Hi, this is Cláudia writing. Another year races by and it’s already time for our annual report. We’re celebrating our seventh year, seven years of work in progress.

Some days ago I was having a conversation with a friend and got asked: what is the most difficult thing about running a company? I answered: “Not following any trends and not letting numbers define us. How many workers, how many clients, how much revenue.” We really want to focus on the people, not in the numbers. The work quality we can give to our employees, clients and community, is our first priority.

Let me start by presenting the team. Sérgio and I are the founders, managing the Development and Design teams, respectively. Filipe Alves is one of the Android Developers, our first permanent employee, and Liliana Faustino our intern doing Android Development too. Sara Pereira is our virtual assistant helping us with our admin and finances. Right now we’re a happy team of 5. Learn more about our story.

Interesting notes about Bloco:

• We believe Bloco is a bootstrapped company, but we did receive 2 project-specific grants;
• We always said we didn’t wanna have internships, but Liliana Faustino is our second intern;
• We said we only hired partners but that’s yet to happen;

I'm sure we said a lot of things we didn’t follow and vice versa. And we’re very happy with that. That is the magic of the number 7, learning by doing and doing what we feel is right.

Client Work

The year had a slow start. With the lack of client work we focused more on internal projects. But we still have some new projects to talk about. And we’re now closing several leads we can't wait to share with you next year.

DR.BILL

After 5 years 😲 working together with Dr.Bill, it was finally time for us to part ways. We still had a great relationship and loved working with the team. But this decision will help us tackle bigger projects with our full dedicated team.

AWALA

We’re still working with Awala, now maintaining the apps we’ve built last year and rooting for the success of the project.

STATIONHEAD

This was our big project last year. This year the focus was to transfer the project to an internal team, so they could continue improving the popular app.

OONI

Our first new project this year. And also the first client we ever closed through cold outreach. OONI stands for Open Observatory of Network Interference, a project that spun off the Tor Project. They’ve built a useful Android app that measures the quality of your internet access and lets you become part of a global community that analyzes Internet censorship. We’ve helped them build a test suite to improve the quality of the app.

PAYMENTS COMPANY

We can’t disclose the company yet, but we’re working with a large payments company on a fun project, with hardware-specific constraints.

Internal Project

LARGE TEXT

This year we focused on marketing our Large Text app. We tried a wide range of strategies, from translating it to Spanish to creating a new landing page. And the results were definitely noticeable: 5 times more installs and 4 times more sales. The bottom-line results are still modest, an average of €30 per month. But we’ve learned a lot about app marketing.

CADERNO

Again no time invested on Carderno this year. New installs did go down by one third, but the overall installed audience grew by 10% and we’re almost crossing the 1 million total installs!

CIRCLES

We had the Circles app ready to launch, after working for the Stacks grant we received. But we couldn’t get the Stacks community to agree on mobile authentication protocol in due time. And it never made sense for us to publicize an app that would only work in a limited set of conditions. On the good side, the full app is open-source and we also did some important improvements on the Stacks Android SDK.

Internal Affairs

HIRING

Our latest attempt to hire resulted in Liliana’s internship. We had reservations accepting an internship. It requires time-commitment to be done right. But we accepted Liliana and we’re glad for this decision. Having a woman on the development team has been our desire for a long time, Liliana is looking like a great fit and we hope this results into a permanent hire. She is developing an app to showcase apps curated by Bloco’s team.

PROCESS

Our biggest process change: we’re now just working 4 days a week (we don’t work on Fridays). So what do our weeks look like? The first hour on Mondays is for our Breakly (Breakfast + Weekly) where we write down the work for the week by project and department (business development, communication and operations). The Breakly meeting doesn’t determine all the work we need to do, it is just an aim or direction for the week. On Thursdays, we have a Retro Meeting where we review what we achieved or not. Plus, everyone measures their week from 0 to 10, along with a description of what went well, what went poorly and what can be improved. Then we end the week with a gin or cider.

Last year, we introduced a new concept, the CEO of the week — Chief of Entertainment Officer. The CEO is responsible for creating at least one moment of relaxation or entertainment for the team. That can include going to a new restaurant, going to an exhibition, going for a picnic at the park, etc..

RETREAT

This year we had our first retreat, up North in Celorico de Basto. We started our trip in Amarante with a quick stop for lunch and getting to know the city. Next we reached Celorico de Basto and visited some beautiful places nearby: Santuário Senhora da Graça, Cascata do Bilhó, Fisgas do Ermelo and Piocas de Baixo. On the second day, we went on a bike tour from Celorico de Bastos to Mondim de Basto with a lovely picnic by the old train station of Mondim. In the afternoon we had an annual planning meeting, followed by a well-deserved rest in the pool, spa and sauna. On our last day, we visited Guimarães and had a delicious vegan lunch at Cor de Tangerina.

FINANCES

In the last 12 months, with the additional grant we’ve won, our income grew slightly to about €98K. Our expenses also increased, especially with the new hires' salaries, but they sat at about €71K. Overall, it was a year similar to the last one.

Expenses fell into: 39% Salaries; 35% Taxes; 13% Services, Utilities and Insurances; 6% Others; 4% Events; 3% Rental costs;

Everyone's salary got a small raise to €1224 net per month. We hope this next year we'll be able to raise it more quickly to the local industry average. Liliana is receiving an internship grant of 800€ net per month.

GOALS FOR 2022

• Raise our salaries to 1750€ net per month;
• Hire one more permanent developer (fingers crossed for Liliana);
• Launch a new company website with more information about our services and other improvements;
• Find a new office, to have a more comfort and extra facilities for our needs;
• Increase and improve our business development.

ENDNOTES

We want to thank all the people who make Bloco possible: Germana Rodrigues and Sérgio Domingues who were part of the team and are now in other adventures. Our accountants, Gesconsulting, for keeping our finances in place and João Madeira, our lawyer, helping us with contracts and our legal questions. James Knight and Gustavo Nereida for the help and trust. It’s great when our clients become good friends. 😁