TraceWorks is getting bigger. Many new partners and customers come aboard every month. Our average growth rate is around +50% aiming for 100% next year. We’re very happy about that because it allows us to invest in more intellectual capital. So today, we’re about 30 happy super talents (gaining 1 every month, I think).

Many of our new super talents often ask for a little history lecture: So how did you guys do this? You’ve got rich parents, right?

So here goes a brief walk down memory lane. Let’s call it “the making of a fast growing, still pretty small yet very beautiful software company”. Short, precise - I love it.

Well, we started the company back in 2002 – just 4 guys in an apartment with no money, lots of ideas, and lots of energy. All four of us invested 80-hour workweeks in creating an awesome software boutique. Sure, we worked incredibly hard … but it never really felt that hard, as I recall it (Advice no. 1: work hard).

The guys were:

Anders and myself as Co-CEOs.
Jesper mastering all UX / UI related stuff.
Jimmi working technical miracles.

We definitely didn’t want to create an invoice-by-the-hour consultancy! It’s simply too difficult to scale, we thought (ironically, today we’re building a lot of “professional services” supporting our software offering). It was a very conscious decision to build a business model that would “generate revenue and grow while we’re sleeping” (Advice no. 2: scalability is key).

Regarding sleep, we didn’t sleep much. Our purpose from day 1 was to build-up an international company. International back then meant trying to support maybe 10+ different time zones with just 4 people.

I remember Anders and myself drinking beers at a local bar just around the corner from the apartment. / office. Around 2am Anders had to split because he had a conference call with some guys from the US. 3am Anders joined the party again for more beers. That’s just how we did it. (Advice no. 3: be realistic and keep focus) (Advice no. 4: be crazy and try everything).

One of our biggest concerns were “appearing too small” and we tried hard to make TraceWorks appear BIG - thinking,”big is good”. As well-disciplined new media folks we of course now know that “small is the new big” (Advice no. 5: stay small-at-heart when growing bigger).

Our Kodak moments from the early years would probably include legendary calls from companies like Omniture and Yahoo (both awesome companies by the way – but nevertheless) asking us questions ranging from ”how do you know about which search terms people use?” to “what’s a conversion?”. That’s a little funny - somehow.

So TraceWorks gradually got older and after a year and a half we decided not only to focus on search marketing but to support more marketing channels. That decision was a big success and our company quickly grew to 8 or 9 or 10 people – all getting paid a (ridiculously low) salary (greatly subsidized through government funds). (Advice no. 6: only hire passionate super talents - be very thorough)

Time passed. We moved to new offices, hired a few more people, got catering, new computers, and we just loved Rackspace. Everything was dandy.

But then things got complicated. We saw inferior technology vendors move faster, we experienced limitations with StatLynx (our old product), due to market conditions it was increasingly difficult to find passionate super talents, and we were unhappy with our board (so we fired them). We still had OK growth rates but we weren’t happy because we could do 10x better “if just …”

We decided to do something about it investing all we owned (talent and money) in developing Headlight. After 8-10 months we realized that we didn’t have the muscle to design and develop Headlight just as we wanted it. Ambition is something we never lacked (and will never lack).

We had to do something to speed-up productivity and increase quality - so we partnered-up with Nordic Ventures Partners. They took one look at Headlight and more or less asked “kids, where do we sign!?”

With money in the bank we hired 15 super talents including our CEO, Christian Dam and our CTO, Mads Fink-Jensen. We became more focused and more responsible … and we’re certainly beginning to see the gains from those investments.

Headlight is now out there. It’s helping a lot of companies doing better marketing gaining better ROI%. But Headlight is very much still in development. The longer-term vision for Headlight is still a corporate hush hush very secret … but I can reveal this much:

In the next 12 months marketers and agencies around the world looking for means to increase productivity, maneuverability, and accountability will gradually see some amazing stuff happening on-top of probably the industry’s most sophisticated plug ‘n’ play marketing data warehouse.

The future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed yet.