Sprend's customer support service - a real thing, not a myth

A topic about customer support services deserve to have a song. I really don't know how anyone yet didn't write one about such an important feeling: desperation while you're trying to reach it. It would become a huge hit. Millions of people would sympathize. It would be number one during the working part of the week. Then it would fell to second place, because of an even greater one: "Why are weekends passing so fast?".  And on a third-place after, you're guessing the title: "Oh no, it's Monday again!". 

 To whom could you complain if the service for complaints is not answering you? Let's start from the beginning. It's a familiar feeling for all of us. Part of the story where we need to decide will we buy something and that is the last time that we'll have control over the situation. This light and great feeling. Everything is possible and our life will be changed after. No matters are we buying a toothpick (which is a really important thing in certain moments) or a house. Only in the case we walk away at that point, without buying it, this will become a perfect product for us. Our memory will bring it to perfection. But we don't have time for the imagination of feelings. The things are simple, we need something and it needs to fulfill the purpose. 

It's not easy to stand behind the product or service after selling it. Not to make people feeling good only in those 10 minutes before buying it, but also, the whole time after. Be real. Even with the best ones, sometimes we have questions about it,  but does it often looks any different than standing on the high hill and shouting it into the void? This echo we hear after is the same question returning to us, instead of the service providers. 

Sprend has a different way from the beginning of its existence. Arne Evertsson, the founder, is still one of those who you'll get on the phone or by email, very easily if you have any questions regarding sending large files. Today, Tanja and Karin are the ones who joined him. No matter if you're using Sprend for free, or you're a paying, PRO user with more advantages, you'll get help. With our servers in Sweden, you can send large files easily, securely and fast.

With Sprend, you don't need to climb a mountain. Only if you like it and if you do it for sport. 

Space Oddity

Space designing can be an interesting, fun, or sometimes even dangerous thing for human relations. One can never know what to expect.

We started planning the design of our office in Pula. Chairs, tables, colours, preferences, styles and measures. It would be good to start with measures. So we did. The rest was pretty much fun. When you realise that you work with a person who easily finds entertainment in a lot of things, it becomes magic. Till this moment, I always thought that I'm inclined to exaggerate with styles and wishes, so I tried to bring that back in balance. But completely unnecessary. Tanja not only supported me in each unusual suggestion, but she had it even more. At that moment I realised that her sentence: "Only a sky is a limit" is a vivid thing. 

We're waiting for our furniture to come. One last thing is how to approach the entrance with an eight tons truck in a center of Pula. A small thing for us.

When you find a story in a cup of coffee

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” T.S. Eliot

Some days are passing highly inspired, in some of them, we're in search of it. Brilliant ideas, practical solutions, something effective to be satisfied with ourselves and our work. Small things can always help in that process. Coffee could be one of the solutions. If the intention is to go out of the office, to take a walk and get one of the best cups in town, who knows on which corner the inspiration could find you. That's the main concept of our brilliant idea maker, Arne. So, exactly from Stockholm, he discovered Calm Wins Coffee & Cocktails in the center of Pula.

If you ask me, and I live there, I wouldn't know that the place exists. High quality, great tasting coffee. And here's the story about it: "Coopedota was founded in 1960. in Costa Rica. Currently has 900 farmers with families and it's an integral part of the development of a community of more than 8000 people".

Sometimes the magic is in Arne's code, sometimes in Tanja's remarkable skills of leading or Karin's brightness and humor. And some days it can be just in a cup of coffee. Wish you the best of luck with finding yours.

And Sprend d.o.o was born

A wise man once said: Even the longest journey starts with the first step.

After weeks of preparations and a journey trough todays’s Europe with changing flight schedules, empty airports and heavy rain, but also with a great taste of adventure and excitement, Tihana and me finally gathered in Pula to do this first step - register Sprend d.o.o, a subsidary of our swedish company, that will help us to build an even greater service for our customers.

Starting a company is like constructing a building. If the building is a one story building it will require certain footings to be dug.  However, if you are going to build a 50 story building, it will require a completely different type of foundation. We want to build a skyscraper. What is the better place to find the inspiration for that than Pula, a town full of 2 000 years old ancient remains, still standing there and reminding us of past times.

Everything was perfectly planned and organised by Tihana, so the only thing left for me was to sign lots of papers. In fact, my only worry was if my signature would look similar on all these papers :-) People we met were kind, friendly and well prepared. It felt that Pula was welcoming Sprend with open arms.

After the formal part was done, we also had time to check a coffee shop that we would like to cooperate with, and our new office space at Mletačka 12. The office is still empty and the next important step will be to transform it to the greatest work space ever. So stay tuned!

We ended this exciting day with dinner at Farabuto, together with Johanna, our great friend and a source of positive energy, and Tarita, a girl that will help us with financial matters here in Croatia.

So from now, there is only one way - forward. We start where we are, with what we have, and we are confident that this will lead us into something great.

Recycled idea

To have a business meeting in the morning and to be happy to see your colleagues, that the greatest luck. It's Monday and you're not sad, hating your life and waiting for the next weekend to come, that's rare. But on the top, when the ones you're working with, share your sense of humor, it's even funnier. Very small things can describe bigger ones. I'll tell you one. After a meeting with our business partner, I forgot to save a paid bill for the cost-covering. So I went back (only because I promised to Tanja and Arne to send it) and asked for the thing. It was already trashed. The next question was: Would you like to have it like this, crumpled? Yes, why not. Seems it has a story. A few days after, at our morning meeting, we mentioned that topic. I told the funny story to everyone and we started to laugh, making jokes and then someone said: You should frame it. That was it. Now, we have the first thing for our new office walls. The one that will tell us a story of how our unintentional mistakes can be brilliant, but just in case you're telling them to the ones who'll make it brilliant. Only, there is one thing about this. Fridays don't represent a day when you're feeling this huge happiness of a non-working weekend, expecting your absolute freedom. You already have it.

What is Sprend?

Six images say more than six thousand words.

Sprend has an office in Pula

If you have an idea and a vision, how long will take you to make it possible? The catch is that you can never know it. The starting point is sometimes hard, but mostly exciting and challenging, keeping you to aim higher.

That’s what we tried. After just a month of searching, Sprend has a new office in Pula, Croatia. The homeland of the best and the worst car in history, Yugo 45. Not to be the worst, but expecting the best, we applied for the office in the Istrian Development Agency. Its primary role lies in the stimulation of the development of small and medium-sized entrepreneurship in the region of Istria.

We’re so happy to become a part of the Entrepreneurial Incubator “Challenge” Pula. Established in 2005. there are ten office rooms and more than 40 start-up entrepreneurs have been incubated with steady growth rates. Sprend is one of ten now.

Do you know what else is Yugo 45? Most adored car in the history of this region. Still, after so many years, seeing it on the streets of Pula will not leave anyone indifferent. That’s our next goal.

What is Sprend doing in Croatia?

The photo was taken by analog photography lover Petra Gardijan & her comrade Zorki 4K. The acrobat is Vili Paoletić, the most skillful guy you could ever meet. If you ask him, he'll tell you that anyone can do what he does.

If we speak about the current situation in Croatia, we need to consider the past few months. The Istrian peninsula is a nice place to live, with pleasant people, beautiful nature, and rich history. When Coronavirus occurred in March, it took only a few days to change this town and to put the citizens in a state of shock. Croatia, unlike Sweden, chooses the lockdown at the beginning of a struggle. Together with a fear of the unknown, everything was stopped just in a few days. Schools, bars, restaurants, and all other things that were a part of our lives before, were closed quickly. Socializing with people out of someone's household was not recommended. Offices were replaced for homes for the ones who were lucky, and many others lost their jobs. Not knowing much about this new virus, the comfort that you could get very often was not to worry, the virus kills only older people. Due to the enormous fear, humane society became rootless not even aware of it at that moment. Luckily, very soon we learn how to live with this, to be responsible, but not the prisoners of the situation. Like the rest of the world, we're waiting for this to pass. Things seem much more normal now. But the consequences are greater than visible. With a lot of unemployed, without tourism, our number one in the region, fear grows as winter comes. So the question is, what is Sprend doing in Pula? It's sending large files and hope.

Our Big Croatian Adventure

Arne in the classic Zastava 750, Fićo, on the Forum Romanum in Pula.

We are setting out on a big Croatian adventure, starting a Croatian company, Sprend d.o.o. If we succeed in this endeavour the development studio of sprend.com will be based in Pula, Istria, Croatia.

And how can we not succeed? It's impossible to fail since: The road is the goal. The connections we are making with people, local government, and institutions make the whole project worth it, even if we don't find a single developer to employ.

So why Croatia? Will it be easier to find great developers here than in Stockholm? No, it's probably just as difficult. Pula is small town in Croatia far from Zagreb, which makes it even more special. The big IT company of the region is Infobip. They've been busy luring away developers from the capital to Istria. Their efforts do in turn it make our task easier. We will try to recruit the developer who feels more at home in a small company where she becomes a crucial member of the team. Perhaps she works for Infobip today?

We're opening up in Istria because because we live there part of the year and because we will get more lines of code per Euro spent, than we would in Sweden.

So what are the plans, the team, and how's the progress? Tune in, and you'll be able to read more in future posts.

Alea iacta est.

Money

Price increase

On October 1, 2020, we are raising prices for Sprend Pro from 540 SEK per year to 720 SEK per year, a 33% increase.

Why are we doing this?

To make more money. We are going to use the money for advertising (Google Ads), a new visual profile, and for hiring programmers. Sprend has great unfulfilled potential and things are just moving too slowly when I am the only hacker at the office. More money means more speed.

Is it going to work out?

Hopefully, yes. The competitors will still be more expensive after our price increase. If it works out badly we can always change the prices again.

Even more importantly, we will soon offer Sprend in more currencies than SEK, namely EUR, GBP and USD. It’s no surprise we currently have most of our customers in Sweden. Let’s change that too.

New price list

Plan	EUR	SEK	GBP	USD
Sprend Pro 12 months	€70	720 kr	£62	$85
Sprend Pro 1 month	€9	92 kr	£8	$11

We are dropping the 3-month plan in favor of a 1-month plan, in line with competitors’ offerings.

By signing up for a year you get 4 months for free compared with the 1-month plan, €70 instead of €9 x 12 = €108. I think that makes sense since the user would normally take a vacation, even from sprending, during the year.

In our 15th year

Sprend started in 2004 as skickafilen.se. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can show a screenshot of the original user interface.

I had traffic signs in mind when designing the logo and general ui.

In 2008 we changed the domain name to sprend.com to have a more language neutral name. “Sprend” sounds a bit like “send” and can be used as a verb.

In 2011 we released the paid subscription, Sprend Pro. And last year, 2018, was the first year when our revenue was able support a full time employee, i.e. petit moi.

Slow entrepreneurship, we’ve entered our 15th year (“we” = pluralis maiestatis). The future is bright.

This post marks the reboot of the Sprend Blog.