Looking back at 2015

Sep 11, 20264 min read
Looking back at 2015

Sixfold growth, expansion abroad, new features and a team twice the size. A lot happened at Smartsupp in 2015. We have to admit that we are not the most active when it comes to communicating on the blog, so here is at least a short summary with the most important numbers and events of last year, so that you know what we actually do at Smartsupp all year.

The numbers

As of 1 January 2016 Smartsupp had climbed to 6,300 AU (active users), of which 1,470 were PU (paid users). For comparison, at the start of 2015 we were at roughly 1,000 AU and 400 PU. Revenue for 2015 reached 4.8 million Czech crowns, against 800 thousand in 2014 – so a rather nice growth of around 600 % in both the user base and revenue.

Even though we expanded abroad successfully throughout last year, the Czech and Slovak markets held on to more than half of the total: 51 % of users are CZ/SK versus 49 % from abroad. Among foreign languages the largest are Polish (630 AU), Spanish (500 AU) and French (200 AU). We do not measure it by country yet. At the same time, languages such as Romanian, Norwegian, Turkish, Traditional Chinese and even Slovak ( ! :) were added to the site. The languages were translated for us free of charge by users who got in touch themselves and offered to help with localisation. The site is now in 17 languages in total and the app itself has 13.

New features

Among the features we launched last year, these are worth mentioning:

  • visitor recording, which is the most groundbreaking feature in the whole history of Smartsupp and took roughly a year to develop (about half a year of development itself and then half a year of testing and fine-tuning with users)

  • company identification in the style of Leady.cz – we have our own database, although it is noticeably smaller than the Leady one

  • reworked statistics – new, nicer charts plus a simplification of the existing metrics

  • an extended API, which now covers exports of chat conversations, statistics, office hours and more

  • the Braintree payment gateway, where you can pay by credit card and through PayPal directly on our site without a redirect to an external gateway. All payment details are processed through Braintree via the API (the gateway is PCI compliant – Smartsupp has no access to payment details). I have to say that the Braintree user experience is excellent. The whole payment process runs on your own front end, so you can design it exactly the way you want. That removes the problems with redirects and localisation and makes everything considerably simpler.

We included all of these features in the existing plans at the same price. So over the whole year things were only added and nothing became more expensive. Besides the features mentioned, 2015 was mainly a year of bug fixing and fine-tuning the existing features.

New customers

I cannot resist showing off a few of the larger companies that deployed Smartsupp last year. Worth mentioning are:

  • Seznam.cz + Zboží.cz

  • Česká pojišťovna + Generali

  • AXA

  • RWE Energetika

  • Student Agency (they tested it on letenky.cz, hopefully they will extend it to other sites in time)

  • Okay Elektro + Jena nábytek

  • Kasa.cz

  • Kytary.cz

  • Comfor.cz

  • Gigacomputer.cz

  • aaapoptavka.cz

  • Miamicityballet.org (to this day I cannot believe that paying in euros did not put them off :)

  • and the cherry on top is ruzovyslon.cz

From 2014, Skypicker, Alza, Ferratum Bank and Škoda Auto are still with us.

New team members

Of course we would not have managed all of this on our own. While a year ago there were four of us in the office, there are now nine. Last year we gained a new developer, a support technician and a marketer. This January we expanded the offices to 66 square metres and took on two new team members – another developer and another support technician. So we now run with 4 developers, 2 support technicians, 1 marketer, 1 CEO and me, who occasionally cleans the fridge and brings everyone coffee.

What comes next?

In 2016 you can look forward to:

  • a native Android app

  • a completely new dashboard in react.js – the main benefits from the user's point of view will be a simpler interface and a better user experience. Moving to react.js will let us deliver responsive design on tablets and brings many internal advantages in terms of development speed and simplicity of the architecture.

  • improvements to stability – even though this work is not visible, a lot is happening on our backend. In fact it is even more work than the whole front end and the expansion put together. This year we are migrating to a brand new managed server at VShosting. We are refactoring the whole server code, where we are staying with node.js. We are scripting hard so that we can spin up new server instances faster (read: scale more efficiently), and on top of all that we are moving some Smartsupp components to CDN77 and Digital Ocean (read: the cloud). All of it to improve stability and speed up the app.

So on into 2016, where everything will be more mobile, simpler and more stable.

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