2021 work review: Moodup

I had a clear professional goal for 2021: improve as a developer-entrepreneur by learning new technologies, writing great software, and growing my companies.

To support this goal, I decided at the beginning of the year to stop taking on consulting projects. For the previous three years, I spent a third of my working hours on strategy consulting for various companies, NGOs, and in the public sector.

Consulting was intellectually rewarding and provided me with enough income to focus on programming whenever I was not on a project. However, it demanded significant time and energy, slowing down progress when it came to my own projects and goals.

At the beginning of the year, my software projects could support me financially full-time, so I made the jump. The decision to stop consulting resulted in me having to say no to many people, which were disappointed as a result.

But with an undivided focus on software development, this year I had much more energy to focus on programming and entrepreneurship. I divided it between three projects: Moodup, Frami, and various side projects.

Moodup

Moodup, an employee pulse survey tool, was my main professional focus in 2021. The idea was born in October 2020 and I completed a bare-bones version of the app by the end of that year. In 2021, I spent most of my professional time growing the company. The activities were of three types:

1. Development: new features, improvements, and bug fixes
2. Sales: meetings and calls with leads, customers and partners
3. Marketing: online marketing, a podcast and a conference

1. Development

I worked on improving Moodup quite consistently throughout the whole year. Development was roughly equally divided between reactive time (responding to customer requests/bug reports) and proactive time (developing improvements and new features).

It was interesting to view a breakdown of the changes I committed to the Moodup codebase. The app now has just over 1.000 commits, most of which I made over the various months in 2021 (charts from Fork):

Commits by month

Some months were busier than others, for example while I worked on a large new feature. In the more quiet months, I spent more time on sales and marketing.

Commits by weekday

The first half of the week seems to be the most productive for me, while Saturdays are the most quiet. However, I found development during weekends to be highly productive. Weekends are more conducive to deep work, with no meetings, emails or phone-calls breaking up the time.

Commits by hour

Afternoons are clearly the time when I program the most. In the morning, I would usually focus more on sales and marketing, e.g. by going through emails, making neccessary phone-calls and getting other "business-stuff" out of the way. Then in the afternoon, I would usually close the email and just focus on coding until dinner.

2. Sales

Customers who sign up for Moodup start by having a meeting with us, where we demo the product, discuss how it fits with their needs, and deliver pricing if they are interested.

In total, we met with 75 potential customers in 2021. I talked to approximately 50 of these myself in the beginning, using the opportunity to learn more about their needs and how to continue developing the service so it would provide the most value.

In the fall, my friend joined Moodup and started handling sales and onboarding for most new customers. This gave me more time for development and marketing, as at that point I felt like I had gotten a good feeling for the needs of workplaces and how to best meet them.

3. Marketing

This was the biggest struggle for me. Marketing is something I have to force myself to do. In contrast, development is something I have to force myself not to do. As a result, I probably spent too little time on marketing relative to what whould have been optimal to grow the company.

Nevertheless, the efforts I made resulted in many workplaces being interested in and subsequently signing up for Moodup. The key efforts here were social media campaigns, a podcast that Moodup sponsored, and a full-day 600-person conference, where Moodup had a sales booth and we met with dozens of HR managers.

I have a number of ideas for new campaigns in 2022, which will be interesting to try out. I intend to put more effort into marketing next year. Marketing is inherently more scalable than sales, as a single campaign can result in dozens of new customers without any additional work.

Summary

Overall, I am happy with Moodup's progress in 2021. At the start of the year, it was a basic application with one customer and no surveys delivered. By the end of the year, there were 10.000 employees and 500 managers using the system, with over 160.000 questions answered.

Moreover, the service is now powerful, battle-tested, and flexible, providing managers with many tools to understand their employees and improve the workplace. I had a bit of an impostor syndrome at the beginning of the year, but over full year of new features, improvements and great results, that feeling gradually disappeared.

I look forward to continuing to grow and improve Moodup in 2022 and seeing where the company will be at the end of the upcoming year.

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This is my first review post about 2021. I also plan to review my other professional projects as well as my personal life in separate posts.

Newer: 2021 personal review