At the end of 2017, it seemed hard to imagine that 2018 would be bigger and better, and yet it was. It has undoubtedly been our biggest year so far. We exhibited in several new markets, we added 4 new people to our team, our customer base grew once again, and most excitingly, we added some fantastic new products updates to SuiteFiles.
Capital Raise
2018 was the first year that we were open to the public for investment. For the past 6.5 years our team has worked incredibly hard to build a sustainable business. Working with Snowball, we raised $1 million in capital to help us accelerate this growth and to help us expand onto the world stage.
Asia and Beyond
SuiteFiles did more travel this year than ever before, exploring several new markets and continuing to invest in existing ones. We travelled to Singapore for the first time and explored what accountants in Asia need from their document management and started to really understand their cloud journey.
We also travelled to Australia and The UK more than ever before, and this trend will no doubt continue into the new year.
Customer Growth
This year we increased our revenue by 60% and achieved a major milestone that suggests we truly have product market fit. We also saw our customer base grow by 55% and our number of users increase by 50%.
We can’t wait to see what happens as we increase our sales and marketing activity in 2019.
New Product Updates
This year we made a number of releases for new and existing apps:
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SuiteFiles Web – We updated our templates to make them even better. We improved template prepopulation, allowing users to utilise values configured for the business across all their templates, and confirm field values prior to prepopulation. We also created template categories to improve organisation. In the past week we also rolled out updates to search, making it faster and more accurate.
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Chrome Extension – We launched our Chrome Extension which created a smoother integration with Xero Practice Manager and allowed for integration into Gmail and for users to save any web page straight into SuiteFiles.
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Outlook for Web App – We launched our Outlook for web app, meaning anyone who users Outlook in their browser, or who works on a Mac, can use our email features!
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New Design – We redesigned several of our apps, improving the user interface and user experience.
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Multi-Factor Authentication – SuiteFiles now supports Multi-Factor Authentication, so users can choose the level of security that best suits them.
New Team Members
We’ve added 4 new team members across the year. We’ve grown our customer team with the addition of Roshni, who’s been focused on all thing’s customer success. Amber joined us all the way from the UK as our designer. We added Dragos to our Development team and Molly joined us as our new Marketing Manager. Also, Jack graduated from university and joined us full time after working part time for the past two years. Our team has almost doubled in size this year, and it’s been great to see them all start to really have an impact on our product and road map.
Key Challenges
Working on the Microsoft Office 365 platform provides massive upsides in terms of scalability and security for all our customers. It’s also something that we can’t control so when issues happen on that platform we are at Microsoft’s mercy regarding a fix. We’re working on strategies to minimise the impacts of this.
Looking to 2019
2019 is already shaping up to be another big year for SuiteFiles. We start the year by joining the 2019 Xero Roadshow is almost every location. We also have trips to the UK and for the first time, the US in the front half of the year. We have 2 big product launches planned and our interface is getting a face lift courtesy of our design team. We’re looking forward to rolling up our sleeves and continuing to build this product, and to tell the world about it. We couldn’t have gotten to this point without the ongoing support of our partners, customers and now investors.
From myself and the SuiteFiles team, thank you for making 2018 our biggest yet. Enjoy the break with family and friends, and we’ll see you for the start of 2019!
