KnowledgeOwl begins as a lean startup as part of SurveyGizmo, now Alchemer, a software company in Boulder, Colorado. The vision is to build HelpGizmo, a full help desk solution with ticketing. One of our founders, Marybeth, is a support manager at the time and part of the original HelpGizmo startup team.

While the startup program ends, the idea lives on.

As a surprise 20% project, the support development team revives HelpGizmo. They repurpose it as an internal knowledge base tool for the support team.

The stage is set for a product, and a company, built by customer support professionals.

The first customer, and the first source of feedback, is the docs team. They start using it for their customer-facing product documentation.

Marybeth takes over the product as the product manager, and hires Pete as the lead developer. Marybeth had originally hired Pete as part of her support team and he had worked his way onto the core development team. Their new vision is to bring HelpGizmo to market as stand-alone knowledge base software.

HelpGizmo gets it first paying customer in April. As they sign up, new customers help steer product development in the right direction

Marybeth and Pete buy the company from SurveyGizmo and rebrand as KnowledgeOwl. Already profitable, the company chooses to remain bootstrapped and grow a sustainable business.

Business is growing, and both revenue and active customers triple. We start hosting and sponsoring Write the Docs Boulder/Denver meetups.

After making it to the Final Four as HelpGizmo in 2015, KnowledgeOwl beats out 63 other companies in the Capterra Reviews Madness Competition to become one of the top-reviewed products (and win a sweet trophy too!).

KnowledgeOwl makes its first official hire, a former customer and evangelist, Stephen! Stephen has recently moved from Australia to Scotland.

KnowledgeOwl also begins working with Catherine, a freelance writer from the UK, to help with the blog and social media.

Customer count continues to increase and revenue doubles.

As KnowledgeOwl continues to grow, we are able to do fun new things:

• Marybeth and Pete take a real vacation to Mexico. You know the saying about owl work and no play...

• We have our first company retreat in Iceland and Edinburgh, and our team of four (Marybeth, Pete, Stephen, and Catherine) gets to meet in real life for the first time during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where Stephen is performing.

• Catherine represents KnowledgeOwl at Write the Docs in the Czech Republic.

We hire our first full-time support professional, Lakshmi from Estonia, to help lighten the load.

We begin sponsoring Write the Docs conferences, too!

Customer count and revenue continue to climb.