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DOMO

DOMO – Wise Usage And Management Of Data On Your Fingertips.

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Today the world is all about data and managing the data. Taking about days earlier than twenty years, humans managed all the business data, and it was quite a hectic job. Slowly, with the more installation of the computers and increased availability of the internet, this job was made easy. And today, we have even more resources for this data management. Thanks to the cloud technology and various platforms, which are helpful in easy access and managing of data not only for the common people but also for the big business organizations as well as governments. American company Domo is also one of those leading companies which have been working on developing platforms for businesses so that they can have easy access to their data and combine and use it in real-time for their everyday business activities.

About Domo

Domo is only a decade old company, founded in October 2010. The founder of the company is Josh James, and the company headquarters have been established in American Fork, Utah, US. Being a cloud technology company, Domo offers its services worldwide and has a long list of customers, including Unilever, eBay, Cisco, NBA, Danaher, Emerson, Master Card, etc. Domo is a publically traded company and trades on NASDAQ as DOMO. The company provides products for business intelligence tools and data visualization. Domo Business Cloud is its flagship product, a low-code data app platform for businesses that allows them to combine their data and use it as they require. Talking about the revenues, as per the 2021 records, the company made $210.2 Million for the same financial year. The company is home to more than 800 employees.

DOMO
Image source: brightspotcdn.com

The Founding

Domo has a similar founding story to many of the other technology companies. Josh James, the founder of Domo, is a veteran and had already founded three companies before Domo. One of those companies was even acquired by Adobe in 2006, and James continued to work in his company under Adobe’s name. While working at Adobe, he continued to conceptulising and raising money for new business, and in 2010 left Adobe.

James established Shacho Inc. in October 2010. Just in two months, the newly founded company acquired Lindon-based Corda Technologies, and Shacho was renamed Domo in December 2010.

As soon as Domo was established, it started to work on data connectivity and analytics for business. The company built a platform, which offered data integration, BI & Analytics as well as App Framework in one place, attracting multiple clients from almost every industry. The platform allows the users to manage all their data placed on different websites and apps. There is a dashboard available on the platform such that you can access Amazon Redshift, Oracle, Salesforce, Google Analytics, etc., from that single dashboard.

Trusting the capabilities of Josh James, investors like Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Ron Conway came forward for the initial investments in Domo. In 2011, the company received $20 million from Institutional Venture Partners. The company held a Series B round of investment and raised $60 million. The next year as Series C funding was hosted, and the company raised $125 million, followed by raising another $200 million in Series D financing with a $2 billion valuation in 2015. In June 2018, Domo went public on NASDAQ Global Exchange.

The CEO at Domo

John Mellor is the CEO and Director at Domo. He is a SaaS veteran and has over 25 years of experience working in the technology industry.

Mellor is a mechanical engineering graduate and has an MBA in marketing and finance from Brigham Young University. He has co-founded ViewPoint and led the company as the VP of marketing and business development. Mellor has also worked at companies like RichFX and was working at Omniture as the EVP of strategy and business development when Adobe acquired the company. With the acquisition, Mellor also joined Adobe and worked in various leading positions at the company. In 2019, He left Adobe and joined Domo to become the Chief Strategy Officer and was promoted to be the Chief Executive Officer and the Director at Domo in 2022.

basecamp

Basecamp, A Company that Created Mystique in the World of Web Applications

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Every business, rising from a small start-up to a flourishing company needs smart management tools to become more efficient and work in a proper hassle-free manner. The main problem that arises when you don’t have appropriate tools for managing a project is the communication gap between the company and the clients. And, this is the biggest threat to any existing business which can lead to extreme loss and even dissolution.

But, how about a web application where everything from creating your schedules to managing multiple chat heads of clients can be carried out? Basecamp, a private company, is one such platform that provides web applications where every necessary tool is combined together in a single software to make your work much easier and better.

Though Basecamp released its first web application publicly in 2004, the history of the company dates back to 1999, when a company named 37signals was formed with just four team members.

basecamp
Image Source: basecamp.com

37signals

In 1999, Jason Fried, Carlos Segura and Ernest Kim founded 37signals in Chicago, Illinois, as a web designing firm. The main motive of the company was to help other business companies improve their websites and make it less complex.

Initially, the company was doing quite well, but as the number of clients started increasing, the founders found themselves in a much-disorganized situation and started losing the demand for its service. As the trend of business communication follows, 37signals also marketed and managed projects through emails. And, this is what needed a very significant change to bring them out of the dealing topsy-turvy. 37signals realized that the method of getting updates via emails isn’t efficient enough, and it hinders proper communication. So, they planned to create a project management tool, which will have features like tracking progress, alerting deadlines, bookmarking important messages, managing emails, receiving notifications and much more. Basically, they started working on building up a web application with an arsenal of perks for every businessman around the globe.

After building the application, they started implementing the features, while interacting with their clients. This way, they received feedbacks of the tool internally, which was exceptionally positive. Realizing the demand for it, the company finally released Basecamp publicly in 4th February 2004. This was the first step towards something way bigger and over the years updated version of Basecamp like Basecamp Next and Basecamp 3 were also released.

The Growth

After the release of the application, they offered everyone one free project, in order to give clients the experience of management. And in case they still wanted to continue, they were asked to sign up for any one of the three paid packages.

Their first target was to make $5000 a month, which means $60,000 annual revenue. But they achieved it within six weeks only. This triggered their determination, and they realised that they are on the right path. Since the business was increasing rapidly after the launch of Basecamp, 37signals wanted to shift their field of interest from web designing to building web applications. So, they stopped taking any more clients for web designing and fully focused on modifying Basecamp. Today, Basecamp is used by the majority of firms and is the best project management tool across the world.

The tool became so popular that everyone starting from the business firms, software developers, educational institutions, and even, the non-profit organizations used this application to make their projects better. In 2014, the company was to Basecamp, after the software package (flagship product) Basecamp.

In 2004, David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at Basecamp, created Ruby on Rails, a free web application framework which was later released as open source.

In 2015, Basecamp 3 was released which the founders claim to be the best ever version of Basecamp with maximum modification and features.

When Basecamp was released in 2004, only 45 clients signed up for it. But the numbers started increasing so gigantically that by the next ten years 1,544,456 clients signed up, and, the number has almost doubled by now.

The Success

Basecamp and Ruby on Rails are two of the most successful products of 37signals (now Basecamp). Most popular sites like Twitter and GitHub use the Ruby on Rails framework.

Today, Basecamp has around 54 employees dealing with a diverse population working for the same goal that is creating better projects. Several books have also been published by this team like Zero to One and Rework.