The startup 123hjemmeside, which operates in 24 countries so far under brands such as simplesite.com (US) or 123webseite.de (DE), has shared with them their yearly earnings numbers for 2012, and together with that their ambitious plans to grow even more international.
The company has said that they have started to perfect their user acquisition costs online, being able to accurately forecast new users depending on marketing efforts.
“We stepped up the speed during 2012 and now in 2013 we start to see that the business is growing as expected. Already in 2014 there will be a positive result from the large number of customers that we have seen sign-up in the recent quarters,” says Morten Elk, CEO
The startup got in november 2012 an investment of €1.7M from Kaare Danielsen, founder of the successful jobindex.dk, with the purpose of growing internationally. A plan that has been going very good so far.
“We’ve added six new countries in May and will open three in the coming months, so we are coming up on 24 countries in total. We expect that these new markets increase the growth rate to over 30 percent in the rest of 2013,” says Morten Elk.
The company has released some of their main numbers for 2012 to us, something that is appreciated by us and gives revealing facts about their business. Besides the income and EBIT they also reveal part of their user aquisition cost: Morten says that at the current trend, with their average retention-rate of 3 years of a costumer, their spending on adwords is only one third of the lifetime value per costumer.
The main numbers of 123hjemmeside (global operations) for 2012 where the following:
- Income: € 4.46M (2011: € 3.68M)
- EBIT: € -0.21M (2011: € 0.35M)
- Number of costumers: 59 000
123hjemmeside is currently officially in the following countries:
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, UK, Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Malaysia, Russia, Greece, Portugal, Indonesia, Turkey, USA.
Next in line is Brazil, according to Morten.
Their business modell, of enabling easy to create webpages at low prices, might seem to be in direct competition with free-to-use solutions such as WordPress, but alot of users value the ease of setting thigs up. In this field the marketing budget seems so far to be the main growth factor – something that the team looks to have figured out how to do efficiently. It will definitely be interesting to hear 123hjemmesides numbers for 2013 next year!
Sorry, I stopped at the ridiculous service name… I’m working for a new startup with my founders, check out wesellgoodsecondhandclothing.com 😉
Them having achieved a substantial growth, multi million revenue and being able to scale internationally I would say that their name does not seem to be a problem… Maybe not the most hipster name for a startup ever, but I guess their target audience is not you and me either, but rather somewhat older and not so tech-happy business owners (because we would set up our own wordpress / joomla or similar site). I say it’s better to look at what they do and their performance, then being stuck upon what name they have 🙂
I think Karsten is spot on. It often amazes me how many entrepreneurs that fail to see the size of the market comprised of just regular people – people who are not mirror images of the entrepreneurs themselves, but people who live in the real world and have everyday problems and everyday aspirations. If you serve them well and focus on ease of use and problem-solving, there is a lot of market out there.
Fantastic news, congrats guys!