Happy Cog
We design, build, and market websites, apps, and products.
Today, we got the chance to talk to Indie Hackers about our road so far. It’s been a long journey with a lot of ups and downs, but we’re proud of how far we’ve come. Check out the interview to learn more about how we got started and what challenges we’ve faced. https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-we-grew-our-high-school-hustle-into-a-lifelong-career-1436fbde90
By 2018 we were clearly outgrowing our office. We looked for new space for a year before finding a beautiful, well-lit space on Madison Ave and 29th Street in Manhattan. We spent late 2018 and early 2019 building it out before moving in around February/March 2019.
Ben had been with us since mid-2012 and quickly rose from being a developer to leading many of our largest client proposals, engagements, and inter-department coordination. In 2019 he became our fourth partner, taking responsibility for many of the operational aspects of keeping clients happy and making sure projects are successful.
Employee counts don't necessarily say a lot by themselves, but this was a cool milestone that just felt like a big step. We had been (and continue to be) profitable every month since founding without ever taking outside debt or investment, so it feels worth mentioning here.
In 2018 we acquired Happy Cog, an extremely well-known digital agency that helped create and popularize modern web standards many years ago. Besides bringing on their team and staff, we also decided to re-brand the whole new combined company as Happy Cog. It's a name and history we felt matched our values and future plans.
In the past, we had focused purely on development (engineering) and online marketing. But our goal was to become a full-service agency, and to do that we needed design in-house. We partnered with Nick, a great designer that we had known for years, and started to build a design, branding, and UX department.
By December 2013, we had 10 employees and were outgrowing our shared coworking space. WeWork wasn't as popular back then and the company we used had limited options for bigger sizes. So we signed a lease for a 3600 square foot space in the Flatiron district of Manhattan.
2013 was our first appearance on the Inc 5000 list of America's fastest growing companies (we were number 728). We've been on the list every year since then, 7 times in a row (as of the time I'm writing this). It immediately earned us more trust with clients and prospects.
Lee had worked with Stuart at a previous job, and the two of them got along extremely well. Stuart saw a lot of potential in our business and we saw a lot of skills Stu would bring to the table around business development and operations. So, he became a third partner.
Andrew had been working with us for many years at this point, as a part-timer helping with a number of client marketing and development tasks. He was becoming more and more involved in different tasks and we all liked working together, so he became our first true full-time employee (after working with us part-time for so long).
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