2017 Highlights From Okappy

A year is a long time in the life of a tech startup! Okappy was born in June 2015 and over the last 2 ½ years we’ve grown massively. In this year alone there were over 100, 000 jobs created on the system with over £10 million of invoices raised. Reflecting upon our journey, we thought we’d share a review of how far we’ve come this year.

Increased Resources

We successfully closed our third funding round in July 2017. This allowed us to take on more people and do a number of projects with outside consultants to streamline and improve what we do, read more below.
Our new investors also bring a wealth of experience to the table. Our lead investor built and then sold his digital marketing agency to WPP last year. He’s providing mentoring and support.
One of our other investors is the Ex IT Director from the Racing Post and Mirror Group Newspapers. He brings a wealth of experience ot the table having grown the IT department from a couple of people to a large team spanning two countries.
We also have investors with a background in insurance and startups so we’re hoping they can open doors for us into larger corporates.

Restructured Our Architecture

Last year we had 2 servers and 1 database. We now have 8 servers and 3 databases. This means improved performance and increased reliability with less chance of an issue in one part of the system effecting the rest of the platform.

Improved Monitoring

Part of improving performance is understanding where the bottlenecks are. With this in mind, we now have greatly improved how we monitor the system – covering each of it’s aspects. This has allowed us to dramatically speed up certain aspects of the system and better handle large spikes in traffic. Last month alone we saw over 1 million views of one our pages with no impact on performance. We’ve also been monitoring and focusing our efforts on the performance of our mobile apps.

New Developments

We’ve also been keen to hear thoughts and suggestions from our customers. Although the pace of change has slowed this year as we’ve concentrated on growth, performance and stability, we’ve still made a lot of improvements across all aspects of the system. You can read more on our support page.

Highlights include:

For iOS / Android / Mobile:

Offline processing around image uploads, job updates.
You can re-assign jobs from the mobile
You can copy jobs from the mobile
Include customer addresses when adding a job
You can now upload more types of attachments including voice memos and longer videos
A calendar view is available
You can add and view notes for subcontractors as well as customers
We’ve brought all three platforms in line with each other

For Web:

We added a scheduling view
Improved the layout of the connections screens and jobs screen to make things clearer and easier to find
You can now edit an address from the jobs dashboard (whilst still being able to view the address in google maps)
We added global search early in the year so you can more easily find the information you need wherever you are in the system
We added some extra filters so you can more easily go between different days or find particular types of jobs

Over the next quarter we’re planning to introduce the following:
1) New feature – companies will have the option to initially set the work done details to draft. This will mean your customer will only be able to view the work done details your engineers have entered once you’ve approved it.
2) New feature – ability to link jobs. This functionality enables you to link jobs together eg. you could link a quote and job together, or link multiple jobs.
3) We’re going to tone down the banner on the job sheet, invoice and report emails sent from the system. Using the okappy email functionality will allow you to better monitor the emails your company sends for jobs and invoices without having to look at different systems or having to track down emails in other peoples sent items.
4) We’re working on a big performance upgrade for the iOS app

Seeing Our Customer’s Thrive:

It has been very heart warming to see our efforts reap benefits for our customers. We have received a number of Google Reviews from customers who have really benefited from the system.
“The advantages of us using the system is that is has reduced paperwork by 70%, freed up 4 hours a day and it’s enabled us to push the company in different directions. My message to anyone thinking about using Okappy would be – Don’t be afraid of it, it’s a very simple system to use, it will give you a lot more time and will help streamline your business.”
– Lee Brown, Service Manager at BEC Perimeter Security Ltd

Developing Our Partnerships:

This year we’ve continued to build strong relationships with various industry stakeholders and experts in the field who have kindly supported us in growing the platform. We attended a number of Trade shows where we spoke about the Okappy Market Network and have connected with other SMEs in the industry. Working closely with TMARA has contributed towards helping us improve our product-market fit. We’ve also taken part in a number of marketing collaborations with other businesses and would like to thank iOffice, Drain Trader, NADC, Fix Radio and Akoni for their support and promotion of our core work.

Growing The Team

Securing funding earlier in the year allowed us to welcome new members to the Okappy Team. We now have two new developers and I’m overseeing the Community and improving the Marketing. We’ve had challenging moments but have really seen the team come together to find new ways of solving problems whilst expanding our skillsets. As the company moves forward, we are looking forward to seeing how the team will develop in the next quarter!