For business owners, the year-end is often more than just symbolic; it’s when we close our books, sum it all up, and see whether we hit our goals or not. Hopefully, we’ve already taken the time to plan for the year ahead, and we’re getting ready (after too much holiday chocolate) to hit the ground running next week.
At Ontraport, things are no different. I look back at the accomplishments of our team in 2015 and am blown away by what we’ve achieved. 2016 will mark our 10 year anniversary and, as most entrepreneurs can imagine, many of those years were spent very conscious of the wide gap between our vision of what was possible and what was actually occurring in our business.
While we’ve been successful now for several years, we always knew we could do better. The product wasn’t quite where we wanted it; the team wasn’t always organized the way we imagined it could be; our brand didn’t always reflect our commitment to quality. These are challenges and projects that, as every business owner knows, one takes on day by day, tweak by tweak, and we make incremental improvements until we find that we can take a step back and look at what we’ve put together and say, “Whoa, guys! Look what we built! This is actually pretty amazing!”
For us, 2015 was that year. Our vision for our product has been pretty clear since 2009, with work starting on our 3.0 platform in early 2011. After years of work, we finally launched it in the middle of 2014, but it took until spring of this year to really come into its own and fulfill our vision… and it certainly has. We now have a scalable, stable, modern platform on which we can quickly and confidently move forward and build the tools that will take Ontraport to the next level.
As if to prove it worked, the team took on Ontraport Pages and Ontraport Forms this year, and (in under five months from start to finish, excluding design time) we launched those tools to clients in July, and to the rest of the world in October, making it dramatically easier for you to publish your vision to the web.
The list of other improvements and additions to the system are too many to mention. While we still have a way to go before we are going to feel like we’ve nailed the ultimate vision, 2015 has brought us dramatically closer… and it feels really good.
We also made huge strides with our team this year. We’ve streamlined our internal operations, grown our management team, moved the entire company to one single project management and internal communication platform, and made huge progress in “systemizing” our operations.
We made our first international step toward Australia, which helped us determine that a permanent office there makes sense. We’re excited to announce that we’re sending a long-term team to set up shop for us in Sydney next month. It’s the big time, people.
As you’ve probably noticed, we made huge strides with our brand as well, launching a new website, blog, and a new overall look at feel across all company communications. We also held our fourth annual user’s conference in Santa Barbara, welcoming hundreds of clients and speakers from around the world. Always an amazing event.
And we had another year of business growth, winning the Inc. 500 for the fourth time, Deloitte’s Tech Fast 500 for the second time, and both Forbes and Outside Magazine’s Best Places to Work awards (for the second year running). Not too shabby.
All in all, it’s been another extraordinary year at Ontraport, really beyond my wildest dreams just a few years ago. As we look toward the future, we are more excited than ever about the opportunity we have to make a difference for our clients and the entrepreneurial community. Honestly, it feels as though we’re on the cusp of taking things to a whole new level, and 2016 feels like it’s going to be our year.
On behalf of the entire team at Ontraport, I want you to know that we are honored to have your trust and support and to have the opportunity to make an impact for your life and your business. We look forward to sharing another year of progress with you.
Happy new year!
