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2015 is a year of Sprouting for AfterShip, which we grew stronger and bigger while enjoyed the freshness of new ideas and challenges.

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2014 2015 Growth
Registered Users (total) 36,763 86,941 136%
iOS apps download (total) 174,000 451,000 159%
Android apps download (total) 30,738 114,448 272%
Couriers integrated (total) 222 333 50%
Employees (total) 7 21 200%
Office (sq. ft.) 1,000 4,500 350%
Alexa Ranking 17,216 5003 12,213
Tracking Numbers (New) - - 274%

Sprouting in Mars

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For those who does not know - AfterShip is based in Hong Kong, a land that does not have much fertilizer or clean air for a startup to grow fast in terms of and people you can learn from (You go to a coffee shop here, you are more likely to meet someone working in a bank or accounting firm). When it comes to Mars, you have to be creative and do some maths to grow potatoes - especially you are the first one to do so.

Developers, where are you?

Teddy, our CEO, set a goal of growing the team to 30 people by the end of 2015 - even though we didnt meet our expectation, we figure out the formula for hiring in Hong Kong. Not only we had to reach out to other countries, we have organized 5 tech sharing sessions with other startups / solution providers (MongoDB, GoGoVan, 9Gag etc) for the Hong Kong startup community.

By 2015, we have developers from 11 countries: Romania, Poland, Spain, India, Sweden, Fiji, Russia, Botswana, China, Philippines, Hong Kong.

Multiply it but how?

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Growing potatoes is a like growing a great company / team, which it multiples itself automatically and keeps growing. When we grow the team to 7, we started to realize the difficulty of management - keeping our hierarchy flat or everyone waiting for instructions from Teddy does not work.

By 2015 Q3, we have implemented the following:

  1. Four teams with a team leader role
  2. Quarterly performance review
  3. Quarterly OKR (objectives and key results)
  4. Weekly issue / tasks update

Note: we use Github to manage goals, issues and tasks, and use Google Spreadsheet to manage performance reviews (self-assessment, peer review and team leader survey)

We learned from other startups and Google on people management and we look forward to more growth in 2016 - which we will continue to grow our backend /frontend developer team, a new UX/UI team and bigger technology consultant team.

What to look forward to?

We have to admit that not much updates have been done to AfterShip in 2015 as we were finding the right soil and method to grow, but we believe we are ready for 2016 and coming years. We saw more copy cats of AfterShip in the market (basically simply stealing all icons, design, functions) - a little bit of frustration but more excitement of challenges ahead. Stay tuned with new features and new product from AfterShip in 2016. We are building a rocket. Cheers.

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