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.

Easy as one-two-three

This is a step-by-step instruction on how to make software:

10 Select one thing to do

20 Build it together

30 Confirm that users are happy

40 Go to 10

This method also, incidentally, summarizes Agile development.

I’ve been developing software for 25 years. The craft is hard enough as it is. You don’t want to make it harder with difficult processes.

Select one thing and build it together. Why only one? Because, in a team, you don’t want to let anyone skip testing. There can be no cherry-picking of fun tasks and letting someone else do the boring stuff. We also don’t want to have unfinished work pile up.

Build the feature together, learn from each other, help each other. You will share the fun and the boring tasks.

Release it and watch users use the new feature. Learn. Adjust.

What about time estimations? Let the person interested in time also create the estimations. Let the rest of us focus on what really matters: happy users and happy team members.

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.