Hitting your first £1m revenue is a landmark moment in the life of any startup.
Fast-growing SaaS business Shopblocks has just reached the milestone of £1m annual recurring revenue (ARR) four years after being launched by co-founders Kevin Jones and Stewart Reynolds.
The Stockport company produce bespoke ecommerce websites at scale and has enjoyed several months of record growth.
CEO Kevin Jones says the tech firm is already targeting £2.5m turnover for next year on the back of some major enterprise partnerships.
Jones says: “It’s a real landmark to hit £1m ARR for the first time and it’s the result of a lot of hard work. However this is just the start and we’re so excited by what the future has in store.”
The news comes on the back of the company’s recent move into new 6,500 sq ft offices at No 1 St Peter’s Square, Stockport.
Jones said: “Hitting £1m ARR for the first time is the result of the fact that the team now feels fully formed.
“We’ve got three main teams in the business – sales, operations and development. The sales team is firing on all cylinders. We had quite a few new hires at the middle and end of last year and, as with any sales team, it can take a few months to ramp up.
“The development team has given them a really good product to sell and they now get it and understand it so we’re doing more deals than ever before.
“People are sticking with us and the operations team onboard and support the new customers and keep them happy. These three teams are working in harmony.
“It feels as though we’re scaling up something that works rather than finding out what works.”
In January, Shopblocks onboarded 62 new customers, mostly from the US, USA and Australia, which followed six months of continuous growth.
Key hires
Jones believes Shopblocks is perfectly placed to hit £2.5m revenue in 2022/23 after appointing Kristian Hunt as Chief Operating Officer and Stacey MacNaught as non-executive director and closing a £1.2m funding round.
“All our sales at the moment are direct,” he says. “We are picking up individual ecommerce businesses but in the works we have bigger enterprise partnerships which are much slower to onboard but have the potential to deliver hundreds of new customers to us every month.
“We’ve been working on these projects for 12-18 months and we’re just getting to the point where we’re starting to go live.
“This will give us a huge second revenue stream. We’re going to continue working with businesses but we also have the partner channel. That’s the reason we’re confident of doubling up.”
Shopblocks employs nearly 50 people and has more than 1,500 customers worldwide.