Kentico CMS for ASP.NET 6 years later: grow and move

Foreword

For a long time I thought about which blog to publish - Startups or Office, but the article, as if not entirely about the office, and at the same time, is not exactly a start-up to the current moment. In general, one of the short success stories of CMS on the .Net platform :)

Kentico CMS is the most successful commercial CMS platform for ASP.NET today. Current version 5.5. Used in 84 countries of the world, and has tens of thousands of sites built on it. There is also a free version. This is a brief history of the development of this platform, which was actually born in the garage.
This is a translation of the article by the CEO and founder of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET - Petr Pallas. ( original )

This month Kentico CMS celebrates 6 years on the market. Even after 6 years, we still continue to grow, which gives us a chance to increase our team by 20 new developers and move to a new office. Although I often think about the future, this is a good opportunity to stop and look back.

When I started Kentico in 2004, I wanted to create a good ASP.NET CMS. I had no definite plans about how many developers we should have, and how our company will grow. I didn’t have any clear development strategies, and I don’t have them now. I just knew that if I wanted to make a CMS, I had to start and release something before I ran out of money. So I rented a small room in the office of my friends, and began to develop Kentico CMS 1.0

Speaking about how I started, I am often asked what the word "Kentico" means. In fact, I simply chose a random word that was not used by anyone to avoid possible conflicts. The name of our company, as well as the logo, became the product of inspiration for Kenvelo and Texaco brands. I shouldn't say this, but I made a logo using Visio overnight — that's what you do when you start your business;)
A year later, Kentico was already steadily making a profit, and I hired three developers. Martin Hejtmanek, our current CTO, was one of them. And yes, we moved to our first office - a small house where I lived with my wife at the same time, that is, we had one room, and the other two were an office.

Two years later, our house became small for us, and we moved to our first real office in the territory of the former factory. At the same time, we also created a team of user support, and hired the first employee responsible for sales.

')
This spring we hired 20 new employees and moved again, this time we finally found an office with all the infrastructure we need.

So we now have 62 employees. Kentico CMS is developed by 30 developers who are currently working on version 5.5 R2 and 6.0. I am sure you will see the results of such growth of the company in the functionality of the next version.
During all these years, we never took out a loan and did not attract venture capital. We invested our income in product improvement, support, marketing, and workflow organization in the company. This gave us the opportunity to grow from a "garage" into a large company whose products are used in 84 countries of the world.
At the end of the post, I want to say thanks to all our customers and partners who trusted us and went along this road with us. We hope to help you continue to create great sites.