Fin?

New year. New product. We took all our learnings and what little energy we had left and invested them in the creation of Swipes for Teams. A feature-rich substitute for Swipes Workspace that was solely focused on team planning. In May the first version of the product was ready and we opened it for Beta.

We were thrilled about our new product. For the first time since Swipes Personal, we felt the conviction that we have hit it right. This time we were certain the product was going to be a breakthrough.

But we overlooked one thing…

We didn't realize what making this final stretch costed us and what capacity we were left with. All these last months of hard work had taken a heavy toll on the team - one of the developers left the company, the other was very unsatisfied with the current situation and the last one was simply burned out. This way of working wasn't working.

We had gone through so much over the past 6 years. After the initial 2 years of success, the last 4 felt like pushing an overly large rock on an overly steep muddy hill in the rain. We were a damn fine and resilient team no doubt about it. There were numerous times when we could have quit, but we kept going. But there's a limit even to our tenacity. Our motivation and energy were exhausted. We were drained from the constant iterations and lack of results. So we did what we thought we would never do — shut down the company.

Was it all this for nothing? Did we just give up?

The lessons we learned from this experience have been extremely valuable. But what's priceless is the people and team we became in the process. That's something earned, not given. In addition, we helped make the daily life of hundreds of thousands of people around the world a little better. Even after 4 years of neglect people still LOVED Swipes Personal. It helped people remove the anxiety of piling tasks and achieve more in their day. This is why we started on this journey in the first place and we had succeeded.

To our families, mentors, investors, friends, team members, and users — thank you this wasn't going to be possible without your love, support and belief. Yes, this was all worth it. And we would forever be grateful to our younger selves for putting up with the hardships and making the sacrifices to give us these learnings.

Fast forwarding to today in 2022 we are still together as a team — Kasper, Yana, and Stefan. Scarred, Seasoned, a little wiser, and still as stubborn and relentless as in our 20s. If there's one thing that we learned that stands from this story is this. Either we do things out of belief or we don't do them at all. Swipes Personal became a success because we deeply believed this product must exist.

What do we believe in today?

There's an untapped potential in company knowledge. Vast know-how is lost or stays hidden from knowledge workers. And we are gonna change that. Join us on our next mission — Question Base.