Adam and me back in 2003 ready to conquer the world
We were 10 years old yesterday – if you base our birthday on Companies House’ record of when Esendex Limited was founded.
Like many boot-strapped businesses the first few years were extremely tight and there are lots of stories from those early years that will be kept back for the 10th birthday party next month – and a few more that won’t even be aired then !
We’ve come a long long way from a few mobile phones ziplocked to the back of a PC in Adam’s attic. Our first job was to send out triathlon results by SMS (something that’s now become a standard thanks to our bright idea) but other early projects included an “order your bagel by SMS” messaging service – which hasn’t caught on!
In that first year we had a few months when we failed to raise an invoice. But we’re still working with many of our early customers and we now have over 11,000 customers worldwide being looked after by 45 people in offices in the UK, Australia, Spain and the USA and have direct connections to mobile phone networks around the world.
We’ve seen a similar scale of change within the SMS messaging market itself. When we started the biggest objection was that “SMS was surely just for kids”. Of course SMS is now probably the most ubiquitous worldwide communication channel. And whilst the crazy-frog probably hurt the whole industry, today business SMS has come of age: recent analysis by Juniper suggests that A2P SMS revenues of $70.1 billion will exceed peer to peer traffic by 2016.
Esendex has never been stronger: profitable businesses in 5 countries, traction in the States having launched last year and a bunch of new projects. It’s difficult to predict what we’ll look like on our 21st birthday but if we change just half as much as we have over the last 10 years it’s going to be a very exciting time.
