Humble beginnings

Welcome to our new blog. Within this blog, we would like to openly share the lessons we have learned while growing from our first customer to our 500,000th, from a bootstrapped company to our first Series A funding round, and beyond. Along the way, we made awful mistakes and found great success — and this blog is our way to share these lessons with you as The Foundation for Digital Success.

It all started with our work as SEO and online marketing consultants. Marcus Tandler, Niels Doerje, Merlin Jacob and I reviewed the source code of websites for our clients and wrote the same reports and recommendations over and over again.

After a while we started to see patterns. These reports, and the patterns that we saw, became the foundation for OnPage that later became Ryte. This was our humble beginning.

At this point we decided to turn our agency into a proper product-driven company — this was our very first transformation back in 2012.

OnPage.org was born through a lot of trial and error. We built our first product, grew our users from just a handful to over 500,000 and hired lots of people.

In the first four years, there were a lot of ups and downs. Way more than we would have hoped for but thankfully in the end there were more ups than downs.

A little over two years ago, we looked at our growth rate and the company, including our culture, and asked ourselves: Is this it? Is it good enough? Or should we take on something much bigger?

We decided for the latter. This was the second and even bigger transformation for our company.

At this point, OnPage.org had over 37 employees and made over 3 million Euros in revenue. Yet this simple question, and the dedication from our team, was able to kick off a series of long nights with intense debates and endless talks with our customers that would rattle the very foundation of our company 5 years into its existence.

After a couple of weeks, we started to see new patterns emerge and we felt increasingly optimistic that we found nothing less but the truth of what we — as the founders and the team — wanted to be.

We came up with a sentence so simple and so often stated by companies that in itself it doesn’t mean much, but at Ryte this led to a series of decisions that transformed the bloodstream of the whole company — from good to great:

We will transform OnPage.org from a software to the foundation for digital success.

OnPage was just a software, Ryte on the other hand should become the foundation for digital success for our users all over the world. So we strove to turn our software into a full-fledged platform for achieving digital success.

This new vision and mission statement led to our rebranding, Series A funding (after bootstrapping for many years), restructuring, software architecture redesign and basically complete and total upheaval.

After almost two years into the process, we can say that we’ve done a lot of things that turned out incredibly well and helped us to experience positive effects for our business, the company and our team that we never thought were possible.

And now we will share all the details with you.

Our goal is to help other companies avoid the mistakes that we made and be able to achieve the same results that we did. We really hope this blog will help you to achieve a new level of success.

Yours,

Andi, Marcus and Niels