Worked hard, played hard, 2013 has been an amazing year! I had so much professional and personal opportunities throughout the year. Among the major milestones, I developed the inbound lead generation at Dexem, launched a new B2B solution, launched a first iPhone app, attended to great conferences, met with awesome people and visited a lot of new places with my wife and friends.

Inbound Lead Generation

Toward the end of 2012, we began to implement an inbound lead generation activity at Dexem. As the first results were encouraging, we decided in 2013 to invest seriously on it.

Throughout the year we've improved our online store. We call our website our online store because everything we do on our website is dedicated to convert visitors into leads (and then a part of them into customers). We've tweaked a lot of stuff to improve step by step the conversion rates. We've done better month after month and there's still a lot we can do to reach the highest rates.

In addition, we implemented several acquisition channels to bring visitors into the store. We started with the basics - ads on Google Adwords, blogging for SEO, sharing blog posts on social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus - and I want to get more of these channels next year. And of course, I will also test new channels. With more channels, you potentially increase the number of visitors and reduce dependence on a few acquisition channels.

As a result this year, we quadrupled the number of visitors and doubled the number of customers. And we did not reach our maximum potential at all. This is very positive for the future! It takes time to tweak the machine so we'll continue to invest ourselves in the inbound lead generation in 2014.

Launched a new call management solution

Until this year, we were focusing on call management solutions for customer service such as hosted IVR and call routing services. We moved this year to bring also solutions for other departments.

And this is why we launched the Call Tracking solution for marketing teams. Call Tracking particularly works well for inbound lead generation. Marketers are able to put different phone numbers in their ads or campaigns and route them to the right sales people. Thereby, they can measure the ROI of each campaign, each ad, each keyword and reinvest in the ones that generate the most calls.

Being fully implicated in the process of defining, positionning, designing and building a new product was new and very exciting. The path is difficult and requires to test and iterate a lot. Because we already started to build an inbound lead generation machine for our existing products, we knew how to generate the first leads for the Call Tracking solution. This helped a lot to collect quickly the first feedback, discuss with potential customers, understand their needs and make the first sales.

Even if we already have several leads each week today, we still consider ourselves working on the product / market fit. Our plan is to go futher beyond in 2014.

Released a first iPhone application

Dexem has been building innovative call management solutions for companies all around the world for over 12 years. Today, the rise of smartphones opens the door to many new opportunities of contact. Building a contact manager for iPhone is our first mobile-oriented project.

We initiated this project in March and released the first version as a public beta in June 18. We first strongly focused on interacting with the first users. We wanted to collect valuable feedbacks to improve the app so that these users really love to use it. And so, honestly, we did not grow our users' base that much during the first three months. But we ended up with 36% of those who had installed the app that used it more than once a week in Septembre. During the fall, we've mainly worked on a iOS 7 redesign and on new users acquisition.

Today, we already have thousands of users from a lot of countries worldwide. We measured a cumulative growth rate for active users aroud 9% per week since we launched the first version in June and around 12% per week since we released the iOS 7 version in November. And most importantly, we receive each week very encouraging feedbacks and reviews.

Brought great design into our products

The world of design has known significant changes this year. 2013 has been the rise of flat design. We did not move purely to a whole flat design but got inspired by the philosophy of being essential, simple and focused. We tried to simplify the workflow in our products to make the life of our customer even more easier. I directly contributed this year to bring new design in the following products:

• VoicePublisher Designer, our no-coding voice apps builder.
• VoicePublisher Admin for Mobile, a mobile version for our voice apps management tool.
• Call Tracking, a new product we launched to track from which ads your phone calls come.
• Call Analytics, our call reporting product (which is also integrated in VoicePublisher).
• Dexem Connect, the contact manager for iPhone we launched this year.

In order to deliver a consistent experience, we've also brought this philsophy of design in our websites and other communication tools. Working on these improvements about our brand identity has been so cool, with a lot of creativity, thoughts and expression.

Look forward to 2014

We worked hard in 2013, we started a lot new things. 2014 will be a year to go further beyond in most of these activities. 2014 will be a year of growth with exciting challenges:

• Generate more inbound leads for our B2B call management solutions.
• Grow the number of active users for Connect, our contact manager for iPhone.
• Bring more (UX, support, uptime) to make customers and users even more happier.

To generate more inbound leads, we will produce more awesome content both in English and French, optimize existing acquisition channels, explore new acquisition channels (and there's always a lot). Growing the number of active users for Connect will be in the same mindset and, I guess, with really different techniques. We will continue to support our customers and users with the same passion and reactivity, make sure performance reach the highest levels, and work hard on softwares to bring a better UX and some new game-changing features.

I'm very excited to start this year 2014!