2017:
Year In Review

Phew! What a year. We are very thankful for the opportunity to look back over 2017, our fifth as a company.

The highlight of this year was the launch of our second flagship product, Pro. Originally slated as a massive update to X, we realized fairly quickly that what we were doing would be better suited as a separate product. While there is certainly still work to do, we have been blown away at the response to this 8 month old product! November was our strongest month to date and shows no signs of slowing down as we head into the first quarter—our busiest time of the year.

Product

Throughout 2017 we had 12 X updates, 15 Pro updates, and well over 100 Extension updates. This was our most active development year to date.

While we are very proud of the work produced in 2017, immediately following our next major release we are going to be spending several months working through a backlog of items and usability improvements for both X and Pro. We know there are a few corners that need rounding, and we are looking forward to addressing them. There will be no new feature development during this period.

It is a priority for us to return to a more normalized state of being able to quickly address bugs and issues as they crop up. With the product team so focused on feature development they have not been able to devote the attention as fast as we would like to bug fixes and usability improvements. This is a key priority for us in the new year. In addition, we are actively looking for two new people to add to the X and Pro development team.

Support

Throughout 2017 we answered approximately 10,000 emails and replied to nearly 90,000 forum posts.

Over the past several months we have done a complete overhaul of our support process, and the changes have made an immediate impact. Support has always and will always be a priority to us, however we were essentially trying to handle the six figure customer base of today the same way we managed a much smaller group before. It was time for a reboot.

We sat down to review the whole process front to back. As a result of that analysis and the subsequent changes, average response times have gone down from around a day to under a few hours, many times faster. We have added a new tiered level of support internally for our team, and we now have the product team in support on a more consistent basis so they can get a better pulse of real world feedback directly from customers. We are eager to continue to improve in this area.

2017 was also the year we launched a new support forum and community management system as we had severely outgrown the old one. This was a massive undertaking and let's just say we're glad we won't be needing to do it again anytime soon. 🙂 We will be making a few key changes to this in 2018 to coincide with a site-wide redesign that aims to bring everything under one roof from a design, layout, and branding point of view across all of Themeco.

Enterprise

Another exciting development in 2017 was the forming of a team dedicated to Enterprise customers. We had some very exciting projects, and that team is doing a fabulous job (don't worry—it's not slowing down product development for X and Pro as they are a completely separate team).

From web development to app development to making your new Alexa Skill—no project is too big as they specialize in end-to-end, cross channel solutions. While we are not able to share all Enterprise projects due to contractural agreements, we recently completed one with a well known brand that we hope to share with everyone soon.

Final Thoughts

We are excited at the roadmap before us in 2018, especially for X and Pro. And as proud as I am of all that was accomplished in 2017, one of the most personally gratifying things to see is the countless number of people in this community who chip in to help one another—in many ways. This is an especially rare thing to see online, and it does make a difference. To everyone who gives of their time and talent to serve, you have my most heartfelt appreciation.

As we look forward to the future, I can't help but be grateful for the past. Your continued business allows us to develop and support this ecosystem that we love, and our entire team remains committed to the mission and vision of this company.

Until the task is done,
Kyle