2019 AD: Ready for takeoff

On May 25, 1961, the then President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, set a national goal: perform a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth. After several historic attempts, his goal was achieved on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong stepped off the Lunar Module’s ladder and onto the Moon’s surface.

It took 8 years of relentless effort, sacrifice, persistence and finance to land a man safely on the Moon.

While there’s no comparison between the effort behind a rocket and a startup, pictures like the following are quite common:

And when I look back at the years gone by, it all makes sense. Here’s a thing(or two) about 2018:

“When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don’t repeat it.”

2018: The Year of Reckoning

Truth be told, our entry into 2018 was nothing short of a bumpy ride from the downfall in 2017, and every day, we were battling relentlessly to put our ideas into execution as fast as we could. A lot of them tanked, but we finally pulled one off in early Q1 and that gave rise to a content platform, now ranked among the top 350 web properties in the United States. To put things in perspective, here are a couple more statistics:

• Served over 1.5B ads in a month — that’s almost 5 times the US population.
• Reached more than 15M readers, averaging more than 200M pageviews on the platform, every month.
• Partnered with leading publications like CNN, BBC, Yahoo News, Fox, and numerous more for syndicating our content.

Apart from our media division, after months of internal R&D, we also launched a breakthrough advertising product in early Q3, based entirely on video. As of today, it is used by leading publications across the world and contributes tremendously to their advertising ecosystem. Following are some statistics around it as well:

• Served over 1B video plays in a month, worldwide.
• Transferred more than 1.5 petabytes of data across all our streaming servers in less than a month.
• Garnered a direct reach of more than 500M unique users a month.

Overall, we managed to recover from the severe hit in 2017, and clocked an annual revenue in low XX million USD.

None of the above was an overnight play — it took months of toil, sleepless nights, and innumerable cups of coffee to make it happen. And when it finally did, we were already too busy to take notice. And we still are, raging to push things forward, and scale to 10x of where we are currently — all in 2019. And there’s just one mantra:

Do. Or do not. There is no try.

We’re ready for takeoff and are excited for 2019 with renewed energy, enthusiasm and valour.

We at Zero1 Inc grew from a team of less than 10 in late 2017 to over 35 in 2018. It took months to find the right fit, and even today, we are on the lookout for talented, committed folks to join the fray and push things forward. The foremost competitive advantage in a startup is speed. Everything else is secondary. And speed is inversely proportional to time. That’s why the one thing we learnt to value most is, in fact, time.

We’re more of an army — and we seek troopers, people who can give in what it takes to achieve the impossible in the shortest amount of time. People who can challenge the status quo, and don’t take No for an answer. People in fields as diverse as tech, HR, sales, digital marketing, data analysis and Ad operations.

Get in touch with us at: hr@z1.co and tell us your story — we might see a synergy and contact you right away.

2019 AD: Ready for takeoff was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.