It’s Salsa’s 8th birthday, I’m feeling nostalgic, so I thought I’d share a little about our young history.

August 25, 2003.  8 years ago today I sat at a 2nd hand desk in a spare bedroom (well, it was spare after we moved our 4 month old daughter into our room) of our 2 bedroom unit in Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs.  I stared at the screen of my 3-year-old self made PC, rolled up my sleeves, and started working… with absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Previously I was a lead developer for a large IT services firm.  I was made redundant during the DotCom bust, then spent a couple of months pondering life with my Fiance Nicole and our new baby Sienna – I actually considered getting out of IT all together.

My good friends Phil & Alfred asked me whether I’d be interested in running a new business idea they had – selling & building thousands (!!??) of websites using open source software for $99, and making money off the hosting & support.  Wow, how things have changed…

We hired our first employee a few weeks later (Murat, designer – family of course), then our second (Emil, developer – a close friend, who has recently re-joined the Salsa team actually!), then Nicole kicked us out of the house.

2004. We leased our first real office which was above a mechanical workshop in Northcote for $150/week, and then hired Conan & Hiroo, and shortly afterwards, Matt.  They helped us make a name for ourselves, and thankfully I’m still in touch with them (in fact I had a beer with Matty & Hiroo on Friday afternoon, along with half a dozen or so other x-Salsa employees).

2005. Over the coming year we met some amazing clients that had faith in us, and allowed us to learn & grow, including www.melbourneweddingregistry.com.au, who we still work with today.

2006. We moved into our 3rd location in Lygon St, East Brunswick, where Phil joined the business full time as our SEO Manager (and cold caller – that was funny).  We hired our first Office Manager, Rachel, and a series of developers that were to transform the Salsa business yet again to the agency it is today, including Sammy, Nathan, Chris, Steve, Dan (x2), Nick, Modi, & Alex (R.I.P Big Al, we miss ya).

2008. We moved into our current premises in Fitzroy, and now have a team of 29 staff across 3 countries, and about 200 loyal customers.  The journey continues – we keep changing the business, introducing new services, meeting new clients, and making great friends along the way.  Our staff are the difference for us – they’re the real Salsa.

I love what I do, what Salsa does for our customers, and that we’re able to provide jobs to some special people.

Since starting Salsa, I married my Fiance and we’ve had a couple more kids – my life has been amazing because of Nicole, and what Salsa has allowed us to do.  Nicole would kill me if I put a photo of her here, but here is one of our kids.

Adam DeGiorgio.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2011 at 11:54 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.