Web design firm Streamline Inc., which started as a subsidiary of Sacramento web design firm Digital Deployment, is going it alone following the sale of the parent company.
Streamline specializes in building and maintaining websites for special districts, like sewer districts, fire departments, utilities and other quasi-governmental agencies, said Mac Clemmens, founder of Digital Deployment and Streamline.
Clemmens is taking $2 million from the sale of Digital Deployment to Planeteria Media of Santa Rosa earlier this year and investing in the growth of Streamline, he said.
Streamline started in late 2015 building its first website for special districts. It had built 20 of them by the end of 2016 and it had 400 by the end of 2019. Streamline now has more than 700 websites, all built on proprietary custom software.
That is differentiated from Digital Deployment’s websites, which were built on Drupal, an open-source web content management system.
Digital Deployment started in Clemmens’ dorm room in 2004, when he began building custom websites. By the time he sold Digital Deployment earlier this year, it had more than 100 customers with total recurring revenue in the seven figures, he said. Digital Deployment built and maintained websites for cities, agencies, retirement funds and private companies.
It sold those customers to Planeteria, which also designs and supports websites for companies and public agencies. Planeteria has built more than 500 sites since it started in 1999, according to its website.
Clemmens said he is under a nondisclosure agreement and cannot disclose the value of the sale. He did say the value of ongoing and recurring revenue is attractive to buyers. Digital Deployment had less than 3% turnover of customers annually.
Streamline’s customers are special districts all over the country, which is a target-rich environment because there are more than 40,000 of them. In the special district business, Streamline has less than a 1% annual attrition rate, Clemmens said.
Streamline currently has 18 employees, up from six last year, and nearly all of them still come into the company’s offices in Midtown Sacramento.
Clemmens said he would like to grow Streamline to manage the websites of 4,000 special districts over the next seven years. And he would like to sell more services and features to all those customers, including cybersecurity and Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility software.
