I felt guilty for not writing a post in this blog for almost 2 months now. But in this quiet Saturday I’d like to write once again, especially because we have just closed the first quarter of 2010. Let me write about our evaluations so far in 2010, which I have actually written to our employees several days ago.
The first three months was considered ‘good’. We’ve grown the number of employees from <35 in December 2009 to >45 in March 2010. Technology-wise we have successfully diversified to Blackberry and Iphone development, and market-wise we have successfully diversified to domestic corporations and Indonesian public sector.
We are also fully aware that developing products for other companies may not sustain us for a long time, so we have built our own products and sell its licenses. We also have explored other ways of working, such as with equity-sharing or revenue-sharing mechanism. We are planning to start building our own SaSS products this month as well.
Attrition rate has gone down to almost zero, and we have managed to minimize client’s dissatisfaction through better process management (measured in client termination due to dissatisfaction – which is zero, and in number of complaints, which is minimal). Growth prospect is also looking good, and we are certain to have >60 employees by this coming May/June.
That’s the good news. The bad news is, the fast pace and never ending projects with deadlines and pressures may stress out managers and developers. And the smooth runs may make managers and developers complacent and thus lose the original motivation and productivity. Both are bad. That is why I keep reminding our managers, stay paranoid. As Andy Grove said, only the paranoid survive!