It's hard to believe that less than a year has passed since the IPSE Awards. I've been so busy since then that it feels like it deserves an update.
Once I'd finally caught up on notifications and thanked all the well-wishers, it was time to get grafting. The award gave The Code Guy a real credibility boost, but more practically, it came with a generous prize pot and support from the sponsors. That meant I could actually invest in the business properly for the first time.
Growing the Team
Working in a shed at the bottom of your garden never gets tiring - not when you have cats curling up on the keyboard and kids popping their head round the door to check if you fancy a Lego break. But as the workload grew, I knew it was time to bring someone on board.
Millie joined as project manager - a marketing whiz who left the London agency world to work with us. We'd worked together before, and it was immediately a good fit. She's done some brilliant work on both the software and the marketing side.
A Fresh Look
The Code Guy started on a shoestring, so it was great to finally have the time and resources to give the brand a proper refresh. New website, new look, new energy. It also gave us the chance to showcase the software we'd been building behind the scenes.
Building Our Own Software
This is the bit I'm most excited about. I've always loved solving other people's problems through code, but I'd been sitting on ideas of my own for years. The IPSE prize pot gave me the push to actually build one of them.
The result was a project management tool - born out of genuine frustration with what was on the market. That tool eventually evolved into what is now Task Board, our project management platform that we still develop and use every day.
The IPSE Freelancer Awards 2015 were a genuine launch pad for everything that came next. I'm glad I filled in that application on a quiet afternoon in the shed.
