The early days in Revit

One of the fascinating views in business is a startup that succeeds, Revit was one of these companies that established itself out of nowhere, if you are after the BIM industry from the early 2000s, you will be surprised how Revit passed the established market leaders of that time and became one of the leading companies in the industry.

This article talks about one of the conferences for Autodesk Revit, check it here in the AEC Bytes magazine.

I'll highlight 2 parts that are very inspiring for any startup:

Conant showed an early photo of the Revit team in the summer of 1999—of the 12 to 13 people in it at that time, about half of them are still around at Autodesk, working on Revit.

It was interesting to learn more about the early days of Revit, especially a "behind the scenes" look that we don't otherwise get a chance to hear about. I recall the public launch of Revit in the summer of 2000, when it was a very brash, in-your-face upstart that was seriously challenging far more established players like Autodesk, Bentley, and Graphisoft. In particular, it showed up at trade shows such as the AIA National Convention with a booth larger than Autodesk! What we didn't know at that time was that it actually had only 12 paying customers then and spent a sizable portion ($20,000) of its early revenue for a professionally produced video. Luckily for the start-up, Autodesk recognized its potential and acquired it in 2002. The rest, as they say, is history! An interesting fact to note is that most of those first paying customers are using still Revit.