Reflections From 2021

When I first started Stack Five in 2018, it was just a business for my own personal contracting work. I knew that I wanted to build a team, but I didn't know how to make that first step. When Jordan and I decided to partner up in 2019, we made big plans to build a team and scale the business. We had no idea that our journey through 2020 and the pandemic lockdown would be so rough. We experienced the struggles and challenges that you always hear about from entrepreneurs, going months without making any money and wondering whether we would even survive. The story has been different this year (thankfully). 2021 has been the first year that we've been able to grow the team beyond ourselves. It's the first year that has felt like we're building a real company.

The Team

I'm so grateful for our team! They put their trust in us to keep this business running so that we can all have jobs, and I will never take that responsibility for granted. We started the year with just 2 full-time employees (Jordan and I). In February we brought on our first full-time team member, Tauqueer, which was a huge step for us! As the year progressed we continued growing the team, adding Nick, Daniel, and Phil. At our height, we had a team of 5 full-time developers, 3 contract developers, 1 contract designer/illustrator, and 1 contract payroll administrator.

The Projects

Our first priority is always our clients! They give us the opportunity to keep doing what we love! This past year we had the pleasure of working with a bunch of great folks in a wide variety of sectors.

Our 2021 Timeline

Our team is so talented and I'm always blown away at the range and depth of their knowledge. We love helping clients ship products end-to-end! Every part of the stack is interesting to us: exploring possibilities with UI/UX design, crafting beautiful UIs in React and NextJS, architecting scalable backends with Node.js and PostgreSQL, and optimizing workflows through DevOps.

Our technologies

Summary

I'm so happy with the growth of our team and business this year! Moreover, I love the relationships we've built, both in our team and with our amazing clients! We've continued to be a team that strives to be the best at what we do, which is to build beautiful experiences, ship quality code, and genuinely help those that we work with. We also kept ourselves fresh with continued learning and new projects in blockchain, pushing the boundaries of the tech we work with.

The Future

At the risk of sounding cliche, I'll say that I feel like this is only the beginning. As a company, we've got runway into 2023. That's a big deal because we aren't fighting for our survival anymore. It means that we get to focus on finding opportunities where we can be the most effective. It means that we get to spend time giving back to the developer and tech communities that we've benefitted from. Lastly, it means that next year will give us the opportunity to really define Stack Five's culture and the type of company we'll be for years to come.