• Website Building Tool Jimdo Is Taking Off, Adding Cool Features, Making Money

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Thursday, May 19th, 2011

    Jimdo, a service that lets anyone create a good-looking website without too much effort, is on a roll. The tool has now been used to build over 4 million websites, and 200,000 more Jimdo-powered sites get published every month.

    Last year, the German startup behind the service rolled out a feature that let anyone create an online store, quickly and easily. Fast forward 15 months and 40,000 online stores have been built using the service, generating more than 7.5 million euros in sales.

    Today, the company is debuting a mobile-friendly view for optimized display on iPhone, Android handsets and other smartphones, which works for all Jimdo websites. In addition, all 40,000 online stores will have a mobile store with mobile checkout. Click a Google Map in the mobile view, and the native Google Maps app will open on your phone.

    Jimdo has more in store: next week, the company will announce Dropbox integration, enhancing the website building application with a digital file center in the cloud.

    The startup currently boasts offices in Hamburg, San Francisco, Shanghai, and through cooperation with KDDI Webcommunications, also in Tokyo. There are about 70 people working for Jimdo today, and co-founder Christian Springub just relocated to the United States to more efficiently attack the North American market.

    Furthermore, Jimdo is a profitable business today, although they declined to share absolute revenue numbers. Either way, their momentum is noteworthy, especially when you consider how much capital was raised by rivals Wix ($58.5 million) and Yola ($25 million).

    Jimdo, in contrast, was built on only 500,000 euros (roughly $715,000). When United Internet invested in the company, more capital was available, but the management team actually moved to buy back the shares back in 2009.

    Company: Jimdo
    Website: jimdo.com
    Launch Date: March 1, 2007

    Jimdo is a website editor that lets users quickly create websites complete with blog, photo galleries, video, online store, and more. Jimdo caters to less technical users through its straightforward interface. Jimdo started as a group of three friends selling basic site creation tools for the enterprise. The site creation tools developed into a freemium version and now they have over 8,000,000 sites in eleven different languages (German, English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Polish and Dutch). In...

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