As of this month it’s been 5 years. Five years as HeroCoders. Five Years selling apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. We started small - just the two founders. Then hired another developer. Then another.
Looking at where we are five years in, we feel pretty good about the milestones we’ve reached:
Building a Stellar Team 👬
Our modest team has grown to 16, all remote, working from six different countries around the world. Along with developers, we now have admin assistance, a super-star support team, a marketing team, and our first product manager.
The other wonderful thing that happened in 2022 is that ten of us were able to meet face to face at our first, annual company retreat. We’re already busy planning the next one - working out the logistics of flights and visas, and thrilled not to be worrying about covid restrictions!
Growing our team gave us a chance to improve our hiring process. In 2022, we reviewed 200 candidates and found the ones that are the right fit. We continue to refine our process and look forward to hiring for several more key positions in 2023.
Apps To Be Proud Of
Our apps in the Atlassian Marketplace continue to grow. Two of our paid apps showed nearly 50% growth in the number of Active Installs:
- Issue Checklist for Jira Pro – 49% ⬆️
And our free apps are performing even better.
Our biggest challenge product-wise has been completing a merger we started last year. Our developers are working hard on a new Enterprise checklist app that combines the best features of Issue Checklist for Jira Pro and Checklist for Jira. But unanticipated complexities emerged and it has taken longer than we thought.
New Markets
The past year also saw us make our first foray into another market, dipping our toe in the Microsoft waters by introducing To-do Checklist for MS Teams. It’s been more successful than we ever imagined, so we’re keen to expand on it in 2023. Well done, @Farid Khaheshi .
A couple of our developers have been using their hackathon and 20% pet-project time to develop a time tracking app for monday.com. We’re putting the final touches on it and hope to release it soon.
Super Support
When we began five years ago, the same developers who built the product were responsible for supporting the product. That became unsustainable, so we contracted with e-core until we were ready to hire our own team. Today, we still have an assigned “developer on support”, but they are in the background. The job of ensuring customers success falls on our three-person support team who handled over 2000 requests in 2022 alone.
The Bottom Line 📈
For any business, the bottom line is the bottom line. In April of 2022, we celebrated reaching $2M ARR, and it increased 30% by the end of the year. The economy is shifting, but we remain confident that with hard work, our company will continue to grow. (We’ll be growing our team as well. Keep an eye on this space - we’ll open recruiting for a couple of positions in the upcoming weeks.)
Five years is both a long time, and the blink of eye. It has been an exciting journey from two-man-startup to the robust company we have today. We look forward to seeing what the next five years bring.
