersnack, success is enabling anyone to create quality visuals efficiently and easily. It’s not about big raises, big noise, and messy cap tables.

It’s about listening, building, and expanding.