Why 2015 Is So Exciting for Vero

This graph represents Vero’s MRR growth over the last two years.

I remember the first day an email was sent through the initial (basic, held-together-with-manual-scripts) version of Vero back in June 2012.

Just two and a half (short) years later, here is some of what we’ve achieved:

• 85,000+ monthly blog readers,
• Over 5 billion rows of customer data stored,
• 14,000+ support tickets in the last twelve months,
• Over 420 customers

So far, we’ve done all of this without raising institutional investment.

Instead, we’ve grown by working with you: amazing companies that believe in our vision and the platform we’re building at Vero.

We have already achieved more than the laws of statistics suggested we would, but we are only at the beginning of what we set out to achieve, and have always believed we could.

Once Vero got in the hands of real businesses sending real emails, it didn’t take us long to confirm the opportunity we have to help businesses change the way they communicate with their customers.

We are extremely grateful for the support we have had throughout 2014 from our customers, friends and all of the other great people we’ve worked with online. Your support of Vero means so much to us.

2015 is going to be a fantastic year. Here are the key reasons Vero is on an amazing path.

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We’re here to help you delight your customers

In 2015, we’re focused squarely on Vero the product.

We want to make Vero the most intuitive marketing tool out there and this comes by focusing firmly on UX.

As an online business in 2015, you have access to troves of amazing data that you have never had before and we are here to help you turn this data into email and marketing outputs that help you craft meaningful and delightful customer journeys from first-touch to recommendation.

Some of the amazing businesses we get to call customers.

Working with you to better enable you to create, test and understand the results of the email campaigns that go out to your individual customers on a one-to-one basis is all about crafting amazing customer experiences.

Tracking what your customers do is a complex challenge. We believe we have a great, full-featured product but appreciate that there are still many improvements we can make to help marketers work more efficiently. We’re currently completing significant improvements to both our segment and campaign workflows to help you to send highly-personalised, automated faster and easier than ever before.

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Vero, more than ever, helps you create amazing customer experiences.

We’re building a team that delivers.

From June 2012 until January 2013, Vero was James and I in a room. Vero’s first team member, Damien, came onboard toward the middle of 2013. Since then we’ve grown to a team of eight across the globe.

The Vero team, as it is today. We’re hiring more great people too, so please spread the word if you know any talented engineers or designers.

By the end of 2015 we believe we can reach as many as 15 team members. This is a sign of how quickly Vero is already growing and how ambitious our plans are, particularly as we haven’t taken any institutional funding to date.

We’re not obsessed with bootstrapping and consistently evaluate all our options to ensure we’re building a company that can best help you, our amazing customers, achieve what you need to achieve both today and for the long term. We intend for Vero to be a company that is around for the next 10, 15, 20 years or beyond – we’re not here to bail quickly (plus, we’re all having too much fun!)

We’ve become obsessed with process and with maximising efficiency. I am constantly in awe and admiration of companies like WhatsApp that can process 27 billion messages per day with only 60 employees. This points to the quality of their engineering processes and is something we think about a lot these days at Vero.

There are no prizes for minimising headcount and we have, in the past, perhaps not hired early enough. Our focus is growing out our product and customer success teams and already have a great base to start from in order to ensure your every interaction with Vero is nothing short of amazing!

We celebrated our first team retreat in Malaysia at the end of last year. We were surprised at how motivating this was and how much of a lift it has given the team coming into 2015.

2015 is also an exciting time to create a world-class company culture. Many businesses have gone before Vero and shown what it means to create a team that is fulfilled and happy, whilst creating an amazing business. We believe strongly in this. We all spend so much of our lives at work – so creating an environment where work is fulfilling for all of us is vital to creating the best outcome: if you’re creating something you believe in with people you trust and are concerned for and work with customers you admire and respect, then you’ve got the perfect environment to make work a great place.

We think we got off to a pretty great start in 2014.

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We’re growing quickly, so we can meet scale with your goals

We’ve invested heavily in education over the past two years. Since February 2013 we’ve regularly blogged and shared practical ideas about email marketing.

Our readers are phenomenal and your kind words only seem to get kinder. In 2015 we expect our blog to grow to be five times the size it is today. We know more than ever what works, what hasn’t worked for us and how to optimise to reach our audience.

We have also begun planning and implementing processes so that we can better serve the many large customers that are switching to Vero.

No matter their size, every customer of Vero can get massive value. Having the support structures in place to work with customers that send to tens or hundreds of millions of subscribers is an important shift Vero has already begun to make.

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We’re just getting started

Vero is only just getting started.

We’ve had an awesome two and a half years and 2015 will be even better.

We have our minds firmly focused on our vision and our focus firmly on the present. We’re working to create a world where marketers have tools that let them touch every customer as an individual, even at massive scale.

We’re not going anywhere and I’m excited to grow and share 2015 with you all.