We’re in the final week of 2021 and I can’t help but to feel optimistic.
Optimistic that covid-19 vaccines and boosters are available in the US, that we were able to return to an office in 2021 with expansion plans in 2022, and that our target market (marketing agencies) grew by 23% during the pandemic.
I also feel optimistic as we begin focusing on our broader product vision at Cloud Campaign — building the “operating system” for marketing agencies. We’ve already begun assembling the team to work on this new product platform and will begin writing code in the new year.
2021 had its ebbs and flows with a handful of trying events — the “Great Resignation” in the Summer, covid-19 variants resulting in difficult decisions around the office environment, and stiff hiring competition as many corporations adopt a full-time remote policy—yet, as a company, we managed to more than double both revenue and headcount, raise $5m from top local VCs, and open two offices.
Here’s a snapshot of 2021 by the numbers:
(for reference, here’s my recap of 2020 and of 2019)
👯♂️ Team Members: 11→ 23
📈 Revenue: $98k MRR → $210k MRR
💰 Capital Raised: $5M
🌴 Team Events: too many to count 🥳
🎙 Podcast Appearances: 7
It felt like we transitioned into a real company in 2021 — we opened office space (1 in Portland and 1 in Boulder), raised a large ($5m) institutional round, and hired more than 10 employees.
We’re still fine-tuning our growth engine and searching for our inflection point, but, in the meantime, we had a strong 2021.
Product-first Mentality
We started the year with a handful of HUGE product releases that not only led to happy customers (foreshadowing), but a reduction in COGs.
- Facebook and Instagram ads reporting
- Instagram direct publishing
- Mobile version of our dashboard
- Pinterest integration
- Scheduling to any social media platform
- Enhanced reporting — hashtags, categories, post-type
- Cloud Connect allows clients to connect their own social media accounts
Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Oh my…
One of our goals for 2021 was to become a thought leader for marketing agencies.
To achieve this, we focused on helpful content and hosting conversations with leaders in the space.
Around the beginning of 2021, Clubhouse was surging so we decided to hop on the trend and host our own #AgencyTalks Clubhouse every month. It ended up being a total flop, so we tried some other formats, but ultimately settled on hosting monthly webinars where we interview top agency owners.
We still host these webinars monthly and have some really exciting guests lined up for 2022!
Do our customers like us?
Around the middle of the year, we published an NPS (net promoter score) survey in our product, and to be honest, I was anxious.
I knew the goal was to just set a baseline to improve from but the thought of receiving mostly negative feedback was scary.
Within minutes of publishing the survey, feedback started coming in, and… our customers LOVE us.
This is a humblebrag. Our NPS score, +71, is a reflection of many people’s hard work! (+30 was the SaaS NPS benchmark for 2020)
Our engineering team of 3 busting their behind to stay ahead of competitors with much larger teams; our customer success team not only helping agencies learn our product, but helping them improve their businesses.
$5,000,000 would help…
With a strong growth trajectory after our January 2020 Seed round of $1.5m and the potential to expand our product offering to better serve our customers, we raised a $5m Series A from Oregon Venture Fund and Access Venture Partners.
The goal was to use a majority of the capital for growth and reserve $1.5m for new product development.
Our customers were beginning to request that we solve other problems for their business — namely, software products to help with invoicing, email marketing, and more. We saw this as a natural transition for the business and in line with our broader vision, so we raised additional capital to do exactly that.
And the interviews shortly followed
Following the raise, a handful of podcasters reached out to share our story, so I did a quick podcast tour for the month:
- Org3D Growing Tech Fast: Ryan Born
- RiderFlex Podcast: Ryan Born, CEO & Co-Founder at Cloud Campaign
- Invested Success: Raising $7,000,000 with Startup Founder Ryan Born of Cloud Campaign
- The Fuse Show: Agencies the Next Frontier
- Unscalable: How to Raise Venture Capital for Startups
- Proper Expression: Balancing Short Term and Long Term Strategies — Ryan Born (CEO)
- Paired: Meet Ryan Born, Co-Founder & CEO of Cloud Campaign
The Great Resignation
In the middle of Summer, we were returning to our new office spaces, and at the same time, the country was experiencing The Great Resignation.
Four million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021 including 5 of our own campaigners.
This was the first time in the company’s history that an employee left, and it wasn’t just one, but five. I was deflated and shocked (we had just raised $5m and had aggressive growth plans).
Around this time, we realized that the expectations of work have changed. People want flexibility, higher pay, and more ownership.
Taking this into account, we focused on work-life balance.
Work-Life Balance
For the Summer, we implemented half-day Fridays. The goal was to give the team more time to enjoy the good weather and more time to recharge so they would be ready for another productive week come Monday.
We decided to take it one step further for Q4 and implement 4-day work weeks. Monday through Thursday, 8 hours per day. Shout out to our investors/board for letting us run this experiment; you typically don’t think of 32-hour work weeks when you talk about VC-backed startups, but we had a hunch that our team would be more focused, motivated, and ultimately, productive with the shorter week. We also felt that it would help with employee happiness and retention.
I’ll be posting a follow up article on our 4-day work week experiment and our results, so be sure to subscribe to see the results.
In the meantime, you can see what others have learned from their 4-day work weeks. It’s been tried by teams at Microsoft, Atlassian, Basecamp, Wildbits, and even 86% of Iceland’s workforce.
Iceland found that the shorter work week led to “increased productivity and creativity; improved recruitment and retention; less burnout for founders and leaders; and more balanced and sustainable lives for workers” — TED.
Recognition of our Team’s Hard Work
Our small team worked extremely hard this past year to compete with the large incumbents in the space (2 are public, many others are backed by large PE firms). I want to give our team a shoutout and recognize some of our achievements from this past year:
- Blackstone Entrepreneur’s Network Scale Up 2021 cohort member
- 7th fastest-growing startup in Colorado (Colorado Startups and Crunchbase)
- 65th fastest-growing startup globally (SaaS Magazine — Latka)
What’s Next?
We have a handful of open positions if you’re interested in joining our fast-paced, high-output team.
Over this next year, we will be building the operating system for growing agencies and freelancers. We’re projeting to end the year around $5.7m ARR with 38 employees. Follow along our journey to help hold me accountable!
