5 Bloco Years 🥳
And there goes 5 years, a hand-full. It feels like a lot happened this year and, at the same time, not much changed, it's a weird feeling. But we find the company more stable now, fewer ups and downs.
PWIT Awards 2019
Client Work
We continued working with our longest client, Dr. Bill, building a useful medical billing app for Canadian doctors. And recently they were bought by RBC, Canada's largest bank, so there are interesting times ahead in this front.
A startup building a social radio app in New York. It's another project we're doing together with Pembroke. They started with an iOS app and after many user requests, we're now building their Android app.
This is a project we were looking forward but took a while to close. Now we're finally building a proof-of-concept for a network to circumvent Internet blackouts areas, all open-source.
This is our first maintenance project. We started working on with a municipal water company to maintain and improve their Android app.
Not something we usually do, but friends asked us to build a website for their company. They do great walking tours in Coimbra and about.
Internal Projects
Envelop
The big internal project this year was Envelop, that you probably already read about in this blog. We built a web app, browser extensions and an Android app together with João Diogo Costa.
It was our first decentralized app. We learned a ton building it and we also invested time marketing it. Plus we earned funding for it through the App Mining program. We don't track usage in the app, but through external stats, we estimate about 30K people have used the app so far.
Other projects
Our other Android apps in Google Play keep growing, although we're only maintaining them. Here are the stats for Caderno and Large Text:
Caderno installs
Large Text installs
Internal
Processes
Although we're quite small, we were lacking some processes to keep a pulse on our tasks and goals. So for the past year, we start our weeks with a breakly, a Monday breakfast meeting to plan the week. And we finish the week with a small retrospective chat, to discuss how the week went and what we can improve next week.
Hiring
We wrote here that we hired a junior Android developer. But after a 6-months contract, we decided that it wasn't working out, the cultural fit wasn't there. So now we're again looking for a junior developer to join us, and considering hiring someone for a mix of operations, marketing and business development.
Finances
In the last 12 months, with the additional client work and Envelop rewards, our income doubled to about €82K. Expenses also increased, especially salaries with the new hire, but they sat at about €58K. So, this was our best year in terms of profit.
With this results, we keep increasing our salaries slightly every 6 months, and they're now €1050 net per month.
Community
Community-wise, here are our activities this year:
- Continued organizing The Zain Talks every 2 months
- Organized a Blockstack meetup in Porto
- Cláudia spoke at ENEM, Demium Startups Roadshow, GDG Devfests Coimbra and Leiria
- Attended Droidcon Lisbon, the Web Summit and a remote IAM Weekend
- Cláudia got nominated for a Portuguese Women in Tech award
- And we kept sponsoring Rádio Baixa