To say this past year has been busy is an understatement! Luckily, we have plenty to show for it – new clients, new team members and new arrivals are the standouts of 2018.
Strong partnerships
Massive thanks to Gap Medics, Patternbank, Pulsenotes, Kyero, Card Nest, Good Sixty and Shiken, who continued to partner with us into 2018. Here’s to many more years of collaboration.
New clients
We were very pleased to welcome AutonoMe, Big Clean Switch, The Career Portal, AON2, Article 19 and Médecins Sans Frontières to the CookiesHQ family this year. We’re excited to see what the future holds for each of these innovative startups.
A growing team
Our team almost doubled this year. First Sarah and Ffion came on board as our content manager and quality assurance tester respectively. Then came James, our junior backend developer (who had no previous experience in coding), Katie our project manager, and Jelena, our junior frontend developer.
We’re proud that over half our team are women and a third are on flexible working contracts that work for them. We’re looking forward to taking on more projects and providing even more value for our partners.
Improved website
The new CookiesHQ website is a marked improvement on the last, with a cleaner design, simpler UI and better navigation. We’ll be making plenty more improvements and creating lots of useful content in 2019 too.
Cracking conferences
With four well-attended meetups in 2018 – Blogging and Social Media, Mobile Apps, Successes and Failures and Performance Matters – Design/Build/Market has gone from strength to strength. A massive thank you to everyone who attended or supported us in some way – we now have almost 750 members and counting!
We’ll be kicking off 2019 with a DBM specifically for founders and startups. Join us on in March 2019 for an event about building and launching your app – see the DBM meetup page for updates.
I also had the privilege of speaking at the South West Ruby meetup and Talks For Growing Brands and speaking to the Polleni blog. Meanwhile, Nathalie was interviewed by Women Who Rock and will be speaking at a Women Tech Founders event in the new year.
Expanded skills
With new team members comes new skills, and our existing team had plenty of opportunities to learn as well this year. We’ve added copywriting, accessibility, user testing and react native app development to the list in the past 12 months alone.
We built our first React Native app for AutonoMe – a tool that scans QR codes to display videos that help adults with disabilities be independent around the home. And we made a couple of voice apps – one that tells you interesting facts about Bristol on command, and a revision tool for edtech company Shiken.
Our backend developer Denis then turned the Bristol Facts voice app into a bot-driven Twitter account – which now has nearly 400 followers.
Little cookies!
In August we said hello to Nic and Nathalie’s third baby, Amelie. And just last week project manager Gemma’s had her very first baby, Cassie!
Looking forward
Our passion has always been partnering with early-stage and growing startups. We’re looking forward to meeting new founders who want to bring a product to market in 2019.
If you have an innovative idea you’d like to discuss, get in touch and find out how we can make your vision a reality.
And lastly… thank you to all our readers and everyone in the Bristol tech community who helped make our 2018 special.
