2015 was another great year at Chargify, and we could not have done it without our awesome customers and amazing team members.
Across the board, we grew the number of subscriptions we manage, the size of our team, the features available to you, our support satisfaction rating, and our revenue – all while having our third consecutive year of profitability. We also saw a very high level of trust from large enterprises, which always take a deep look at any new vendor before saying “yes.” We got some very substantial “yeses.”
Thank you!
When reflecting back on 2015, a theme that emerged is: Focus & Maturity
To help realize our potential, we hired a business coach – Kris Kaplan. Kris helped us order our strengths (and weaknesses), values, and purpose. With these as our guide, the path forward for us is clearer than ever, and we think this clarity will show in the product and merchant experience.
Our subscription billing platform has the most depth and stability on the market, but sometimes that depth is overwhelming for new merchants. Thus:
- We increased focus on design, usability, and the on-boarding experience. While our initial user interface update in 2015 was just the tip of the iceberg, we are on a path to make Chargify more modern, intuitive, and user friendly.
- We concentrated resources in a “Customer Success” team to help our merchants make the best use of Chargify. We’re currently investigating success metrics in our efforts to proactively engage with customers and help them succeed in 2016.
- Towards the end of 2015, we ramped up content geared towards helping subscription businesses succeed. If you haven’t seen some of our recent blog posts, we encourage you to browse our blog (and share tips you find useful).
You may know that we’re a fully remote team spread across the USA, plus three team members in Canada, Brazil, and Australia. In 2015, we removed the last two remnants of having any kind of “office” – our two “lairs” (apartments in California & North Carolina that we once used as work/meeting places). Working remotely has some challenges, and our team came together (remotely, of course), to compile a blog post that may prove helpful to you: “Remote work tips from Chargify’s distributed team.” We still hold annual company retreats and we look forward to the next one in Austin this coming April. If you’ll be in Austin in April, we’d love to meet up!
While we worked on our “focus & clarity” at the company level, our product team was busy, ending the year with 1,972 commits and 329 deployments. That’s a deploy almost every day! Here are some of the feature releases from 2015:
- Xero accounting integration released
- Mailchimp integration released
- First release of our refer-a-friend feature to help customers grow referrals. And then we made it better.
- Metered and quantity-based components now allow fractional quantities
- ChartMogul integration released for advanced analytics for your Chargify account
- “Delayed Cancel” function added to consumer self-service Billing Portal
- Show custom fields on statements & invoices
- Two big invoicing improvements so you get paid now, not later, for mid-cycle changes
- Customers can now pay invoices online with a credit card
- Updated WordPress plugin released
- Added multi-site support to Xero accounting integration
- Username/password logins added to consumer self-service Billing Portal
- Chargify gets a fresh coat of paint (UI update)
Looking back at 2015, we had a lot of fun together:
Dev team meetup at ElixirConf 2015 in Austin
Our own Wendy Smoak speaking at ElixirConf 2015
Monthly “all hands” meeting with a remote team
Team meetup in Savannah – Nathan couldn’t make the trip so we skyped him in
Scavenger hunt during Savanah meetup
Suzanne, Director of Customer Success, training our Tier 1 support team
Organizing quarterly priorities with our business coach in Key West
Opening conspiracy Santa gifts via Zoom
As 2016 is upon us, we already see a theme emerging: Convergence & Clarity
In the new year, we will bring new ease-of-use to our already powerful platform. Our app holds amazing data about your subscriber base, so we’ll help open up insights to that data so you can make better decisions about your business. 2016 is already off to a great start with the beta release of Sales Reports – learn more and request early access. We’ll narrow our focus to make sure we continue to provide the best tool to run recurring billing for Software-as-a-Service businesses.
Happy New Year!
– Lance Walley, Co-Founder & CEO, Chargify
The post Thanks for making 2015 a great year at Chargify! appeared first on Chargify Blog.
