A Year in Review: 2017 from I to Z

From exciting new features to personal triumphs — 2017 has been a stellar year for inzpire.me!

Wow, what an incredible year it’s been.

Over the course of 2017, we’ve hit a bunch of major milestones. We’ve introduced some exciting new features, expanded our team, moved to a new office, closed our 1st seed round, and much more!

We’re excited to share some of our favorite moments with you. Here’s our 2017 year in review, from I to Z:

In August, we reached our milestone of 10,000 registered influencers! Our community has now grown to 11,500 influencers (and still counting) from over 100 countries, and they have a total of 464,800,000 followers.

We had the unique opportunity to pitch at the Slush Tokyo Pitch Competition in Tokyo, Japan. We were 1 of 4 startups to make it to the finals. Out of the 4 finalists, Japan Airline selected inzpire.me as their winner of choice on the main stage!

Over 125 brands have started using inzpire.me to collaborate with influencers. Nordic Choice Hotels, Skogstad Sport, TINE, Yoplait, and Coca-Cola had stand-out campaigns this year! The influencers created eye-catching content, and the campaigns generated impressive results.

As a team of 10 from 6 different countries, we speak 9 languages fluently: English, Norwegian, Burmese, Russian, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Shanghainese.

Because several of our team members work remotely, there’s a whole lot of online messages being sent to each other! Over 192,243 messages have been sent over Slack this past year.

Over the summer, inzpire.me moved to brand new offices at Storgata 32, Oslo, NO. After several weeks of intense painting and ceiling tearing, we’re proud of what the office has become — welcoming, homey, and open to anyone who’d like to drop by.

In April, we closed our first seed round of $1 million. We’re grateful for all the support from our amazing team of investors: SNÖ Ventures, Thomas Falck, Erik Bakkejord, Tomas Settevik, Aase Settevik, Kaare M. Risung, Silvija Seres, Tim Nilo, Even Aas-Eng, and Venture Factory.

We’re proud of our diversity, and we wanted it to show in the office. We decided to take on the mission of painting a world map in our reception, so we could pin fun polaroids of our team members and guests around their countries of origin. With several paintbrushes in hand, the map has made it on the wall, and it’s now one of our favorite rooms in the office!

We constantly challenge our team to provide quicker and better support. This year, we’re happy to find that all that hard work has paid off — it takes our team an average of 3h and 23m to respond to an inquiry that’s been sent to us!

Because we have team members working in various countries, we experiment with different activities to strengthen our team cohesion. Some activities that we’ve tried this year: we created remote team quizzes to learn fun facts about each other and shared memorable moments, made in Oslo or abroad, by posting photos and videos to our Watchbox, located at our HQ.

Before we moved into our new office, we made a pit stop at StartupLab, a technology incubator that only accepts and houses 10% of the startups that apply.

In September, we had our 1st team week in Oslo! All our team members flew in and met each other for the 1st time. We enjoyed a week filled with interesting workshops and fun team bonding activities. Several of our favorite activities included mini-golfing, singing karaoke, and solving escape rooms.

There has been a number of major and minor updates to our platform this year. Some of our most notable updates have been (1) implementing a Kanban View in Dashboard to help manage collaborations, (2) adding a Deliverables flow to easily access links to all sponsored content, and (3) including a Reporting function to analyze the results of a campaign.

To get some interesting conversations going, we encourage coffee breaks between team members throughout the week. If a team member is working remotely, coffee dates occur virtually via Skype! Our team members have had 38 virtual coffee dates with each other this year.

Friday Waffles & Beers is a well-loved tradition, and it gives our team the chance to unwind and socialize at the end of the week. Since moving to our office, we’ve eaten approximately 360 waffles.

Earlier this year, we welcomed 4 new team members to inzpire.me: Paul Arnould (FR), our Head of Sales, Chris Constandse (NL), our Head of Design, Mads Kristiansen (NO), our Customer Success Intern, and Gustavo Rodriguez (ES), our Data Engineer.

This March, inzpire.me celebrated its 1st birthday. We’ve come a long way since 2016, and we couldn’t have done it without your continued feedback and support!

2017 has zoomed by, and we’re incredibly proud of everything we’ve accomplished this year. We’re excited to share all the new product updates and developments we have in store for you next year. Look out for some big changes in 2018!