Just a few more days and Comrads will be 10 years old on November 01, 2021! In this blog, co-owner Sebastiaan de Ruiter looks back on the ten - and more - eventful years in which he and his partner Erwin Klinkenberg made Comrads into the successful and leading marketing software company it is today.

Roots

Comrads' roots go back to before the turn of the millennium. The creative DTP agency Comrads from Emmeloord started around that time with a first generation of online Digital Asset Management and Web-to-Print solutions. In 2004 I was brought into Comrads as Manager Business Development. A great challenge, because if you want to sell software instead of graphic services, that requires a totally new market approach. Back then I had the opportunity to implement the first image banks at ING - which was then Postbank -, Atos - then still known as Atos Origin and the Hypotheekshop.

Survival versus growth

In 2010, it started to itch. I was then managing director at Comrads and saw that we could better position ourselves independently as a marketing software developer. It was wonderful that we had been able to develop under the wings of Comrads' graphic parent company, but the survival mode of the old world and the growth opportunities offered by the new world began to get in the way of each other. I involved Erwin in my plans and together we first checked with our customers to see what they thought about an acquisition. Of course, corporatization could also be a reason to cancel the contract. Fortunately, all the clients and our entire team were behind us and after a few more unexpected hurdles and challenges, the takeover was a fact on November 1, 2011.

Boss in your own belly

To better connect with the job market, we moved from Purmerend to Amsterdam-Noord, on the "other" side of the IJ River. In the early years still an abandoned part of Amsterdam, but soon proclaimed to be one of the coolest places of our capital. Full of pride, we started investing from day one to serve our existing customers like never before. So within a few years we were able to say goodbye to our investors and were boss in our own - digital - belly. If in the first years we still made a lot of customizations, we soon started bringing together the best of what we had to offer in a beautiful SaaS solution. This allowed us to sell our software as a subscription, although we have always found it important to be able to apply customer-specific configurations.

Solid base

By now we can proudly look back on ten special years. We have built a great club that is close to the customer. We hear the same from our customers. We have a longstanding relationship with companies like Intratuin, Grolsch and stichd®, but also with our clients like ING, Atos and Nova College who supported us unconditionally during our takeover ten years ago! They are not only happy with our listening ear and pragmatism, but also like the fact that we dare to challenge them when necessary. Of course, not everything was hosanna in recent years. In 2017/2018 we made a major investment, which ended in failure in 2019. Corona came right after that, so believe me when I say we did have some sleepless nights. Fortunately, our foundation is so solid that we recovered from that as well. In fact, in 2021 we welcomed almost double the usual number of customers.

Time for a party

Now is the time for celebration. We are an organization that values relationships with its employees, and we are happy that soon we will all get to go out and enjoy ourselves again. In mid-November we are going to celebrate our anniversary with our team in Berlin. We are looking forward to raising a good Berlin beer to the past ten years and looking ahead to the next ten.

Will you celebrate with us?

Will you celebrate our party with us? We would like to invite you to join us for a nice demo or a good conversation. A tasty treat will be waiting for you starting November 1. We look forward to your message!