Nozbe will not take any outside investment… nor will we build an office…
💼Business
Every now and then I get an email from an investor, thinking about investing in Nozbe. We even had some serious acquisition offers in the past. Especially now that our main competitors like Asana or Monday are valued at more than $1B. This is really flattering but our answer has always been:
Thank you but: “NO, thanks!”
As I’ve written almost 2 years ago on the Nozbe blog:
Nozbe is completely self-funded or better yet - customer funded. We have no outside investors and we’ve never had them and are not planning to get them. We’ve had quite a few offers to invest in Nozbe, but the thing is, our company is not really a good fit for investors. All they care about is growth… and all we care are our customers and delivering the best product we can for them. Don’t get me wrong, growth is nice and all.. but not at all costs. We prefer slower growth and better working conditions… and even some profits on top of that.
So if you’re an investor looking to invest in a great technology company, we appreciate your work but we won’t be working together… unless of course you’re a paying customer and you’d like to send us feedback on Nozbe, which we’ll gladly listen to.
We love customer feedback! That makes our customers our real investors - as they fund our company by paying for Nozbe and saving lots of time (and money!) by using our app in the process. This way we can focus on “maximizing shareholder value” by really “maximizing customer value”. We’re still humbled that more than half a million people from all over the world are using our tool to get their stuff done every day.
I stand by this now as I stood then
Our growing competitors (Monday, Asana, ClickUp, Trello…) and more interest in the productivity space is amazing and we have ambitions to have more impact on the world with the launch of our new Nozbe, but I believe we can get there by not having outside investors (i.e. “outside bosses”) that would want us to “get serious” (i.e. “get a real office” instead of #NoOffice or stop “TGIF Fridays policy” or force me to relocate to Silicon Valley - and I like where I live now 😎).
It’s all about FREEDOM!
After almost 13 years of running Nozbe I just love the freedom it gives me to work the way I love and I don’t want to give that up. As far as I know my entire team feels the same way. And we believe we can still make a splash with our software without the acceleration of outside money.
So if you’re an investor, know that you won’t be able to invest in Nozbe. However if you want to get to know me and offer me free advice, by all means get in touch, I will have 30 minutes for a quick chat.