If your business depends on Xero’s easy to use accounting software, like ours does, you’re probably already familiar with some of the company’s impressive statistics and the backstory of its founder, Ron Drury.
But even die-hard Xero fans like us can’t keep up with this phenomenal New Zealand success story. Here are seven interesting facts we found today about Xero that we didn’t know. We challenge you: how many did you know?
1. Google Trends - Worldwide
According to Google Trends, the countries with the highest percentage of Google searches for Xero in their country (compared to their competitors) are, in this order: New Zealand; United Kingdom; Australia; Brazil; Poland; and then Turkey.
Key: Green = Quickbooks; Blue = Xero; Red = MYOB; Yellow = Quicken; and Purple = Reckon.
2. Google Trends - Australia
The Northern Territory is the only state in Australia where MYOB is searched* more than Xero, by the slimmest of margins. NSW, VIC and WA are the three states where Xero is searched the most, compared to Xero’s competitors.
* Values are scaled from 0 to 100, where 100 is the region with peak popularity, a value of 50 is the region where the term is half as popular, and a value of 0 means that term was less than 1% as popular as the peak.
3. Xero subscribers
Xero’s cloud based accounting platform has over 862,000 subscribers! That’s a crazy number that our Trigger team could only dream of for our cloud based time tracking and project management tool.
But take hope, the graph below shows that it hasn’t always been that way. Like any new business startup, Xero started from humble beginnings. To its credit, it has come a long way in the last eleven years.
4. Diversity in the leadership team
Bucking the trend of most billion dollar cap companies, Xero’s leadership team around their CEO comprises 40% women. For a boring old industry like accounting that’s typically dominated by men, this diversity is refreshing to see.
5. Most popular Xero blog posts
The most popular Xero blog posts (as counted by social media shares) are on the topics of: automated bookkeeping; Xero’s integration with Microsoft’s Power BI; a customer case study of a Chicago rock and roll band; and a podcast interview with Ron Cates of Constant Contact and Megan Roth of Insightly, about how to attract and retain customers.
6. Xero’s add-on marketplace
There are over 500 apps in Xero’s add-on marketplace. This would explain why, as a vendor such as Trigger, it’s easy for us to get lost in there. When we reached out to Xero to ask if more customer reviews would make a difference, we were told that the best placements go to the apps with the most Xero customers. Catch 22?
7. Xero’s CEO says to fail quick
We love this sage advice for entrepreneurs by Xero’s CEO Drury, in digital magazine NZ Entrepreneur:
“When things aren’t working I try to quit them as soon as I can as my time and resources will be better spent elsewhere. So I think failing quick is a key skill for entrepreneurs.”
Xero fans - how many of these did you know?
Xero newcomers - if you’re not already using Xero, you’re missing out on the fun.
Update: 30 March 2017 AU
Xero announced today that they passed 1 million subscribers worldwide. Congrats guys!
