elevio’s 2016 year in review

Wow, what a year.

It’s amazing to look back at where we were 12 months ago and compare it to the elevio of today.

12 months ago we were a team of two, working in windowless office gearing up to move to Sydney to take part in Startmate, quietly shitting our pants at the unknown.

We had no idea what we were in for, and definitley had no idea how much our lives, and the life of elevio was about to change.

2016, a recap

Going through an Accelerator

For the first three months of 2016, we moved to Sydney to take part in Startmate. We met some incredibly smart people, and made a bunch of new friends that we still talk with every week. The biggest thing to come from Startmate was a new, broader way of thinking. It’s changed the way we operate and think about running a startup that I don’t think we’d be able to get from any book.

Some time in San Francisco

In April we flew over to San Francisco and stayed for just over a month, speaking with a whole range of people, from top VC firms through to a good number of our existing customers, and other successful founders running startups and crushing it.

There’s too many people to thank for giving up their time to chat with us so we could sponge off them and watch how they operate.

It’s hard to quantify how much we learnt in that 6 weeks, being surrounded by the momentum and connectedness that is San Francisco.

We got funded

Coming off the back of solid growth and movement while going through Startmate, we were fortunate enough to have great interest from investors when we made the move to seek funding, it all came together much better than we could ever have anticipated to the point of being well over subscribed.

We ended up raising investment from 2 of Australia’s top VCs, Blackbird and Airtree, as well as a select group of quality angels (all from the Startmate network) that helped us early on, and still do today.

We couldn’t be happier with the people that filled our round, thanks crew ❤️

We’ve grown

We’ve grown revenue almost 5x since the start of the year which is promising that we’re getting closer to product-market fit, but more exciting to us is that we’ve grown from a team of two hacks to a solid team of 9 legends, pushing out updates and working on things that we could never have done on our own.

Growing the team and watching them set us up for an epic 2017 has been incredibly rewarding. It’s beautiful to watch.

Product updates

Among a slew of updates, a few key updates that moved the needle:

• We released the visualizer to add tips to your site with a point and click tool
• Complete rebuild of the embeddable, it’s magnitudes better in every aspect
• We introduced real time, deep searching
• We can now auto suggest relevant content to your users, to help guide them
• We added a tonne of new integrations and new modules
• We’re rolling out our hosted knowledge base (currently in alpha)
• We grew up and moved our infrastructure to AWS, across 15 different servers (prepping for 2017’s new services)
• More exciting though, is that much of what was worked on this year by our new team, is on the verge of release for early next year. I’m pumped just thinking about what’s on the horizon.

Previewing 2017

The start of 2017 is going to be pretty big for us, with a few major releases coming to give a lot of depth and completeness to our offering. All with the goal of moving towards a utopia where every piece of sofware supports its users in a personalized and streamlined manner, while staying out of the way. And we’ll be leading the charge.

Some teasers into what’s coming

• Better ways to communicate with your users
• Better discoverability of help content
• Better insights into where things are going wrong
• Better ways to educate your users

(It’s amazing what you can get done with a talented team on the case)

Finally, Thank You’s.

Our first thanks goes to every customer who has believed in what we’re doing, and where we’re heading. You are what drives us to want to do better.

Our next thanks goes to a group of people who’ve helped us out in some way throughout the year, in no particular order:

Niki Scevak, Paul Bennetts, John Henderson, alan jones, Alex De Aboitiz, Rayn Ong, Alan Downie, Samantha Wong, caseyjohnellis, Chris Raethke, Nick Crocker, Chris Hexton, Nick Hac, Michael Sharkey, Jackie Ariston

And finally, to our team, and our families, we could not have done this without you.

So from all of us at elevio, thank you.