Central Desktop CEO 2009 Retrospective

It's the second week of 2010 and I'm still buzzing from last year.  Not from the alcohol (anymore) but from the stellar fourth quarter our company just had!  We finished the quarter strong and I'm proud to state that year-over-year, our total company annual sales grew by more than 44% during "The Great Recession of 2009"  (read more in our press release here). 

Since its common for start-ups to state hypergrowth statistics I'll share some of our own stats as well:

• Year over Year Enterprise Sales Bookings increased by more than 1500%
• Q4 2009 Enterprise Sales compared to Q4 2008 Enterprise Sales increased by more than 600%
• Q4 2009 Total Enterprise Customer Counts increased by more than 1000% compared to Q4 2008

In short, our mid-market ("Enterprise") business grew dramatically in 2009 and we foresee even more percentage growth in 2010 in this sector - transitioning firmly from an early stage startup into an established mid-stage startup company.

As a visual retrospective, I also wanted to share a trend graph of the last two years that captures our top line sales growth (gross bookings). 


This graph shows the upward trend that our company has realized for the past 8 quarters (as a private company, we do not release our revenue numbers).  As you can see, Q1 of 2009 yielded a dip that coincides perfectly with the first quarter following the financial crisis.  Looking back at Q1 2009, growth was inhibited by a slowdown in the number of new customers signing up with Central Desktop.  

I recall speaking with many of our customers and prospects during that first quarter and hearing their anxiety about the economy and the future.  Small business customers were fully extended with regards to their credit lines and said that many of their larger vendors and customers were holding out on payments terms for months - which severely impacted their cash flow and ability to stay alive.  As a result, some customers downgraded or disappeared altogether.

Fortunately, the nature of our economical model (SaaS subscriptions) significantly reduced the impact that canceling customers had on our business.  No single customer represents more than 1% of our total annual revenues, yielding a far more resilient business model than traditional enterprise software.

(There is also some seasonality that the graph implies, as Q4 has historically always been our best quarter and there is a small deflationary period that occurs after Q4.  I did look back at prior years to look for other trends, but did not notice a pull back in prior Q1s like what occurred Q1 of 2009....clearly pointing to the impact of the financial crisis.)  

Let's be honest - 2009 was a tough year for everyone, including for us at Central Desktop.  We've had to battle the economy, we teethed through company growing pains (we've grown from a team of 6 to 30+ over the last 18 months) and fought to remain competitive in a very competitive marketplace.  

But, in spite of the economic headwinds we grew and below is a short list of key milestones and company events that we achieved during 2009:

- 50%+ Employee Growth
- Hundreds of New Enterprise customers
- Industry recognition as a leading mid-market SaaS collaboration platform by both Forrester Research and Gartner
- Central Desktop named one of "2010's 10 Companies to Watch"
- Named one of InformationWeek's Startup 50
- Released the Outlook Plugin to put us closer to par with SharePoint (Central Desktop as a *real* SharePoint Alternative)
- Status Updates / Twitter-like functionality built into Central Desktop
- 3rd party iPhone App available
- Extended and improved global performance via Akamai's Content Delivery Network
- Partnered with Zoho for their online spreadsheet technology
- WebDAV went into beta
- Central Desktop availability in the Intuit App Center
- Total System Availability for the YEAR (Annual Uptime) greater than 99.9+%
(This is something we'll expand on in a later blog post)

Overall, 2009 was a good year.  Sure, our goals were higher and our expectations are always that we should have done more - but we should also be proud of what we accomplished during "The Great Recession of 2009."

Ultimately, our success is completely driven by you, our customers.  I want to thank you for your loyalty to Central Desktop.  Thank you for choosing Central Desktop and thank you for staying with us during 2009.  2010 is full of promise as we continue to drive hard at providing the best collaboration software solution on the market.