Masuga Design Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary

I'm so excited Masuga Design is celebrating its 10 year anniversary today, April 1, 2016. (No, this is not one of those April Fools’ blog posts!) The company has come a long way since it started, when a solo freelancer (that would be me) toiled away in a spare bedroom, working way too many hours for a very small stable of clients. According to some newer research on business failure rates, 25% of all new U.S. businesses fail in the first year, and 44% are done by the end of year three, so I’m very happy (and just a little proud) to say that we’re still here, doing what we do.

Over the course of those ten years, the company has (thankfully) changed from “me, me, me” to “we, we, we.” I started out writing Coldfusion, to coding Actionscript and making animations in Flash, to hand-rolling PHP websites and coding all the front-end stuff myself, to using content management systems like ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS (among others that shall remain nameless), to hiring people to do the back-end and front-end work, to hiring people to help project manage and work on marketing efforts.

Now we have a small, efficient 4-person team. Together we rebranded and relaunched our website, created a long-running online marketplace, developed a SaaS application, and coded side projects like placeIMG, which has serves 100's of millions of images. As a team we’re now more diverse and can forge into new areas (for us!) such as digital and inbound marketing. On the inbound front, we're currently well on our way towards becoming HubSpot Certified Partners.

[UPDATE May 2021: The whole Hubspot / Inbound Marketing thing didn't work out so well. Read our two blog posts about that adventure: Masuga’s Expensive Mistake: Our HubSpot Inbound Marketing Experiment (Part 1), and Masuga’s Expensive Mistake: Our HubSpot Inbound Marketing Experiment (Part 2).]

Our team works from an office in downtown Grand Rapids, where we’ve been for the last 5 years. The space is cool (and we played an incredible amount of ping-pong here) but we’re moving to a new space in May, and are excited about the possibilities and the fresh perspective we’ll have there, once we make that space our own.

The internet landscape we’re working in has changed quite a bit over the last ten years. What hasn’t changed is our ability to embrace change and our desire to deliver responsible and rewarding work. We will continue to add value for those clients who trust us, day in and day out.

That’s why we’re still here.

It was a good ten years. Let’s do it again.