The story of Zendesk
I have often wondered if the leaders of a successful company always knew they would make it.
I have also wondered if a seemingly big idea for a business was always obvious or only in retrospect?
This is the story of a fabulously successful business called Zendesk (the original idea for this post came from a blog in Smart Company).
It has gone from a start-up in 2007 in Copenhagen to a company that employs 600 people and in 2013 had revenues of $US 72 million.
Zendeck helps organisations to develop better relations with their customers (over 40,000 of them) through cloud-based service solutions.
It was formed by Mikkel Svane by Alexander Aghassipour and Morten Primdahl.
Think Big — Start Small
The reason I like this story other than the company produces a great product and they have created something from nothing is the honesty of one of their co-founders.
As Mikkel Svane notes when asked about building a business,
As a startup, you take one deal, one objective, at a time.
And when you reach the peak of one mountain, there is another mountain behind it.
But that’s the fun.
And further,
When we started out, it was all about building a great product and getting customers, and it wasn’t much more complicated than that.
I suspect that many great brands and businesses are the same.
Someone has an idea.
And with lots of hard work, some luck and perseverance sometimes it leads to success.
But it also requires lots of small steps and wins along the way.
One small win begets another and so on.
Big thinking has to be realised with small actions.
Sometime all we see is the end result not the hundreds or thousands of small wins it took to get there.