This is our annual transparency report from the 1st of April’22 to the 31st of March’23. Another year went by and Bloco arrived at its 8th year of life. This means that it’s again time to celebrate, look back to our year, and reveal the numbers.

Moneywise, Bloco had its best year so far, almost doubling last year’s revenue. We crossed ~€180K in revenue and €135K in expenses. So let’s begin.

Client work

SWITCH PAYMENTS

This was our mystery client from last year, a payments company based in Porto. We’ve worked with their internal team for a total of 8 months, through their acquisition by SaltPay.

AWALA

Now our oldest client, we’re still working with Awala, maintaining the open-source apps and libraries we’ve built together.

PNGME

A small project where we audited the mobile SDKs of this fintech startup.

CULTURE BIOSCIENCES

Culture is a biotech startup based in San Francisco, US. We’ve helped them maintain an internal tool used by their scientists.

HONOR EDUCATION

Another Californian startup, Honor is building a big product to improve the higher education experience. We’re adding seniority to their Android development team. The product is still in stealth mode, but hopefully next year we’ll be able to show you more.

7MIND

The “headspace of Germany” as we call it, 7mind is planning to release a new app and we’re helping them build it.

Internal Projects

CABINET

The project we launched last year, in November. Cabinet was born from the difficulty of finding good news apps for Android. That’s what led us to design Cabinet: a directory of apps that does not disappoint, without false marketing or rankings based on the number of downloads. This project started during Liliana’s internship at Bloco, with the help and collaboration of the whole team. It’s also our first paid app. An important thing about having our own app laboratory is being able to test different business models and marketing strategies. It’s not going great for now, but we’re definitely learning.

LARGE TEXT

As you can see in the chart below, installs have accelerated this year. We’re still profiting from the marketing work we did last year. The rating has also been improving and now sits at an average of 4.72⭐️.

In December we launched a new pack of themes, named “Winter Holidays”, which means we now have three packs of paid themes. That increased our gross revenue to around €45/month, or €540/year.

CADERNO

We did not invest time in Caderno last year, but we’re planning to this year. At this moment we have 87.3K active devices with an average rating of 4.49⭐️. Our plan is to redesign the app and generate some revenue from it.

Internal Affairs

NEW OFFICE

Finding a new office was a goal from last year, and we’re glad that we found the one. It required some renovation work: floor restorations, wall painting and a new kitchen. But eventually, we got it done and moved into a new office across the street. It’s bigger, we finally have a meeting room and a kitchen (!), and it comes with a nice outdoor patio as a plus. We had an inauguration party and tons of friends showed up, which warmed our hearts.

We invested around €10K in the new office, even though it’s rented, but we did get three months off the rent.

Here are some photos of the new place:

TEAM

We hired Liliana full-time. We also tried hiring someone for operations and marketing but failed. So for now we’re working with a virtual assistant to help us with operations.

PROCESS AND MEDIA

Not much changed in terms of internal processes, we’ve been mostly busy with client work. We’re still enjoying working only 4 days per week. We even got an article on national press about it, Público, and another on Coimbra Coolectiva about living and working at Coimbra's downtown.

One of our concerns is around sales. We can’t complain because we get enough work through our network. But we would like to have a more repeatable sales process. This year, the whole team has been involved in gathering leads and contacting potential clients. But there’s still work to do before this process is in shape.

RETREAT

You can read about it in our blog post.

The year has just begun, and what better way to start it off right than with a company retreat? That's exactly what we did here at Bloco! We embarked on a three-day journey to Ferreira do Zêzere. Our goal was to connect with nature, recharge our batteries, and come together as a team to set the tone for a productive and successful year of 2023.

PHILANTROPY

Cláudia organized four editions of the Design Club. We also donated to three important local projects:

• Rádio Baixa: €680
• Coimbra Coolectiva: €1000
• Concerto apoio à Ucrânia: €200

Finances

As we mentioned, our income roughly doubled from last year to reach €183K. Last year it was €97K. Expenses also increased, but less so, to a total of €135K. Here’s how we spent the money:

Salaries are still at €1.5K gross, however raises are in order soon. And we gave everyone a €5K gross bonus based on 2022’s results.

GOALS FOR 2023

Here are the goals we planned for 2023 on the retreat:

• A new website with our updated services and case studies;
• Raise salaries to €2K gross until the end of the year;
• Make new connections with other companies;
• Caderno starts making money;
• Experiment with selling app templates;
• Plant a small garden 🥬 in our new outdoor patio.