Tweaky breaks its vow of sobriety: From zero to profitable in 9 months | The Tweaky Blog

Starting at zero.

Nine months ago we launched Tweaky.com as the marketplace that helps anyone improve their website – from $39 per tweak.

It’s hard for small businesses to get small changes made to their website. Agencies and freelancers typically don’t want to touch jobs less than $500-$1000. The overheads are too high. I know because I ran an agency for a couple of years.

We set out to build a marketplace where projects could be done on a per tweak basis from $39.

We took a vow of sobriety

At the time we took a vow of sobriety, agreeing as a team that we wouldn’t have a drink of alcohol until we reached profitability.

The basic idea was to give us ultimate focus on the task at hand, to remove all distractions and to bind the team together. You can read the post I wrote about it at the time here.

In all honesty at the time we thought this was something we could do in less than 3 months which sounded like a small price to pay for increased focus and mental acuity.

One of our early supporters and investors Leni Mayo offered to fund the party if we hit our 3 month goal. I’m still not sure if he was being generous and supportive or sceptical of the likelihood of us achieving the goal in such a short period of time.

We’re profitable – bring on the beer!

Nine months later we’ve come a long way. Not only are we running a profitable business but we’ve grown to a team of 10 people, we’ve helped 1500 small businesses improve their websites with everything from minor layout tweaks to setting up their Google Adwords and we’re growing at a steady 27% month on month.

We’re also a lot trimmer than we started out, a lot fitter.

But after 9 months without a drop of alcohol we’re also ready to crack a beer and celebrate what we’ve achieved.

What’s next?

A profitable startup is a great thing, the biggest killer for any company is running out of cash. Now that we’ve achieved it we want to grow as fast as possible so we’re unlikely to stay profitable for very long, ramping up our growth with extra people and marketing spend to take this thing to the next level.

Profitability was a great goal for us to achieve because it forced us to focus on delivering a great experience for our early customers. It also forced us to think about our revenue a lot earlier than if we had been focusing on scale from day 1, which I think has mostly turned out for the best. Now that we’ve achieved it we’re going to be reinvesting every dollar earned into the business.

Thanks to our investors Mark and Leni for supporting our vision for a better services marketplace; thanks to our friends and family for putting up with the crazy hours; thanks to our customers for trusting us to make your business better.

- Ned

P.S. If you’re in Melbourne and want to join us to celebrate this milestone we’re going to have a few drinks at Naked for Satan rooftop in Fitzroy from 6pm.

Photos:

• Dan Wearne (Designer of Tweaky.com v.1.0), PJ Murray (co-founder) and Ned Dwyer
• Early whiteboard session at Inspire9
• PJ signing incorporation documents.
• Ivan Lim setting up in the new office.