I founded Czechgeeks with my partner Mila Novak 3 years ago. Our initial idea was to build a young and innovative company working on its own projects and helping other companies with software development.
We spent almost a year in Silicon Valley, mainly with our first project called Moredays. With the great design we had from Vita Jancak and Daniel Maslo, we’ve been featured on Techcrunch, Mashable and other prestigious servers. What we didn’t do well was the development process. People loved our concept and design, but the execution stumbled. We started out with inexperienced developers and found ourselves outsourcing some parts of the development later on. Both ways proved to be wrong. So even with more than 60,000 users, we closed down the service after 2 years. There was still a fair perspective for the project but no more energy on our side.
Thanks to this experience and the media coverage we had received, we were working with very interesting clients - from Evernote to Mail.ru or Samsung. We learned a lot, gained tons of experience and helped our young team grow and move forward.
We launched a few other projects of our own (Yournaline, Hello, Pocketmega, Customeed,…) but without a major success. It was still the same - working on our own projects brought us to new customers. And when you need money to run your company and pay your staff, it’s hard to say “no” to the new commercial projects.
Gradually, we’ve lost focus on building our own things and became just another regular software development/design studio - working on large enterprise projects or helping startups with their ideas, design and development. We’ve collected an impressive portfolio of customers including Damejidlo.cz, Energomonitor, SocialBakers, Virtual Training, CSOB and many others.
But this was not the path we founded Czechgeeks to take. So we decided to merge Czechgeeks with a much larger company called Datasys. At Datasys, they have a really great team of senior developers and consultants. Combined with our mobile- and design-oriented team, we’ll be able to deliver great apps for the enterprise sector. I’m sure that the new team will be able to meet our customers’ requirements and continue the great cooperation.
I’m really thankful for the time we had in Czechgeeks, trying our own projects and getting experience in design, development and marketing. I’d like to thank all team members for being onboard and mainly my co-founder, Mila, for his cooperation and great support.
Next time, I’ll share my experience with running such a company and will tell you what I’m doing now and what my plans are ;-).
