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.

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.