• 01
  • September

Holy crap, we’re seven (!)

With the calendar flipping (or refreshing, for you digital nerds) to September, it’s time for our annual blog post.

Our seventh-Cromuversary $7,000 giveaway!

We celebrate every Cromuversary by donating to local organizations doing vital work in our community. So last week, each of the seven organizations below got $1,000:

We’re proud to say that Cromulent’s lifetime donations to these orgs exceed $23,000.

Boring business stuff

For our fiscal year (September 1st, 2024 through August 31st, 2025), we…

  • Did work for 9 clients, 3 of whom were new (bringing us to 43 clients in our lifetime); in all of the new-client cases, a person from a prior client moved to a new company and called us up — continuing our streak of 100% word-of-mouth biz dev
  • Sent a total of 35 invoices for something like 45-50 pieces of content
  • Performed at least some Cromuwork — anything from answering an email to a 12-hour writing marathon — on 295 out of 365 calendar days (80.8%)

Total revenue dipped slightly from last year, with a breakdown of (approximately):

  • 80% U.S.-based clients
  • 15% Canadian
  • 5% Rest of the World

However, we worked far fewer hours than in recent years — and we’re finally getting the hang of using/enjoying downtime (rather than constantly fretting), which meant a lot more mountain biking and reading (although not at the same time) compared to years past 🤙

We also treated ourselves to a new laptop*, marking the first new piece of equipment in Cromulent’s lifetime (we run a lean operation, and pass the savings on to our customers!). Still no monitor, but that’s OK — it wouldn’t fit on the lap desk on which we do ~98% of our work.

*Our old laptop still works fine, but we figure it’s probably prudent not to completely rely upon a 12 year-old device; also, it’s reached the certain-apps-no-longer-work-on-it stage of life, and we really hate typing out messages on our phone.

Project notes

We’re fortunate to work on many interesting projects, for many interesting companies, in many interesting markets.

As is typically the case…

  • Our smallest projects were blog posts, but we probably only wrote a dozen or so of them this year
  • The largest were flagship thought leadership pieces at the heart of massive global marketing campaigns (we remain grateful to have emerged as the go-to thought leadership partner for a number of companies)
  • The in-betweens were largely things like datasheets, brochures, whitepapers, and various different labels of longer-form content (e.g., eGuide, eBook, etc.)

…and our work was attributed to Presidents, CISOs, CIOs, CTOs, VPs, Directors, Product Marketers, Architects, Researchers, and more.

Following the same pattern as probably the last 5 years, most of our activity in Y7 dealt with cybersecurity and close adjacencies like IAM, DFIR, and backup solutions.

Of course, we also had got to write about AI quite a bit (particularly genAI, RAG, and AI agents), which remains slightly ironic given that we’ve never used any of the new-fangled AI ourselves (but back in our university days we built fuzzy logic controllers and neural nets, among other varieties of AI).

Looking ahead

We head into year 8 midway through an eGuide and a couple of blogs, with a bunch of annual thought leadership pieces scheduled. So it looks like we’ll be keeping busy (and we expect cybersecurity and AI to continue to represent the bulk of our work).

— — —

Buoyed by our longstanding approach of doing good work at reasonable prices, Cromulent has grown from humble roots (as a semi-serious/semi-joking idea) to become possibly the most ‘successful’ single-person tech-focused marketing agency in KW? Ontario? Canada?

(We’re not omniscient, so we can’t really say for sure.)

Of course, we couldn’t do it alone, so we want to thank everyone who’s contributed to Cromulent’s success — and made our annual donations possible — including:

  • Cromulent’s clients, who really make it a pleasure to do what we do and who continue to refer their colleagues and contacts, and who bring us in to their new employers (see above). We’ve worked with hundreds of folks over the years, and doing so has been a real treat. To almost all of these people, we’re just a face on a video call (i.e., we’ve never met in person), so we very much appreciate them putting their trust in us!
  • Our intrepid on-call graphic designer, who does terrific work remarkably quickly while seamlessly adapting to our clients’ branding and design guidelines
  • Friends and former colleagues, who provide helpful perspectives (and who are responsible for more than a few referrals)
  • My family, who didn’t quite get what we were doing when we ‘opted out’ of the traditional corporate world in 2017 (and who, come to think of it, still might not fully get it), but who took it as a given that things would work out
  • My accountant, who expertly handles the important stuff
  • Everyone else who’s said good things about us, supported us, and so on!