HAMBURG, GERMANY – Jimdo, the Hamburg-based website creator, celebrates the millionth site built on its web service, doubling its numbers in less than six months. That is enough Jimdo pages -- including subpages -- to stretch across the 2000 miles from Hamburg to Cairo.
1 Million and No End in Sight
Only half a year after the announcement of the 500,000th Jimdo site, the number of sites has doubled. As this major milestone of 1 million sites passes, Jimdo's growth is increasing exponentially. "The market for a simple way to create professional websites is far from saturated," asserts Matthias Henze, one of Jimdo's three founders. "Users have realized good design and a straightforward update system doesn't have to be expensive. Thanks to our JimdoPro package, they pay just $5 a month for a professional web presence." Jimdo users particularly like to create photo galleries: currently they have uploaded over 32.5 million photos in more than 2 million galleries.
Time for New Goals
With such strong results behind them, the startup can now focus on profitability. "By the end of this year we want to be in the black," confirms Henze. Jimdo's revenues come from its paid version JimdoPro (more information at http://jimdopro.com), which offers advanced users, professionals, and small businesses their own domain with a custom email address, an ad-free website, detailed statistics, a email newsletter system, and much more. Beyond that, says Henze, "Another product is already being planned."
Hamburg vs. Silicon Valley
There's a lot in the Jimdo's short but exciting history on which the three founders, Matthias Henze, Christian Springub, and Fridtjof Detzner, can look back. Spun off of NorthClick, their first business together, in February 2007, Jimdo has grown swiftly, as the user numbers prove. Google Trends confirms the German web startup's success: Jimdo has overtaken its American competitors and can count itself among the top three Web 2.0 website creation services in the world.
No small part in achieving this is due to the focus on internationalization:
About Jimdo
Jimdo -- Pages to the People (http://www.jimdo.com) was founded in February 2007 by three young entrepreneurs Christian Springub, Fridtjof Detzner, and Matthias Henze. In 2004, the three founded a company together on an old farmhouse, NorthClick, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Jimdo. The web technology that powers Jimdo was first developed for NorthClick's business clients to edit and update their sites more easily, but frequent requests from friends gave the founders the idea to offer free Jimdo Pages. Since then, the website creator has been supported by investors like the Samwer Brothers (alando, jamba) and United Internet (GMX, web.de, 1&1) who have invested in the web startup. In August 2009, the 1,000,000th Jimdo site went online.
