Very exciting news for FirstRain today – we have announced that we have signed our 100th institutional client. This means over 100 firms have signed up paying subscribers – and the subscriber count is in the thousands.We introduced the new FirstRain strategy and our search-driven research product 2 years ago in October 2006 and we’ve been developing the buyside market aggressively ever since. Our customers are the large and small institutional managers, large and small hedge funds and corporations – and over the last couple of quarters we have seen an acceleration in the number of firms signing on.

The last two years have been a frenetic pace of product development – I’ll write a separate post on our approach there because it’s highly iterative and a little different – and customer appreciation of our product is very rewarding for the team. I have sent a letter (in email) to every production user thanking them for their business, for helping FirstRain get to this point and letting them know the new capabilities that will be in their hands in September.

The press release is on our web site – and has several customers named in it. However, the buyside is a secretive world and so most customers won’t let us use their names. I’m grateful to the customers listed who will!

I completely understand from their point of view – their research process is their critical IP – but it’s tough from a marketing perspective to not be able to name names. The press always wants to talk to a live person who is using and I have yet to find a portfolio manager who has the time or the inclination to take a lot of calls, unless they are a board member or an advisor. So be it – we just have to be persistent and creative in our marketing.