- We spun out awork and invested €3 million. 💪
- Planned for 2022: New features and launch in the rest of Europe. 🇪🇺
- awork is growing like crazy as a team and as a product. 🏎
We spend a lot of our time working. So it should go without saying that we are happy with and at our work. At awork we believe that we can contribute our part to this. Not only with our software itself, but also with our team: as an experiment, role model and beacon for how modern teamwork works.
The importance of this is evident everywhere right now: two-thirds of knowledge workers in Germany are currently considering changing their jobs in order to be happier. And that's where awork stands ready as a tool and inspiration.
Nils, Lucas and I are absolutely convinced that, with awork, we are in the right place at the right time. Following the sale of our company HQLabs, we have therefore just invested three million euros in our team and our product at the turn of the year. So after 10 years as a founding-team and running a company, we are starting out together once again. This time with a few gray hairs, a lot of experience with B2B SaaS and a team that is second to none.
Team awork
We’ll use the money we invested to further build our team in Hamburg and beyond. Already we have colleagues in Hamburg 🇩🇪, Berlin 🇩🇪, London 🇬🇧, Rome 🇮🇹, Vienna 🇦🇹 and Rio 🇧🇷 working together on the product and services that make up awork.
Currently, awork is available in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium. In the coming months, the rest of Europe will follow, with Scandinavia leading the way. To make this happen, we have gathered a great team around us. A management team with whom we already have many years of shared experience, friendship and mutual trust in our abilities. Together we are now looking for more people to join us in all areas: Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Support, HR... to be a team of 35 people again by mid 2022.
We see ourselves as inspiration and experiment at the same time - and are driven by nine values that beautifully describe our essence as a team and guide our decisions:
- Build great things
- Own it - rock it!
- Design for anti-busy
- Be an adventurer
- No bullshit
- Enjoy work
- Spread energy and sprinkle magic
- Share candid feedback
- Make others successful
With this foundation, built over many years, we feel equipped to grow our team while staying true to our culture and motto 'for the joy of work'.
The product awork
Again and again we’ve been asked if there is a place for another software-tool in the highly competitive market for team organisation. Of course there is! In all respects: An overwhelming number of companies still work manually, cumbersomely and without up-to-date tools for work management - and this at a time when we are all geographically separated and depend on good coordination. Silicon Valley has indeed produced some good tools. But most are generic and too complex to be used as the basis of work organization for our target groups. It's time we found a European answer to organizing work. Beautifully designed and thought through, simple, intuitive, reliable and secure.
Our rapid journey over the last few months shows just how well this works: already, many thousands of users are organizing their everyday work with awork. Among them are such diverse teams as the international agency group thjnk, the Hamburg-based NGO Viva con Agua, the traditional corporation Henkel Beauty Care and the city administration of Wiesbaden. Der Spiegel mentioned us, Die Welt reported about us, we were in Gründerszene, Handelsblatt and on TV (really :-). Based on our role models, creative teams, we’ continue to develop awork into an indispensable organizational helper for more and more companies.
Features, roadmap, further development
Our roadmap does everything we can to keep awork simple while providing a complete organizing process for teams that is a joy to work with. Some of the upcoming focus topics:
Our funding would have been even easier if we got a euro for every customer*s question "Is there a calendar integration for tasks?" 😉 And as (almost) always, our users are absolutely right. Tools for creating project plans abound. Todo lists are also a dime a dozen. And calendar apps even more so. But there is still no usable integration between project and task planning (over days, weeks, months with milestones and many participants) and the personal weekly calendar of individual team members. We are therefore currently paying special attention to this central step in the organization of work - and will be doing so over the coming months, with several releases and features in this area to follow.
Small teams (up to 5 users) and very large teams (up to 5,000 users) work with awork. To ensure that both ends of the spectrum can work with a well-maintained, simple solution, our Team will work hard to build out the necessary complexity for our enterprise customers while keeping our smaller premium teams out of it.
In addition to major extensions, several thousand improvements and optimizations have accumulated in our product roadmap over the last few months. Maturing awork as a product is not just about the milestones and big feature launches, but about continuously improving all processes and their user experience. We see this as another essential building block for the coming period.
for the joy of work. ✊🎉
For awork, an intense phase begins in which we consolidate our structures, refine our product and, of course, go in search of new, suitable growth partners. All in order to make our users' work even more enjoyable.
An acquaintance from the industry said a few weeks ago that awork was one of the best SaaS products he had seen from Germany. We are looking forward to showing the world that we are just at the beginning.
