RamCity is living proof that an office is not essential for success. The company has no central HQ. Instead, employees are spread across a service desk in Bathurst, a warehouse in Brisbane and a handful in Sydney, who work from home and communicate online. It’s clearly a solid strategy. After debuting at No.16 in the 2014 CRN Fast50, this year the company more than doubled its revenue to $4.2 million, growing by 100.32 percent.
The online philosophy has become RamCity’s biggest strength as it grows internet sales in the constantly shifting storage market. RamCity’s bread and butter has always been shipping and upgrading RAM and SSDs. But a recent focus on communicating with customers has allowed the company to add services by way of instructional videos and fostering a consumer tech community.
What began from founder Rod Bland sporadically creating his own tutorial videos has turned into a value-add for RamCity. The company employed a professional video company and new staff to work on RamCity’s YouTube channel to upload tutorials and guides for installing RAM. Its most popular video has 76,000 views.
“We’re constantly producing new content for people who are new to this,” says Bland. “It’s for people who are not necessarily technically astute, or people doing something technically difficult. We have new video content every week, and we’re writing a lot of guides and blog posts that attract a lot of attention. We’re also active on social media and answer questions on overclocker forums.”
Developing an online presence is important for a company whose customer base is 45 percent consumer and 40 percent small business. The RAM and SSD market is driven by early adopters and RamCity is working to stay ahead of these trendsetters.
In the past year, the company began selling through Amazon.com to penetrate the US market. Amazon now handles orders, shipping and product returns in the US.
“In any industry, you have to look for a niche within that vertical you can take advantage of,” says Bland of the company’s early days. “I thought memory was good with very few competitors within Australia. We also saw the likes of Macs and servers were more difficult, so there was an opportunity there.”
Looking ahead, Bland is expecting more strong growth off the back of increased take-up in SSD technology. “We’re aiming to grow another 50 percent next year,” he says. “Obviously as companies grow, that gets harder. It’s hard to say what we’re going to do in the next year because it depends on what technology comes out. There’s the possibly of integrating SSD and RAM so I think there’ll be some development in that area.”
FACT FILE
- Founded 2010
- Key executive Rod Bland (chief executive)
- HQ Sydney
- Growth 100.32%
- 2015 revenue $4.25 million
- Headcount 6 (at time of entry)
- Top vendors Samsung, Crucial, Mushkin
- Top distributors Multimedia Technology, Synnex
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