2021 Year in Review and Lessons Learnt

2021 has been a year of validation of our services and capabilities as an open source enterprise solutions company helping enterprises in shaping their digital landscape. We started the year on a great foot - bagging a contract in January from the leading startup in the shared Mobility space and the momentum has been continuing since then. It was a year of encashment of the many checks we wrote to ourselves by way of our investments in honing our skills, exhibiting excellence in all our practices, doing webinars, and getting the word out in the previous years of our existence - that those have been paying us off well.

We count ourselves immensely lucky to have been picked up by clients pioneering in the field of healthcare, manufacturing and services verticals (both domestic and international clientele) as their preferred vendor for enterprise solutions. As we end the year - we stand validated with sufficient enough pull from the market for our services to keep us busy for quite some time.

At the start of the year - it was just Atul and as we wrap the year, we have a strong team of diverse and specialised skills to take on any challenging enterprise solutions projects.

Looking back some of our key learnings in 2021 have been

Grow organically – allowing your DNA to playout and don’t interfere with it

This was a lesson learnt the hard way - the social trends and ideals we see around us alway tell us that success should look a certain way and most of us try to align ourselves in some ways to look as close to those ideals as possible. So from day one - we didn’t succumb to any sort of pressure as a company to evolve in a certain way or such - we believe in 100% growth to take shape organically as we day-in-and-day-out keep doing what we are best at doing and pressing on toward excellence and improving ourselves. The bottom line is be authentic – Your culture, your way of life and work, let that shape your representation. It is less likely that you succeed if you ape a process or practice that might work in a different context or org dynamics.

Be free from tool obsessions -

For a lot of our work - we are dependent on tools like Notion, github, visual code, Skype, Google Workspace and many more. Realizing that tools are only a means to an end - Let tools and processes evolve from the need on the ground – don’t go for tools for tools sake without a pressing need to implement any tool. For more on this topic - here is an article we published

Let curiosity and consistent learning be your A-Game -

It is okay if we are only making baby-step progress with our learning objectives, but the discipline and keeping at it will pay off well any day. Also looking for avenues for sharing our learnings by way of weekly team show-and-tells, blogs etc have been good ways to cross pollinate across team members and blogs have been a great way to showcase our worth to the outside world as well.

Our Skill -

This year we saw our expertise with the ERPNext and Frappe Platform being stretched to the next level and witness their applications in very interesting and unique ways in a number of our customer scenarios. We saw the usage of ERPNext Healthcare module being sliced and diced to adopt in very innovative distributed healthcare delivery applications. Manufacturing being stretched to meet very niche and specific custom processes catering to multi-city and multi-company operations at all transactional levels (Purchase, Production, Sales, Delivery). REST apis and Webhooks being consumed at very granular levels. From all these use-cases being deployed and used to solve real world operation - we stand validated, both in our consulting capabilities and in terms of the robustness of the solutions we provide.

Additionally we can now build Flutter based cross-platform apps (for web and mobile), that has seen the light of the day by hitting the playstore and appstore. Flutter is a very promising platform and set of tools that bring efficiency in both turn-around time and high optimised app builds for both web and mobile from a single codebase.

We pride in our unique position as a strong consulting team that brings to the table our collective team strengths with both domain and technical expertise to help our customers.

It is any day a fail-safe way for enterprise customers to engage us as their tech partner for their business critical solutions vs partnering with any lone-wolf developer in the wild.

Our partners –

We are fortunate to attracted very niche skilled partners to support our customer deliveries. Currently we work with three dev partner companies who have emerged and honed their skills from their unique life experiences dealing with real world problems and from diverse backgrounds and geographies, whose upside our clients are benefitted.

Learnings from the open source communities we care about and interact with has been the underpinnings of our success. Kudos to the Frappe Community that is a big part of our existence and success. Clients, their friendship, learning from their business has been the most rewarding part of our work and all that we do. And being in a position to add value in each of their contexts and see their project turn-arounds has been truly rewarding for us. The secret sauce of our success is that we don't come claiming we have the sliver bullet to solve all our the problems - but we recognise that the client knows what they need best and we always take the position of a solution provider in the context of what their needs are, bringing to the table our solutions expertise and shaping those needs collaboratively and realising the value they are looking for leveraging our combined strengths.

The highlight of the year has been our French connection where Atul got to visit our customer in the beautiful Grenoble, France and to get a high appreciation of the French food, (especially the famous Michelin 3 star cuisines ) and culture. And the fun part was when he tried his luck with skiing and mostly importantly managed to survive with almost all his bones intact :)

Looking ahead

As we look optimistically how 2022 is going to unfold - we are much well equipped as to discern what works and what doesn't work for us - yet staying curious to learn, unlearn and improve ourselves in all possible ways. This year we see as a year of the team, not the leadership (which means, leadership will focus on enabling the teams to do their job well, and other strategic growth initiatives).