It’s been almost 11 years, since I co-founded Octeth with Mert. Back in the day, there were almost no SaaS services, web 2.0 meant nothing, Facebook and Twitter were not around. In 2000, email marketing industry was a newly emerging industry.
We wanted to have our share in this market and developed our first software, named it “Octeth E-mail Marketing Software”. It was our first baby: a simple list management and e-mail delivery software. Just a basic software without any fancy reporting or personalization features.
After two months, “Octeth E-mail Marketing Software” was purchased by our first customer, just through a simple e-mail conversation. We were happily surprised by the success of our software in such a short amount of time. It was a miracle for our small team, just Mert and I. In our first year, we sold around 100 licenses. Yes, not much, just 100 licenses.
New surprises and successes were waiting for us in the upcoming years. In our second year, we grew by more than 500%. As our products became more powerful, we sold hundreds of licenses. Just through online communications, we acquired more and more customers from all over the world; no phone calls, no meetings. It was 2000 and we were proud of the success of our new business model. We continued to grow in the following years. Our software became one of the best e-mail marketing softwares available in the industry, used by more thousands of customers from more than 110 countries. Following our software, Oempro, others started their own E-mail Service Provider (ESP) businesses.
In 2006, we built Wridea.com. While we originally designed this service for our internal collaborations, to share and store our ideas within our company, something unexpected happened. Luck was again on our side. Google (thank you Google!) indexed our service and in a very short amount of time, more than 10,000 users started using Wridea to collaborate with their friends and colleagues. Wridea was our first SaaS experience and are proud of it!
In 2007, we achieved another success with Sendloop.com, a limited feature hosted version of our software, Oempro. In just 1,5 years, we were again serving ten thousand users from over 110 countries and delivering millions of opt-in e-mails every day. Similar to Oempro, Sendlood also runs on our own server farm, and does not require software download, which means less trouble for you! Another wonderful feature of Sendloop is that its revenue model is cumulative. The existing users payments are sufficient for your service to continue even during months where you don’t get new paid users.
In 2008, we found PreviewMyEmail.com. This unique service takes screen shots of your e-mails on more than 30 clients in less than a minute. It enables you to create better-looking e-mails. We are excited about this promising technology that is still new, but continuing to develop day after day.
And finally in 2010, we created SenderSuite.com. Another e-mail marketing tool, SenderSuite.com enables you to send transaction emails (e.g. password reminders, system notification emails) through its easy-to-integrate gateway, without worrying about the e-mail delivery success. SenderSuite.com is an easy-to-use service that comes very handy for all website owners, blog owners, application developers.
2010 has been an excellent year for Octeth. All of our services, technologies continued to grow this year: Octeth by 60%, Oempro by 30%, Sendloop by 80%, and last but not the least PreviewMyEmail by 300%.
And now, we are about to meet the new year,2011. We are happy, and hopeful about the future. We are confident. In 1999, we believed in one thing: Knowing our target customers’ needs, serving them in the best way possible, and making them happy. We have been successful in this and our strategy is already being applied by several other companies, such as 37Signals, Campaign Monitor, Litmus, Mailchimp and thousands of others.
We are a small giant serving ten thousands easily. It’s only 10 of us, spread around four countries in three continents. We love what we do and we are passionate about our work. We are proud of how hard we work and the way we conduct business. We are proud of what we have achieved and look forward to come up with new solutions, and grow for the better in the future.
We would like take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported us in our journey. We would like to start by thanking all of our competitors and companies in the industry. We provide inspiration for each other and move the industry one step forward every single day. We would like to especially thank 37Signals for their wonderful philosophy and passion, to CampaignMonitor and Mailchimp for their impressive e-mail marketing services, Litmus for their amazing email testing service. We would also like to thank other thousands of other hard-working, small but big ISVs, SaaS companies, groups, entreprenours which contribute to our industry.
When we look back to those 11 years and think about the most important factor in our success, we know that it is our customers. Without our customers, their support and feedback, we would not be able to achieve our goals and build better email delivery solutions. As the Octeth team, we thank to all our customers and friends who supported us.
Octeth Email Delivery Solutions Company will continue to provide you innovative, easy-to-use solutions in 2011. We wish you the best in 2011.
NOTE: We are hiring! Do you know someone who might be interested in being a part of our team? We have open job positions