GFR’s 2018

Happy new year! I realise it’s a bit late but I’m still on holiday and so this has taken ages to write.

I thought I’d list some of the things we did in 2018. Partly to remind myself of what we got up to (I find it easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when we’re so often concerned with the detail) and partly because I figure it might be interesting for others to read.

In 2018, GFR:

• Welcomed Ben as our fourth member.

• Gave up our desks at Space4 and our co-working membership at TOG and rented our own office in a Ministry of Startups office.

• Earned £306,000 and spent £325,000.

• Worked an average of 110 days each on paid client work.

• Had 18 leads during the year. 4 of which became paid work.

• Worked for GDS (consolidating multiple asset manager apps), BBC R&D (making it easier to create interactive stories for Amazon Alexa), Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (reducing hosting costs by migrating from Heroku to AWS), Trainline (helping merge codebases), CCS (building prototype of the Crown Marketplace) and Raising IT (training).

• Collaborated with dxw and Rowe IT on the CCS project, and with The Dot Project on a CoTech presentation.

• Expended quite a bit of time and effort in applying for a few DO&S opportunities that we didn’t win.

• Investigated applying for funding for some more exploratory/self-directed projects.

• Created a prototype of a game for the Amazon Alexa.

• Started working on a product to help teams celebrate success.

• Attended the Web Audio conference, the Goodnight Disruption event and the CoTech Hack 2018.

• Hosted 11 Show & Tell events (events 40 to 50). We moved the location from Forge & Co to our Whitechapel office before using The Hide for the 50th event.

• Wrote in the region of 19,000 words of weeknotes for all but 5 weeks of the year. From week 468 to week 518.

• Donated to Crisis, The Refugee Council, NCT, Rushey Green Time Bank, Kingston Hospital Maternity Fund, British Heart Foundation, MS Society and Emmaus UK.

• Employed Liz to handle some of our company admin to allow us to focus on internal product development.

• Held 2 company away days (in weeks 479 and 503).

• Enjoyed an average of 35 days holiday each.

2019 goals

• Earn more money than we spend.

• Move to an office closer to Waterloo.

• Register with Coops UK.

• Get people using our service that helps teams celebrate success.

• Win funding for some self-directed work.

• Celebrate GFR’s 10th anniversary.

• Rethink our Show & Tell events.