| On behalf of our team at Tyche Softwares, we sincerely hope you’ve had a fantastic 2014 & look forward to a more blessed 2015.
That’s our team in above 2 pictures, with 1 member (Mansi Shah) missing. Just so you can identify (starting from left in 1st picture): Bhavik Kiri, Khyati Gala, Myself, Moxa Jogani, Pinal Shah & Komal Maru. Khyati does all the testing, rest of them are our code ninjas & me? I worry! It’s been a great year for all of us. I will get straight into it. Major milestones of 2014 Yearly Subscriptions We introduced yearly subscriptions in the month of Dec 2013. So technically it’s not something we did in 2014, but I am still adding it here. We moved from lifetime licenses to yearly subscriptions from Dec 7 2013 onwards. The challenge for us was to create enough value for the customers to make the purchase & also subsequently renew. In Dec 2014, we did get renewals. Though not all of those who purchased renewed their license keys, but we are happy that we are getting them to renew so we can continue to provide support & updates to them. We have been working on refining the code structure of the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment plugin since September 2014. About 80% functionalities were coded in a single file. That file was huge, about 8000 lines. We didn’t want to make it so big that it would become totally unmanageable. We thought this is a good opportunity to implement some of the best practices as well as to split the core file into smaller files based on the functionality. We released version 2.0 of the plugin yesterday. An update to the 6 addons of the plugin was also released yesterday. If you are using any addons along with the booking plugin, please ensure that those addons are also updated after updating the core plugin. New plugins / addon releases This wasn’t a great year in terms of new plugin / addon releases. We never intended to release a new plugin since we want to keep our focus on the 3 core plugins that we have. We actually did want to release some addons for the Booking & Order delivery date plugin. However, that did not happen. The last 4 months of the year were spent mainly on refining the Booking plugin & it’s 6 addons. At the start of the year, we were 4 people. We did hire 2 new staff, Komal Maru & Mansi Shah in October 2014. We want to focus on customer support & improving existing plugins & addons. Revenues up by 105% over last year Compared to 2013, the revenues were up this year by 105%. We are very pleased with what we have achieved. We are expecting 2015 revenues to be even higher as we do expect renewal revenues to come in. Apart from that, we will be able to add a lot of value to our plugins in this year as we’ve streamlined a few things & also we have enough staff that we can now focus on adding more relevant features to the plugins. The happiest moment of 2014 The happiest moment for us was when Benjamin Fowler, one of our customer sent us a pair of Sunglasses all the way from Australia to India. Ben is using the WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro plugin on their website, Festival Sunglasses. When we fixed a critical issue on his store, he was very happy & proposed to send a pair of their company’s sunglasses for Moxa & Pinal. And they loved that! Thank you Ben for the nice gesture. What’s coming up in 2015?Refined code structure for all 3 plugins & addons We will continue to refine the code for all the plugins. This would also include addition of hooks & filters to all our plugins to assist developers to extend the plugins themselves. In the next 1 week, we would be putting up documentation on the hooks & filters in the WooCommerce Booking & Appointment plugin. Major would mean including features that have been asked for long, but not yet added. This includes some of the features that have been highest voted on our Feedback system. For the Order Delivery Date plugin for Affiliate Program We are planning to start an affiliate program. Though first we need to re-work on our branding, but nevertheless the affiliate program will be implemented in this week & will be available for everyone. For example, one of the affiliates already told me that he is fine with just a link & the program details. Details will be available soon. WordPress Booking Plugin – a skeleton view Though one target for 2014 was to initiate work on a Booking plugin for WordPress, but there is not much we could do on it. Just recently in Dec 2014, I have gotten close to reviewing some of the booking plugins (wordpress & non-wordpress) out there. I will write more about it in a separate post. The below screenshots show the skeleton that I have been thinking on for the WordPress booking plugin. Product page booking options:
Let me know your thoughts about this. These are just skeletons, nothing functional yet. It would be great to hear your feedback. That’s about it as far as 2015 is concerned. Lastly, we are running a new year campaign right now where we are offering 25% discount on all purchases & renewals. That expires on January 5 2015. Use coupon code HOLIDAYS2014 to avail the discount. Once again, on behalf of our entire team, we wish you all a very happy & safe 2015. |
