The good, old 2015
On Friday, December 18th we summed up the year and had an X-Mass Party.
I was very excited to share some numbers with the members of DeFamily. 2015 was very intense and I know that everyone added their brick to the wall. We’ve done many things: new employees, business travel and content marketing activities. We started with an ambitious plan and to be honest, we managed to deliver over 85% of it. Preparing my slides made me very happy, because most of them I could label as a “PASS”. I won’t be writing about failures here. I prefer to inspire you with the good stuff. Let me share some of our successes with you.
People in 2015
We employed 10 new people with different backgrounds and experience. They are really valuable assets and they became a part of our DeFamily very quickly. We’ve managed to organize 4 D-days, when we created many cool things. We organized a lot of workshops about Emotional Intelligence, Agile Development, UX and Marketing. We’ve also attended a number of conferences as speakers or attendees. We had a company retreat. This year we had an Epic Paintball Battle during our DeIntegration. Great time with great people. I am really happy that we’ve done so many cool things together.
Desmart Office gets bigger in 2015
I love this one. We’ve doubled our office space from 150 m2 to 300 m2. We were building it the whole summer from scratch. Everyone got involved and I really appreciate how people decided to spend their weekends and stay after work to create such a great place. This video will show you the whole process and fun we had together:
We’ve also switched to Macs. We bought 13 new Apple devices and we are really happy about using them. I mean – we didn’t switch to Macs completely, but most of our developers thought that Macs could be a better development platform than Windows. We also got some new additional equipment like: a projector, whiteboards and now we can run our workshops fully equipped. It’s a great pleasure to create a space with things you always wanted to have in the office.
Business in 2016
This was a very accelerated year. Together with Damian I travelled to Germany and UK a couple of times to find new connections and potential clients. We scheduled meetings online via LinkedIn or Meetup.com and then grabbed a beer or coffee with many new people. It paid off. Right now we have clients from NY, Berlin, London and even RSA. The number of my connections on LinkedIn increased from 355 to 1164 people!
We’ve also dug deeper into Agile. What seemed unbelievable at the beginning of this year, became a reality. We learned that we can convince clients that this is the most effective way of building the software and… they love it! It’s extremely convenient for both sides to work in weekly sprints, but I don’t have to tell you this now.
Read one of our stories and you will understand.
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What’s next?
2016 will be more exciting. Thanks to our expansion, we know that we should have even more clients from all around the world. Right now, we don’t only build startups with our clients, but we also create solutions for the real problems for SMBs, as well as bigger brands. It can bring great satisfaction, when you see that your software can even save someone’s life (we work on an interesting project currently, more details soon).
I believe that 2016 will be revolutionary for us. More revenue, more activities, cool clients and more fun, because this is what brings us all together. I hope that DeFamily will keep growing and everyone will put in 110% of their effort to make all our plans happen.
Stay tuned!
