Rise and Shine

At the start of the year, Kris decided to leave the team. It was just us three and Tisho remaining. The last of Mohicans. We were doing ok all things considered. There was money coming from projects. Swipes Personal seemed to have a life of its own. It was still growing at a steady pace with a strong user base and kept getting promoted by Apple. The Swipes Workspace didn't share the same fortune. The past 3 years have been an intense struggle filled with defeats. We felt really tired and started dwelling on the idea of whether it was time to call off the mission and shut the whole thing down. But we didn't, thanks to Tisho.

An optimist by heart Tisho was the one who convinced the rest of us to give Swipes another try. He believed that the problem was not the product itself. Rather, the tool was not marketed properly and thus it couldn't reach the right people. So we decided to give Swipes Workspace "one last attempt".

In the meantime the beauty of life manifested itself. Yana gave birth to little baby Bjørn and Our Swipes Family grew with one more member. Since Yana couldn't help the team in the same capacity over the next couple of months the rest of us chipped in to cover for her.

The external projects were going well. Most importantly we had a financial resource to give us independence from the constant need to raise rounds. We needed more people to cover the demand. It was at that moment two juniors joined our team Valentina (design) and Petar (front-end). There was a fresh new energy in the team.

It was time to test Tisho's hypothesis. We hired Eli to overtake the much-neglected marketing of the company. For the next few months, all efforts were around getting more people into the product. We achieved it only to realize that our hypothesis was wrong. There were still very few people who stayed in the product.

But we didn't give up. We felt that there were still unexplored avenues — a better way to shape the experience. Instead of trying to fix the product we already had, we decided to build a completely new tool that would fit our needs… again.

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