In 2012 my best friend Ben Sperry and I, two recent UW-Madison graduates, started a startup called Codiqa with a dream to make it easy for anyone to build mobile and web apps with HTML5 technologies.
We entered private beta right after new year’s (bad idea, I guess normal people take vacations), and then we launched publicly at the end of February. We grew our first beta user base almost exclusively through twitter and a landing page that encouraged sharing across social networks.
We had our first big break at the end of February when we were featured directly on jquerymobile.com, where we still contribute to jQuery Mobile development to this day. We blogged how that got us over 10k users in a month, despite us getting rejected from YC a few months earlier. That post shot to the top of Hacker News for an entire day and brought us a lot of outside attention.
In March we started charging for Codiqa, and at the beginning of April we charged our first credit card ever. Since then, we’ve expanded our user base to almost 100k users spread out in over 35 countries around the world, and slowly became profitable enough to pay two founders full time. And that’s all without raising a dime of outside funding or dipping into savings or debt.
In 2012 we closed several licensing deals with large international companies, and we’ve cultivated relationships for many more to come.
We also launched our second product, Jetstrap which has seen large adoption in the Twitter Bootstrap developer community, with over 40k users signing up since October when it was launched into beta.
But our brightest days are truly ahead of us. December is shaping up to be our best month on record by a large margin, and we just hired our first ever full time employee. We plan to hire a few more great full-time Javascript/CoffeeScript developers in 2013 (is that you?).
We are so excited to be a growing part of the Madison startup community. In the three years since I entered the community, 2012 seemed its best year, with more startups being created that have seen real traction and acclaim outside of the area. Its best days are to come!
Check out past Codiqa news posts here.