Is HootSuite Canada’s next billion-dollar tech titan?

That was the question posed in a headline earlier this year on a story about HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, who pledged to grow his Vancouver company into a billion-dollar enterprise.

Well, sometime between that story’s release and HootSuite’s recent move to larger headquarters, it seems the company may be reaching its billion dollar goal.

Now, suggests Holmes, it’s time to set new goals.

“You know you just always have to keep raising the bar,” he said with a laugh when asked if he has reached his billion-dollar target.

Not that Holmes puts dollar figures to his company, which is private and doesn’t report financial statements.

However, in an interview with The Vancouver Sun he pointed out the company was valued at $200 million when OMERS Ventures bought a $20-million interest in the company just over a year ago.

That valuation, put together with HootSuite’s own recently released stats that indicate it has grown substantially since then, suggest HootSuite may close to the billion-dollar mark.

“I pointed out several years back now, I think, to building a billion-dollar company,” said Holmes. “It’s not about the dollar amount, it’s about the goal and pointing my team towards something that seemed a lofty goal at that point.”

Holmes compares today to last year at the time of the $200 million valuation.

“When I look at where we’re at now, we have definitely grown the company more since then. We are looking at that goal and thinking ‘OK what is our next goal’ and looking past that because if we set that as our goal and we get that, we need to have something on the other side of it.

“Look at the size of the industry we are in …. It is a multi-billion-dollar industry. I think there is a massive opportunity here. I think it is bigger than a billion dollars. I am excited about building this out with my team.”

Whether it’s a billion-give-or-take-a-few-hundred-million-dollars company, HootSuite has certainly grown from the seven-person startup it was a little over four years ago, an offshoot of Invoke Media, another company started by Holmes.

HootSuite, a social media management company, had its start as a free social media dashboard and while there is still a free HootSuite product, Holmes has proven that the freemium model can translate into real revenue.

“A lot of our users that are pro and enterprise users used to be free users,” he said. “They come in, they try our product for free, they like it, they upgrade, they get more seats, they get more people on their company on board — all of a sudden, they become a big client for us.

“This is a very frictionless way, it is try before you buy, and I think that is a very powerful thing for any company to be able to do in this day and age.”

In the first quarter of this year HootSuite topped six million users and saw a 272-per-cent increase in corporate sales — that is, companies valued at less than $10 billion — in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. It saw a 900-per-cent increase in international strategic sales — that is, companies valued over $10 billion.