What a difference a year has made for Celtx, the St. John’s-based maker of pre-production software for the film industry.
By coincidence, I recently interviewed CEO Mark Kennedy, one year to the day after my last report on the company appeared on Entrevestor, and it was astonishing how the company had performed in that time.
In April 2012, the company had almost two million users (those who had logged in five times or more) in 170 countries operating in 34 languages. Today, Celtx has 4.6 million users, and the company has placed special emphasis on revenue growth lately so it is getting more money out of its users.
“We started to focus on revenue late last year and it’s been really good,” said Kennedy. “We basically doubled our revenue in three months.”
First funded in 2006, Celtx’s software allows filmmakers — directors, cinematographers, writers or whatever — to do all their preparations for filming on their PC or device. Through its development it offered free software with the ability to pay for premium products, and with this model it built up market share.
In the past year and a half, it has focused more on cloud-based and device-based products, so that it now has three main channels: products for desktop, cloud and devices. And more of its clients are paying for the service.
The company now has 14 employees, of whom 10 are developers, and Kennedy said the company has been producing new apps and greater functionality in the cloud to improve the user experience.
While the company has been growing strongly for years, Kennedy said it has witnessed no slowdown in customer uptake. In fact, even when it began to produce products for the cloud and devices, its growth in desktop users continued with no decline. It now has four million in desktop use, 600,000 in the cloud and 15,000 on devices.
Celtx has also been taken up by larger and larger companies, which are interested in its enterprise products, designed for studios and major companies rather than just small filmmakers.
“We just did a big demo for NBC Universal in the U.S. and we see large usage in the studios and that’s worldwide,” said Kennedy. He said NBC Universal has about 9,000 media subsidiaries, and Celtx has also had discussions with a couple of European conglomerates. He said the company takes the approach that it hopes the client will pursue a relationship rather than persisting with a hard sale.
Kennedy is not looking for money, though he won’t rule out doing so in the future. So far he has taken venture capital investment only from St. John’s-based Killick Capital, which backed the company in 2006 and has made a few follow-on investments. Kennedy said its total investment is “south of $2 million.”