DashThis is celebrating its 4th anniversary this year!

Wow. DashThis is 4 years old. Even though I always believed in the company mission, it’s been a roller coaster (read: fun!) ride.

Starting a company, especially a one that sells products, is far from being easy. For starters, we must invest weeks, even months, in the development of a product that we don’t know for sure if it’s going to get enough customers to just survive. No need to say that many larger clients are hesitant to do business with a newcomer.

Fortunately, it’s my 6th or 7th company so I’m getting better at this. Above all, we try not to make the same costly mistakes twice!

Of course, there’s a part of luck with such road trip. While I like to say that I make my own luck, there are events that just happen. By luck, I mean some events that have made the company into the success it is today. To name a few, there was this time when someone at Google sent me an email to offer to write a blog post about DashThis…on the official Google Analytics blog! Man, our tool was just off beta, working, but still needing some polishing before getting too much attention. Of course, we couldn’t let that chance go away–so took it. The results of this blog post are still palpable today.

Another piece of luck occurred was when I stumbled upon the LinkedIn profile of someone I knew few years back. “What if I ask her to work with me” I said to myself. I was in urgent need of someone who spoke English very well. Believe it or not, I suck at it big time. She said yes and we are still working together today. You couldn’t imagine all the stuff she’s handled and how important she has been in the success of DashThis (thanks Tracey!).

On top of that, we have been lucky enough to work with awesome partners. I don’t like to use the word “client” to describe them as they are much more than that. Not only did they help us develop this tool but they have also been very forgiving of all the mistakes we have made. What’s more, they have kept us alive. I like to say that I’d get up in the middle of any Sunday night to order them a pizza if they’d need it. Offering awesome and honest customer service to awesome and honest clients (ahem, partners) is a great part of the reason DashThis has been growing steadily since the very beginning. That’s part of the company’s deep core values and I can assure you this is not going to change.

So where are we now? Well, we are not a “startup” anymore. We have a proven business model, a great tool, great clients (double ahem, partners), employees, providers, the list goes on and on. We even don’t do much promotion as new clients are coming on board naturally thanks word of mouth. In other words, we are here to stay!

Our vision for the next four years is to create even tighter relationships with our best clients. We don’t want 100 000 clients as some popular start-ups. We are more like your local friendly restaurant where everybody knows your name and you are guaranteed that you will be treated like a VIP–not someone at a McDonald’s drive-through.

Thank you for having helped us become what we are today. I hope we’ll be up to your expectations for another 4 years!

Stéphane Guérin, founder and CEO