A History of Surfly - from pie to the sky 🥧🚀 (Part 1)

At Surfly, we are a growing tribe of web technology enthusiasts, customer experience guardians and A-Team players on a mission to make the web a more human, collaborative and visually engaging place. Before we kick things off, one of the most frequently asked questions from all of our fans, customers and partners around the world is always "how, by the beard of zeus, do you say the name of your company?". The honest truth is that we are not too fussed how you say it because we are building something much greater than the pronunciation of a name here. Some people say "Sir Fly", and as much as the idea of a gentlemanly fly on the wall with a top hat, monocle and smoking a pipe is a peculiar image, unfortunately that is not the way that the tribe is known throughout the majority of the galaxy. Instead think more Bruce Lee surfing the internet on a surfboard yelling "be water, my friend" in badly dubbed Chinese - hence Surf Lee or Surf-ly. Why Bruce? Because we understand that the magic should be in interactions, not in technology, and therefore Surfly should be formless, just like water, and facilitate kick-ass experiences to millions of screens and people around the world.

Unlike Bruce, the inspiration for Surfly was not imported all the way from China. It originated in the Lowlands (aka The Netherlands), on a marathon support call that could have been resolved in minutes instead of hours, if co-browsing had been available. Not only did that call give birth to the idea for Surfly, it also ended up with a delighted customer sending in a homemade apple pie that made our founder, Nicholas Piël, an office legend at XS4ALL. More to come on that story later! After Surfly's humble inception in the oven of some grandma's kitchen in 2012, Nicholas metamorphosised from local office legend to international technopreneur superstar and steadily started serving up lines of code - the idea of helping people to easily connect over the web slowly started coming to life.

Shortly after, the "leuke mensen" (good fellas) from Linden Mobile Ventures smelled what was cooking in the Surfly kitchen and invested €400K the first of the seed rounds. This allowed Nicholas to recruit his first disciples who joined the cause in the form of core proxy developers that ventured west from former USSR to our home turf of Amsterdam. With the bulk of the investment going on pizza and red bull, work began on building the sophisticated core of the technology that enables the magic that we are always excited to witness on our screens. The caffeine fuelled all-nighters started to pay off, in 2014 Surfly was announced as finalists in the legendary SXSW Accelerator in Austin. The hype was growing and the tech was glowing. Our user base had expanded to around 20,000 trend-setters and the excitement that people around the world shared for the product was soul stirring. The advantages over the typical screen-sharing technologies out there started to become obvious to many early adopters. There were of course other "co-browsing" approaches out in the wild, however they were wild and very complex to get working right.

At the end of 2016, a global IT training solution provider called ReadyTech all the way in California tried to build their own co-browsing. They quickly understood that the underlying proxy technology could not be replicated that easy, and although they had initially tried to imitate it, decided to call Nicholas in for a whiteboard/give-us-all-your-code session. The outcome of the very near hostage situation was a second round of investment of €1M.

With the companies newly found riches, it was time to hit the casino and put it all on red. Ok, maybe not. What the investment did enable is the hiring of customer facing roles and getting more focussed on actually selling the magic - which is equally as important to keep a roof over everyone's head! That's right, it was 2017 and Surfly was getting all grown up. We started with support, marketing and sales and we learned that selling nowadays is F%#&ING hard work, especially when nobody knows who the hell you are. We moved into a bigger, attic office in Leidseplein (the trashy, touristy but also fun part of Amsterdam) and were opposite the infamous Waterhole were many biertjes were drunk, many bitterballen were eaten and many hangovers were created. It felt as if there was a Dream Team starting to assemble...