Wow! That was unexpected after my last post talking about my first year, but we found out on Monday that we were acquired. It is the goal of every startup to be acquired so I am proud to have taken part in a huge turn around of a business to have made that possible. We took a startup company that was losing money when I joined to one that was profitable today, and I was able to work with the strongest engineering team that I have ever worked with in my career which was hugely rewarding.

Since last September we were able to grow conversion by 25% and mobile enrollments by 40%. We are doing 100,000 enrollments a year and were able to build out the largest online B2B marketplace out there.

How were we able to do such a remarkable turnaround? We focused on two metrics conversions and revenue, and drove hard to pick off all the low hanging fruit and grow them. We redesigned our checkout funnels which allowed us to drastically lower error rates which allowed us to save 1/3 of all customer enrollments that previously would be lost due to errors and usability issues in the funnels. We streamlined and simplified our mobile experience resulting in many more mobile enrollments.

The other project we did which I was proud of was our 3rd microservice which I alluded to on the blog but hadn’t discussed in any depth. We started it back in January. It is a service to reconcile payments from our suppliers for all of the customer leads that we deliver to them. As far as we know it is the only automated system like this in the industry. WE could consume their reports and find which leads we hadn’t been paid for yet which results in much more revenue for the company. On top of that data we had begun to build a consumer facing dashboard so that they would be able to get status on their current enrollment and previous enrollments as well as renew their plan when their contract was coming to an end.

All in all, what a year. It has been a dramatic year of change and really a great year for me. The question now of course is what next. The acquiring company hasn’t yet made clear their plans for us so I am exploring my options now and figuring out what the next step for me in my journey will be. I am sad that the current role is changing as the team has just been so amazing I had hoped we would spend at least another year really ramping up the revenue before the board sold us just because I think we could have built some really neat things.