myk’s mix

To the extended Myxer family,

 

2007 was a great year for Myxer. As I prepared to write this note, I went back through my old documents and emails, and was constantly doing double-takes and saying things like “that was this year?” and “that was only x months ago?” I’m simply stunned by the sheer amount of stuff we have done in one single year!

 

Consider we started the year working out of a tiny two bedroom house in a residential neighborhood with a single hosted server handling our web traffic. Today, our two dozen employees occupy the equivalent of an entire floor of our office building on Ocean Blvd, and we need at least 10 servers and tens of terabytes of storage to deal with our website’s demand.

 

We broke 100,000 page views on our website for the first time at the end of 2006. On Christmas day 2007, we served about 6 million. And, oh, yeah, we delivered four hundred thousand mobile downloads on that day alone, meaning we sustained an average of about 5 downloads a second over the entire day.

 

We also saw 50,000 new users on Christmas – that’s one new user every two seconds – bringing our total user base to over 4.3 million people.

 

An endless stream of enhancements, from the addition of themed content (did everybody get their holiday ringtones?) to infrastructure enhancements, and a million things in between, have all contributed to this astounding growth.

 

But while the growth stats are really amazing and fun, they don’t highlight what I believe to be the most important changes that took place for Myxer over the course of this year.

 

In 2007, we recognized that long-term, large-scale success requires more than just a website and a great idea. Delivering a whole product to our key customers requires the development of a mature market economy that involves relationships with many other partner companies.

 

So as 2008 begins, market development has taken a place of importance next to product and technology development. The key challenge of the New Year is to effectively orchestrate the development of what we call the Myxer Economy – a mature framework of business and market relationships that aligns the motivations of our partners with our own, and defines an efficient value chain for ad-supported mobile content in which Myxer plays a key role.

 

In 2008, Myxer will establish itself as the de facto standard for ad-supported mobile content.

 

This is a very exciting time for the company, because for the first time we have a clear roadmap that connects our high-level Vision on the one hand with our day-to-day, nose-to-the-grindstone operations on the other. And in our current position as one of the most prolific distributors of mobile content in the world, we have the opportunity to effect great change in an industry that sorely needs it.

 

An important aspect of developing the mature Myxer economy is the integration of advertisers in a real way. 2008 begins with our sales team leaping out of the gate with the goal of attracting and selling advertisers directly. This shift from a ‘network sales model’ (whereby we primarily rely on intermediary companies as brokers for our advertising inventory) to a ‘direct sales model’ (whereby we interact directly with ad agencies and large brands) is an important key to reaching our revenue goals for the New Year. We ended 2007 in a great position to springboard this newly-invigorated sales effort and we’re incredibly pumped up about our opportunities.

 

Sales is just one aspect of our operations, however.  In 2007, we recognized the value of Myxer as a brand, and invested significantly in it. Both “brand” in the marketing sense, as well as the equally important legal sense. It was difficult to do at the time, but the serious amount of blood, sweat, tears, and money we put into defending our trademarks against would-be competitors and domain name squatters last year has resulted in a huge step up in brand equity. Myxer Inc., our new corporate name, owes its existence to the difficult challenges we faced early in the year.

 

Our legal endeavors were complemented by a serious new wave of marketing efforts intended to hone our messaging, positioning, and value proposition. The fruits of this labor, of which there are many, will become apparent in 2008 as we work to bring consistency and precision to our brand through the matured understanding of our target customer and our relationships with content providers and other partners.

 

All told, it was an amazing year for Myxer that has set us up for an even more amazing 2008.  I am so proud of what we were able to accomplish in 2007, so proud to be associated with people of such amazing ability and high standards, and so thankful to everyone who has supported our efforts with time, money, advice, and understanding as we’ve grown. I’m so excited for 2008 that I can barely contain myself!

 

Happy New Year to all!

 

Myk