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Founder’s Message to Digicorpians on 13th birthday

On Monday January 16, 2017, Digicorp officially became a teenager as we celebrated our 13th birthday! 13 years ago, on this day, we started Digicorp to solve some problems with coding. No one imagined that one day it would even become a Venture forget being a Venture Builder.

In an email to all the Digicorpians, Kuntal Shah reiterated his commitment of making a great company and highlighted what’s coming in next year.

Here goes the email:

Hello Digicorp,

Congratulations to all of you on completion of 13 years of Digicorp.
Needless to say without all of your belief, support and enthusiasm this would not have been possible.

Last year has been one of the most happening years at Digicorp. I personally learnt a lot of things and applied them to practice. Few of them worked and some of them backfired as well.

Few of the Highlights of Last year

• We invested in 3 Products (BAApps, Readboard and CricHeroes)  and allocated one Founder to completely oversee development of those products. One of the products, CricHeroes got 2 rounds of funding and is also doing great with initial traction. This overall experience has increased our confidence in Digicorp’s ability to make not only usable products but also build successful ventures around it.

• We have revisited some of the management processes in last 6 months and re-aligned them with our original goal of making Digicorp the best place to work.

• We learnt new complementary techniques of Lean Startup, Design Thinking and Traction along with Software Development techniques like Extreme Programming. These techniques have assured our belief that building a successful venture is not a stroke of luck but rather a set of carefully taken decisions following established techniques.

• We helped our clients launch new products (Corpository, Academic Data Platform, Project Alive and Kicking etc.)  and also continue to grow our loyal clients’ (PetPooja, NexTenders, EHR, iTerate, Exercise Buddy etc.)  ventures.

• We have introduced StackOverflow like Skill Matrix and started working on the idea of Product Teams consisting of Product Manager, Product Designer, Developer and QA Engineer. I am banking big on this idea and I see it as a promising idea to improve product development process and increasing chances of product success.

• We have not been able to close a lot of business last year, which has led us to one of the least profit making year(s).

• Due to pivot in product development process, technology consolidation and role restructuring, we had to let go few very good Digicorpians. It has been a real tough time, taking these decisions.

• As a part of providing better facilities to the team, we doubled per employee space and opened up whole new developer area along with more meeting spaces, better Lunch area and indoor gaming area.

What’s coming in next year?

• The first priority is to improve the profitability by 4x and have significant new direct business from US office and continue serving our existing clients with best services.

• It’s going to be more fun to be at Digicorp by learning new things, working on building usable products and ventures around it. We have a list of things to make Digicorp best place to work and have talented people stay with us and work on products and ventures.

• We will be working on the path “From a Venture to Venture-builder, Connecting the Dots” as described in our recent blog post.

• We will be building self-organizing Product Teams (iTerate, EasyPay, CricHeroes, NexTenders etc.) instead of technology teams (PHP, JavaScript, Mobile, Design) in order to improve collaboration and the product ownership. The designers and developers may be sitting with product teams. These things will be executed and its learning will be iterated to improvise the execution.

• The product teams will learn and apply techniques (Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Extreme Programming, Agile) to improve core craft of product development.

• We are looking to work on another promising product idea by some of the Digicorpians and validate it for product-market fit.

There are many other things that happened last year.

On a personal level, every year on this day I feel that the coming year is the most crucial year. I carry the same feeling today. I realise that this is probably due to the commitment of making a great company that lasts for years.

Lastly, what has been the greatest driving force for us as founders to run this venture apart from the idea of building the great company?

It’s the belief and reality that we have people who respect us and allow us to make a workplace where every right idea can be executed. Whenever we fail, they are always there to support us.

Thank you Team Digicorp.

Onwards and Upwards.
– Kuntal Shah (One of the Digicorpians)