A Score of Prospeeps

August was a big month in the Prospress world as we welcomed the 20th full time Prospeep to our happy little crew! We are very excited to introduce Rommel, our newest software developer – Rommel is from Nicaragua, lives in Costa Rica, and is now travelling around Europe.

Our latest “Prospector” is equally as amazing and unique as each of the 19 before, but 20 just seems to be a tidy milestone warranting a moment of reflection. Maybe there are some echoes in the DNA from a long history of counting in twenties, but a score of Prospeeps also just sounds quite grand.

It feels like only yesterday we started with three full timers (Matt, Kirby, and Brent), and one part timer (le moi). Yet somehow, we’ve already passed the fourth anniversary of incorporating and launching Prospress as a company.

Four years ago today we launched Prospress as a company, along with the website https://t.co/Yzyyc6pAZX and our beloved logo 🎉🎊🍾✨🙌🤩💃 🎂 So many changes in that time to our team and products!Looking forward to the fifth (and fiftieth) anniversary 🤔😉

— Prospress (@Prospress) July 1, 2018

It has certainly been quite a ride from our tiny team four years ago to the globally distributed crew we have these days. Prospress has achieved some major milestones, with versions and mini extensions for Subscriptions, the launch of Robot Ninja, and most recently, we welcomed AutomateWoo to the fam. We’ve reached the point where (as I like to say) the sun never sets on the Prospress Empire. It’s amazing to think how much has changed, and yet, how little has changed.

What has changed?

We have more people, more products, more customers, and this all means increasing complexity. The breadth and depth of opportunities (and issues) we encounter continues to expand. And that’s tremendously exciting, as we look to the future with this vibrant team of awesome peeps and consider where we can have the most positive impact.

But we are also encountering some challenges of a growing team, which will probably require testing a few different processes from those we’ve operated so far.

What has stayed the same?

I think it’s fair to say we’ve approached the past four years with an experimental mindset – there are no failures, just experiments that returned alternative results. Everything we’ve done has given us some information that we can build on. So while things change, we’ll still respond by learning and adapting.

We remain a lean, bootstrapped company, that exists to help entrepreneurs. Our purpose is to create tools that will help others to live their purpose. We still see ourselves as a group of makers building and supporting tools for entrepreneurs. We have goals for how we help people with those tools – the most notable of which is having 100 000 users of our software by 2020.

What has both changed and yet stayed the same?

Many of our people come from very different backgrounds – culturally, socially, linguistically, academically, and professionally – and our growing team is increasingly diverse. Yet, when interacting online and getting together at meetups, it’s clear that we all essentially have the same values.

By hiring people who align with our values, regardless of other differences, we have a crack team of diverse perspectives all working on our mission. We all work to give entrepreneurs the tools they need to live their dreams; to help people prosper with WordPress.

When it comes down to it, our team just wants to make the world a little better, while exploring a better way to work for ourselves – a way that doesn’t apply work habits of the industrial age to the information age worker. Brent, the OG Prospeep, embodies that value and we see it in every person we’ve hired since.

So at the milestone of 20 people on our team, we just want to take a moment to reflect on where we came from and where we are going.

We are grateful to our customers, to our collaborators, to our supporters, and to the WooCommerce and WordPress communities for being with us on this endeavour.

And if you know someone who should be on our team, today’s the day we start hiring for the next 20 Prospeeps 😉