Desygner Hits 22 Million In ’22!
We can all talk about hitting milestones but walking the walk is an entirely different story. At Desygner we are over the moon with how 2022 is about to kick off. Desygner had a goal less than two years ago to double its users to 20 million, and we’ve overtaken that goal which has preceded all our expectations.
And while we’re no experts in numerology, we happen to think this milestone has a nice ring to it…
Founder and CEO Alex Rich speaks on how Desygner has achieved 22 million users globally and what’s installed for the rest of the year.
Desygner reached 10 million users in 2020, hit 20 million users a few months ago, and is now starting 2022 with 22 million users. That’s a considerable increase in a short amount of time – what do you believe is the key reason for these impressive growth numbers?
We initially had a target for organic growth of 30 percent year-on-year, so we’re delighted with how we are progressing now, having doubled our users in less than two years to 22 million users.
We have always had the strategy of attracting a good team and scaling slowly but with the proper process of developing the product for the most benefit to our users. We started with five people in our first years and now have grown to over 70 staff globally in the last few months, and will continue to grow to over 200 hopefully in the next 12 months.
We’ve been fortunate that the nature of how Covid-19 has changed remote working requirements has allowed us to attract good hires. Because we offer flexible working arrangements and industry leading share plans, it has benefited our staff as we’ve scaled. We’re also a leader in the market for our enterprise design tools, which has helped us stand out from any competition.
Tell us a bit more about where Desygner has been the leader in the enterprise arena of design.
We’ve been leaders in the market in many areas and others have tended to follow. Some examples have been that we were the first to market enterprise design tools, the first to market for PDF editing, the first to market for integrated digital brand assets, and the first to market with design apps on both, Android and iOS.
But, of course, being a bootstrapped company can have its negatives in terms of speed to scale and grow a business. Still, we’ve found that it has given us more control over our products and has allowed us the freedom to develop and design products we know our users want and need – especially in the enterprise arena.
What areas of the business are you looking to grow further in ’22?
Our enterprise customers and strategic partnerships are our absolute priority and we are working with them closely on automation, AI, integration, and apps. We are looking at scaling this further by having our first dedicated enterprise sales team come on board in 2022, which we’ve never had.
Desygner enterprise has grown successfully because our clients have come to us organically because they knew we offered a solution for their marketing needs for users across their organisation.
While enterprise remains our key driver, we feed the features and tools developed for enterprise to our small and medium business customers, which then feeds to our pro+ and free users in simpler functionality.
What are the key enterprise clients you’ve worked with over the past 12 months, and what has Desygner learned about working with these impressive companies?
We’ve been so fortunate to have worked with many amazing enterprise businesses. We are unique because we attract clients with extensive teams – some with hundreds of thousands of users within their own organisation, all using the same Desygner white labelled platform across their organisation.
The end-user in their business has a really simplified experience whilst their internal marketing experts get incredible power to brand the business with permissioning, automation, approvals, and AI. Desygner for enterprise has been built for extremely large organisations to have their marketing materials all aligned and automated so that everyone in the company can easily use it with little design experience necessary.
We’ve been working closely with companies like Amazon, Redfin, Keller Williams, Techstars, Inspired Education, and the BBC. They have inspired us to continue pushing boundaries within our design technologies and automated marketing developments. We listen to their needs and deliver design solutions that work for their large-scaled teams. The beauty of it all is that Desygner now uses our own enterprise product to feed to our entire 22 million user base.
What have been the most popular new features your clients used in the past year, and what has been the best feedback?
Our clients love our automation features, integration to data feeds, animation, PDF editing, document management, and Adobe Indesign import features.
The positive feedback we always get is how Desygner can empower their staff to do all the marketing themselves in an on-brand way every time with consistent messaging. This can happen across their entire business whilst allowing localised printing with a few clicks almost everywhere in the world.
It also helps large organisations that may have business partners in other parts of the world that may not have access to the same social media presence as first-world countries with our language localisation solution for major blue chips. Desygner allows these people to create sophisticated and relevant content marketing campaigns locally and the HQ can trust that they’re always on-brand.
Are there any features you can let the Desygner users know about that they can expect for 2022?
The Desygner team of developers are constantly working on the latest advancements in design technology software and some new feature releases we can’t quite reveal just yet. But what we can disclose is that full video editing, smart digital assets, and more workflow tools for enterprise will be added and these will flow down to our free users as well.
We know through global statistics that video marketing is becoming one of the most popular marketing tools. Overall, the number of businesses using video as a marketing tool has increased from 61% to 86% since 2016, and we predict this trend will continue for content marketers.
What are you excited about in the overall tech industry for the year ahead, and how does Desygner fit into that tech ecosystem both in your local HQ area of the Gold Coast and on the global playing field?
It’s no secret that we’re a long way off the overseas players in the overall tech startup playing field. But only five years ago, there weren’t a lot of decent startups in Australia nor VCs, but now there is a lot more scope for startups coming to Australia. Startups realise that the Gold Coast, in particular, is a perfect environment to start a business because it’s an incredible lifestyle choice.
In addition, the landscape of the pandemic has allowed more global companies to set up anywhere in the world. For startups, the Gold Coast offers immersive opportunities with great weather, a coastal lifestyle, a skilled multiculturalism workforce, immigration sponsorship opportunities, and generally a fun and safe environment to work within.
