5 years of XING – Some memorable moments and milestones

Tomorrow it will be five years ago to the day that our platform first went online. And what a five years it has been! The network began life with 472 contacts – all friends and associates of mine. Back then I would never have dreamt that these humble beginnings would turn into the platform we are today so fast: Just five years of busy networking later, we’ve grown into the European market leader and count more than 6.5 million people worldwide amongst our members. And with more than 500,000 members who choose to pay for our comprehensive Premium services, we rank no. 1 in the world as the network with the most paying customers.

We look back on many eventful and exciting moments, when our ever-growing team only not only pulled off the relaunch of the platform and change of name, but also managed to acquire and successful migrate no less than three business networks to the platform.

The last five years – all 1827 days – have seen us welcome a continuous stream of new members as the network expands on a global scale. But this period is also marked by ongoing innovation and enhancement: In the last year alone we made 50 releases and introduced 30 major new features. The fact that our ideas and features are copied time and again by others confirms this pioneering status to us. And more than half of all these innovations have been made in response to the valuable input we receive from XING members!

There are enough moments and milestones since our launch to write a book, but in this limited space I’d like to sum up just some of the highlights …

Zero hour – We go live: The platform was officially launched on 1 November 2003 under the name openBC. And by the end of day 1 our numbers had already grown to 1,000 members – a promising sign for us! Way back then just seven people made up our small virtual team: Michael, Heiner, Norbert, Hanno, Bill and Daniela. And the grand company headquarters was my front room at home! The connection path algorithm was developed on an ancient Linux 486 PC – it was already pretty old back then but this was a deliberate move: Using the slowest testing computer we could get our hands on meant we were better able to test and optimize the system speed. These days we manage more than 120 million peer-to-peer connections between our members and my living room has returned to being a family-only domain. We started selling Premium Memberships from the very first day, after just 90 days we were cash-flow positive, and time has shown that our business model is a successful one for the long term.

The Groups are born: By the Christmas of 2003 we launched groups on the platform, known back at the beginning as “networks”. Fast-forward to the present and we have an incredible 20,000 groups on XING where thousands of members interact with and benefit from one another every single day.

Online meets offline: The dawning of Events was heralded when the Munich community, headed by the now Ambassador Martin Bockelmann, began meeting up once a month offline. The official Event feature then followed in February 2004 and XING members now organize thousands of events around the world using our platform. More than 35,000 in fact in the first half-year of 2008 alone!

Unparalleled multilingualism: Recognizing the potential of the global digital world early on, we acted on this and began introducing more and more languages. As of 2005, XING has been available in 16 languages. This makes us the first and to date only online business platform to lay the linguistic foundations for truly global networking without borders.

Private Clubs: Urged on by a number of companies, we developed a customizable white label solution of our software and started distribution from July 2005 onwards. We realized though that this wasn’t completely in tune with our members’ interests and that continuing down this road would not be successful in the long term. Since then we have driven forward the expansion of our popular Groups functionality and introduced Enterprise Groups as a new home for companies on XING.

1 million members and counting!: An exciting moment came at the beginning of 2006, when the number of XING members reached seven figures for the first time. This rapid growth involved the continuous expansion of our IT resources – and our scalable software made sure that this surge in users went almost unnoticed (for the odd downtimes that occurred every now and again we apologize once again). We now have almost 200 servers in two different data processing centers.

openBC becomes XING: In September 2006 we announced that we were changing our name and relaunching the entire platform. “XING” simply better reflects the platform we are today: A global community that unites more than 190 nationalities. We had outgrown the name openBC: Too many “BC” imitators had sprung up, many people interpreted “open” as being insecure and “BC” also had associations as the abbreviation “Before Christ”… The name XING is so appropriate because it is understood in many different cultures. And there’s more than one possible way to pronounce it: Most Germans would say “Ksing”, while the Americans would most probably say “Crossing” like their road signs, the Spaniards “Zing” and the Turks “Ssing”, etc. We came up with the name by the way back in 2004, but it took us some time to secure the international rights.

The Relaunch itself: November 2006 saw the relaunch of the completely reworked platform. The XING era heralded not only a new name but also a new logo, a fresh brand-new look and a much simpler, more user-friendly navigation.

IPO becomes reality: Just one month later in December 2006, XING AG became the first Web 2.0 company to go public. This stands us in excellent stead to withstand any financial crises that come our way: We are free of debt and have a full war chest – the best prerequisites for remaining independent and continuing on our course of expansion, even in the current financial climate on the markets.

We love rails: At the start of 2007 we kick-started the internal development of Rails projects. This is the perfect framework for supporting our agile, test-driven development and is ideally suited to our technical remit of a database-driven Web front-end. Rails has accelerated our development speed. We’ve already implemented Marketplace and BestOffers using Rails and are more than pleased with the results. This way we support the rails community and remain as innovative as ever.

XING hits Spain: In March 2007, XING acquired eConozco, one of the leading Spanish contact networks for business professionals. And then in June 2007 Neurona, the largest business network in Spain and Latin America, joined the XING family, making XING the market leader in Spain. This opened up the XING community overnight to hundreds of thousands of new additional business contacts in the fast-growing Spanish-speaking world.

XING Marketplace is launched in May 2007, marking a world-first with the integration of a job website’s functionality with all the benefits of an international business network. Our billing model is 100 % performance-based, like the new B2B offers we will be launching over the coming months.

XING Mobile hits the market: A completely reworked mobile version of the platform went live in August 2007. Originally launched in 2005, XING was the first provider to offer business networking with contacts on the go – and the relaunch of our mobile portal reinforced once again our status as technical pioneers in the field of mobile networking. XING for the iPhone was then launched in time for the start of iPhone sales in Germany in November 2007, and a native iPhone and Blackberry application is coming soon. Watch this space!

OpenSocial: In November 2007, XING AG became one of the first launch partners to join the open programming standard OpenSocial. Since then we’ve been busy testing in our OpenSocial SandBox. Our clear aim here is to ensure that there’s a clear added value for our members and that their data remains fully protected as well.

Turkey, here we come!: XING entered the Turkish market in January 2008, becoming the clear market leader for business professionals with the acquisition of the business network cember.net. Our Turkish members seem to have felt right at home on XING from the start, and the Turkish-speaking groups are already the second-most active, right behind the German groups!

So much more has happened over the last five years that I can’t leave unmentioned, so I will at least list the links here: Our joint venture in China, the Premium standard for all groups, the introduction of our BestOffer program for members, and this year alone the visualization of business contacts with Google Maps, the roll-out of official XING Seminars, the list just goes on and on.

Anyone who’s interested in becoming a part of the XING story is very welcome to apply to join our team. In spite of the current crisis on the financial markets, we’re still recruiting on a large scale and currently have more than 30 open positions all listed on our job page. I already have the privilege of working together with 160 talent colleagues from no less than 22 different nations – and together we continue to strive to create the best and most successful tool for the networked business world. It’s worth mentioning that we have been financially successful from the very outset: Growing member numbers have led to a continuous rise in revenues and profits. Our quarterly results since the IPO in Q4 2006 has risen from 3.6 million to 9.2 million euros in the current Q3 2008, while the EBITDA margin has increased during the same period from 23% to 40% at present. Which goes to show that there are business models out there that can be profitable in crises too.

Lots of people have been asking me how we’ll be celebrating our 5th birthday. We are in fact throwing two parties: This week we had a big party and meal with our whole team. And we’ve been giving away presents to members as well over the past days with a number of promotions on the platform. Because one thing is absolutely certain: Without our members and without our team of employees we wouldn’t be where we are today. So I’d like to thank you most sincerely for your loyalty, support and all the life you bring to our fantastic platform. Here’s to the next 5 years!