Awsm’s Year in Review – 2020
2020 may probably go down in history as the year that should never have been. The pandemic sure threw a spanner onto our plans and forced us to skip many traditions like the Annual Family Outing. But even amidst all this darkness, we managed to find our own awesome ways of dealing and coming on top of the situation. We struggled, adapted, and became warriors.
A Decade of Existence
Awsm started as Fidiz Solutions in 2010 (rebranded as Awsm Digital Innovations in 2016) and 2020 marked our one decade of existence as a cloud product studio aiming to keep our clients happy through quality and dedicated work.
For the anniversary, we were in Triple Lockdown as per the Government’s directives and thus could not celebrate it in our usual style. But not to be outdone, we celebrated it in our own inimitable style – by getting a new face in new technology. We developed our new website in Frontity which caused a stir in the tech world!
Frontity and Awsm
We were looking for a framework that would enable us to create a blazingly fast website and impress our visitors when Frontity caught our eyes. It is a react based framework specially built for WordPress. We decided to give it a try and the result was a website that scored a perfect 100 score in Google PageSpeed (Desktop) without putting any extra effort in optimisations. It was soon the cynosure of all eyes in the Frontity-WordPress community.
Boosted by the success, we next built our first Frontity package for our beloved plugin WP Job Openings. And finally, we released AWSM F1 Theme for Frontity – the very first theme from the stable of Awsm. Our works are showcased as case studies in the Frontity website.
Expanded Team
The year also saw a spike in the number of projects we were approached for. It caught us unawares. The whole team was working from home for the first time and the new demands overwhelmed us. With the lockdown restrictions limiting our hiring process, it was tough to even after putting in six days of work a week. So we resorted to online onboarding.
It was challenging but we succeeded in expanding our team by 56% in just 5 months! The Awsm family just got bigger.
10k Customers
In 2020, we also achieved an important milestone – 10k customers from the Envato marketplace. It was a proud moment for us because we were not expecting to cross the 10k mark so soon. Our products are much loved by the customers and have been ranked above 4 stars on an average. Our dedication to providing quality and user-friendly products is indeed yielding good results.
Our much-loved WordPress plugin WP Job Openings crossed the 10k active install mark in the repository by this year-end adding to our happiness. We were able to achieve this without receiving even single negative feedback.
We are also happy to say that we have satisfactorily delivered many projects in 2020. Some of our memorable projects include AssistEdge (a marketplace for bots), BiryaniNation, Harsh.in (personal website of the renowned blogger and mentor Harsh Agrawal) and HereNow by the Jewish Board (mobile app for teen mental health and wellness).
100k App Downloads
One of our recent projects, ClearIAS Learning App crossed the 100K downloads mark on the Google Play Store and we couldn’t be happier!
Designed and developed by us using React Native and WordPress Rest API, this app gained an active user base of 50k in just 60 days since its launch and is one of the highest-rated online test apps ever.
WordPress Day and wp-content.co
Awsm Innovations boasts of having a group of WordPress Core contributors as its main development team. As such WordPress Day holds a special place in our hearts and this year we went all out. We brought out our own blog dedicated to all things WordPress – wp-content.co. It is a site dedicated to beginners and WordPress experts where we share our knowledge, opinions and suggestions with the WP community.
Giving Back
We participated in do_action India 2020, an online hackathon where we participated in building functional websites for two charity organizations for free as a gesture of appreciation.
We have also taken the “Five for the Future” pledge. Due to Covid 19, we missed organizing and sponsoring WordCamps 🙁
Goodbye 2020 & Welcome 2021
No doubt, 2020 was challenging but looking back we can proudly say that we made the best out of it. Sure, we missed our coffee sessions, pizza parties and outings, but we found new ways to cope and we emerged as a stronger, better and larger team. We made lemonade with the lemons that were thrown at us and now looking forward to a smashing 2021!
We also thank all our clients for being with us on this amazing journey. We wouldn’t be here today without your valuable support and suggestions. We promise to delight you with even better products in the coming year.
Happy New Year from Awsm team! Have an awesome year!