A very serious annual report for our shareholders

22 Dec 2009
9 comments

So how is business? That is the question that we often get. And to be honest we don't know what to answer because we don't know what is normal for a start-up. But one thing is sure; we have a lot of fun!

So to answer the question "how is business?" we thought it would be good to make an inventory of what happened since we started out.

Clients

The first thing we needed were clients. When we started out each one of us brought a few clients with them from jobs in the past or from our personal network. When we started out we had around 5 clients. Since then this number luckily grew to a number of 15 paying clients. We still can't drive porches but at least people are interested in our services and we are getting more clients every month.

Money

Of course we didn't earn a lot of money when we just started. It wasn't even enough to pay the rent. But hey, we didn't have to invest any money to get the business started so every euro that came in was profit. One thing that we discovered really early was that some clients don't pay. I think we made a classic mistake to accept jobs without asking for a 50% deposit. Since one client never payed us for a big piece of work, we learned to never start working without a deposit. At the moment what we earn per month is just enough to pay the bills and our salary is getting a bit more each month.

Sponsorship

Besides paying clients we also invest in our own future by sponsoring three big projects. The first is the Leiden International Film Festival. Since I (Wouter) was involved with starting up this festival and the organization did a fantastic job making it a big and successful we all have a special place in our hearts for it. The second is the Leiden Marathon. One of the best marathons in The Netherlands with a very professional organization. We feel honored to connect our name to this event and help them out with their new website. The last but certainly not least is a brand new Spanish SEO company E-Studio34. We think the founders have great potential of building a very successful company in the future. By building their website almost for free we hope they have a flying start and that these guys will become our business partners in Spain.

Investments & Expenses

With Bread & Pepper we spend money on the following things:

• Two 24" screens (Samsung 2443 BW)
• Two keyboards (TypeMatrix 2030 and a Logitech)
• Three mouses (Logitech MX)
• A lot of books..

And..

• Petrol
• Company slippers.

Projects/Apps

Besides building websites for clients we also create products of our own. Some are open-source, some are just to show off our skills and with one we believe we can actually earn some money. Last year we managed to release some of these apps. Since we start building apps it became a tradition to give every app a girl name. Here is a list of our apps:

BusyLissy was our very first app. We needed a projectmanagement system for ourselves to manage al the projects that we are working on. And why buy such a system if you can build it yourself.

Shirtly will be an app to create a very simple e-commerce website. Our goal is to make this app so easy to use that even our grandmothers can open a webshop.

Brookie. One thing that we figured out quite quickly was that we all hated to write and create proposals and invoices. To make our lives easier we created a system that generates pdf's with our proposals and invoices.

AdverTyra. Create and manage single advertisements and campaigns. With only 4 words of code in the django template you can create advertisements and campaigns in the django admin. Also being able to track clicks on each advertisement which is also shown in a graph in de admin. Not completely done, but will be soon.

MagaCindy is the app that we believe can actually generate some profit. We can't tell too much about it yet, but it will hopefully change the online publishing world.

Some other girls whom are currently in development are: ArtiKelly, PubLisa, ColumNadia. Which girl is next?

2010

So what do we want to accomplish in 2010? First of all we want to get a stable income out of the business so we don't have to worry about surviving. Second we want to get a bigger revenue out of the applications that we build. Third we really need a bigger office, since you can't even stand up straight in the middle of the room. For now it's not the biggest problem but it would be nice to be able to walk around in stead of crawling to the coffee machine.

Conclusion

We totally rock! And want to thank our girlfriends and shareholder (which are actually the same). And we really appreciate all the support and feedback we got from our friends and family. We promise that we will do everything in our power to make this company work.

Tags: Company