Before we ring in the New Year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on what has been an incredible year for Cobot in every possible way.
Every year that passes we are very thankful to be a part of this great community that is coworking, and, for us at Cobot, 2017 exceeded our wildest dreams. We can’t believe how fast it’s come to an end.
When Cobot launched 7 years ago, it was an in-house tool, build to support our own coworking space. A lot has changed since then. The product has grown and evolved, and so has the company. It’s been awesome watching exciting and meaningful new features being launched and our team growing.
This year was particularly eventful and exciting. And in the same way that the business has grown, our team has grown. In 2017 our team doubled in size, with three new programmers, a customer support specialist and a new office manager.
Let’s take quick look back on all the amazing things that happened this year, in no particular order:
Exciting new features
Many of the updates and improvements we built come from you, our Cobot users, who have been giving us constructive feedback over the years and encouraged us to get creative and push the boundaries. The improvements we’ve built are too numerous to list here, but let’s highlight some of the biggest announcements of 2017:
The first and one of the most popular features we introduced this year was text formatting, which made it easier to edit plans, terms & conditions and any other text you would want to give some structure.
We’ve started a major design update across all our platform, starting with our new landing page. Since then, we rolled out a number of design related improvements and a redesigned profile page.
A much better structured invoices section was introduced to help you get a better overview of all transactions happening in your space and streamline your work.
We’ve also introduced external bookings, one of the most anticipated features ever. This was the first step towards making Cobot more open to all your community, not only your members.
Finally, we recently launched a brand new dashboard. Before, the dashboard presented a list of activities. Now, it is the central starting point where you see everything that you need to know to start your day, at a glance. From here it is also easier to drill down into any aspect of your space you want, booking, invoices, memberships, you name it.
Around the World with Cobot
Every year, we make our selections of which trade shows and conferences to attend, we consider what will be most beneficial for our users, our partners and our team. We believe it’s important for market leaders to step outside of our offices, put our faces out there and discover what’s new in the industry. Being in a room full of likeminded people with the same passions IRL (in real life) is crucial to further understand the current and future needs of our users.
This year our team attended over a dozen industry related conferences all over the globe — passing through Thailand, U.S., Brazil, Australia and more. We set out to understand more deeply the local practices and trends emerging around coworking in different parts of the world. Even after all these years, it is truly amazing to see how diverse and unique this industry can be depending on where you are.
We always return from a conference with new ideas and insights that guide and motivate us to improve our product for you. All that travel has informed many of the decisions we made this year both regarding the software and our operations.
Which conferences or coworking events left a lasting impression on you? Which ones do you think we should attend? Leave your answers in the comments below!
Future
Our developers worked hard this year to clean up and update our code. This essentially means we now have a fresh foundation to build on and will be able to add new features and improvements to the platform more frequently than in the past.
Next year we will continue our efforts to make Cobot more transparent and flexible, improve UX, and add more languages. We have a lot in our pipeline and we’re already looking forward to the next steps on our product roadmap.
Whew, what a year!
A huge thank you to all our users and the global coworking community, and everyone who is constantly inspiring us to make our product even stronger. We’re proud of how we’ve evolved this past year, and look forward to the next year of challenges.
We hope you’ve had a great year and can now spend its last few days among loved ones and fireworks!
Happy holidays, everyone! May your 2018 be a good one!
