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Today's a big day for us here at Outright.com - its our one year anniversary. One year ago today, we opened our application for public use.
A lot has happened in the last year. When we started, it was just Ben and I working from our homes. We now have a whole team working out of the second floor of a historic building in downtown Campbell, California. Here's a quick look back over the past year:
- July 9, 2008: We officially opened Outright (called GoBootstrap.com at the time) for public use. Check out our initial coverage in VentureBeat. In addition to helping people with the basic financial record keeping for their small business, we also introduced a feature to help people remember and calculate how much to pay for estimated taxes. This was something that had been largely ignored by most "accounting" programs.
- October 1st, 2008: we launched our first partnership and integration with Freshbooks to allow customers do automatically import invoice and payment information from FreshBooks into Outright. This was an important milestone, as it started to show the promise of what can happen when online software applications take an open approach and play nicely together.
- November 26, 2008: We received an initial investment from top early stage venture firms First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures and SoftTech VC. At a time when the capital markets were imploding, this was a tremendous vote of confidence for what we have been trying to build.
- December 1, 2008: Ben and Kevin moved into a small office a block off the main drag in downtown Campbell. Outright.com worldwide corporate headquarters #1 is born.
- February 1, 2009: Will Chow joined us as a full time developer and first non-founding employee, helping to shape our early corporate culture.
- February 9, 2009: GoBootstrap.com was officially rebranded as Outright.com and the completion of our full $2MM round of financing is announced.
- February 18, 2009: Outright.com and Shoeboxed.com announced an integration partnership to automatically turn scanned receipts from Shoeboxed into business deductions within Outright.
- April 22, 2009: Paul O'Brien joined as Outright.com's VP of Marketing and increases our marketing skill set thousands of percentage points.
- May 11, 2009: Accountants and bookkeepers were able to access client accounts within Outright.com
- May 18, 2009: Outright.com moved to our new offices at 393 E. Campbell Ave in downtown Campbell, CA. There is much rejoicing.
- May 18, 2009: Bernd Ustorf joined us a full time developer and promptly moves from Walnut Creek down to Los Gatos, right next to the greatest family-friendly park around.
- July 9, 2009: Outright.com, formerly known as GoBootstrap.com, turns 1 year old
We've learned a lot over the last year - we've had some successes, made lots of mistakes, met tons of other entrepreneurs and gotten to know many of our customers. We'll be doing more of the same, with hopefully fewer mistakes, more successes and many, many more customers.
