Kentico six years later: growing and moving
This month, Kentico celebrates 6 years on the market. Even after 6 years, we still keep growing which allowed us to enhance our team with 20 new employees and move to a new office. Although I'm mostly thinking about future, it's a good opportunity to stop for a while and look back.
When I started Kentico in 2004, I wanted to create a great
CMS for ASP.NET. I didn't have any particular plan of how many employees we should have or how the company will grow. I didn't have any exit strategy and I don't have any even now. I just knew that if I want to build the CMS I have to start somewhere and release something before I run out of money. So I rented a small room in the office of my friend's company and started developing Kentico CMS 1.0.
When talking about the start - I'm often asked about what the word "Kentico" means. In fact, I chose a random word that wasn't used by anybody to avoid any conflicts. The name as well as our original logo was mainly inspired by brands Kenvelo and Texaco. I shouldn't say that, but I created the logo using Visio during one night - that's what you do if you bootstrap your business ;)
12 months later, Kentico was already profitable and had a stable stream of revenue, so I hired three developers.
Martin Hejtmanek, our current CTO, was one of them (yes, Martin will celebrate 5 years in Kentico in July:). And we moved to our first office - a small house where I also lived with my wife, so we had one room and the other two rooms were offices.
Two years later, the house was not big enough, so we moved to our first real office in a former factory building. At this time, we also created a dedicated support team (in fact, Martin Dobsicek was our first support engineer) and hired the first sales person (Wayne Jasek).
This spring, we hired 20 new employees and we had to move again. Last month, we moved to the new office that finally has all the infrastructure we need. You can find a few photos below.
So now we have 62 employees. Kentico CMS is developed by 30+ people who work on versions 5.5 R2 and 6.0 right now. I'm sure you will see the impact of this growth on the functionality of version 6.0 that will bring lots of improvements and new features.
During all those years, we never took a loan or venture capital. We reinvested the revenues into improving the product, support, marketing and creating more solid company processes. It allowed us to grow from the bootstrapped business into a fully professional company with customers in 84 countries.
At the end of this post, I'd like to say thank you to all of our clients and partners who took this road with us and gave us their trust. We look forward to helping you create more great websites!