And the fourth year of our existence we have managed to live through without external investments. That puts us in the small group of fully bootstrapped companies. We believe in long term, gradual, but healthier growth based on quality and sustainability. We do not oppose investments but we consider that investment as such should bring more than just monetary benefit - by ‘more’ we mean opportunity for global scalability and deep industry expertise.
During 2018 our team got expanded by one more baby. On the 18th of June Jan Padavić printed “Hello World”. Welcome, Jan! Rentlio juniors team now counts 5 members in total and soon we are getting reinforcement - Ante, get ready to sleepless nights, and not because of the frontend tasks :)
Mini web-aplication for race results at Zadar Night Run race event is the first side project we have done. Supporting quality projects is out great desire. As we grow so the number of such projects will grow as we wish to utilise our skills and knowledge to help our local community.
For the first time we have “closed” the whole company for 2 days (24th and 31st of December) giving the opportunity to our team members to get additional couple of days on top of their regular holidays to rest and hang out with their friends and family.
Iva, Pankracije and Željko have joined our team in 2018. Željko at the start of the year and Iva and Pani at the end. It was a tough year from the team management perspective and year in which we have experienced our first goodbyes. We are grateful for everything that we have learned and we are readily marching forward to 2019 when we are planning to bring new additions to our team.
It is our great desire to support our local tech-biz scene. We believe that is our obligation and a mission. Thanks to the partnership with Inovativni Zadar, we got that opportunity. During November, we joined forces to organize 3 events which were visited by more than 200 people. Big thanks to our outstanding guests - Mateja, Tomislav and Albert!
Zadar (Croatia) is our headquarter and our inspiration. Most of our team sits in the office on Duke Trpimir’s coast with a million dollar view. However, we are not all in the same place. Our team members work also from Split, Zagreb, Varaždin and Linköping.
Slack is our main communication tool but at the same time our great source of distraction. During 2018 we have reduced the number of public Slack channels and 2019 is all about the optimization, as we wish to reduce the number of apps we use daily. Fewer apps - fewer notifications, fewer notifications - fewer distractions, fewer distractions - more focus. We want to spend our eight hours at work efficiently, not busy.
Our aspiration is to have an unlimited budget per employee for investment in books, whether on Kindle or in the ‘old-school’ hardcover format. Knowledge has never been more available and cheaper. We need to take this opportunity. These 11 books are our first humble step toward that goal.
From Click by Booking conference in Amsterdam to Digital LAB.in conference in Labin, our team members have participated in 14 conferences, workshops, meetups and similar events.
For the first time Rentlio stood on an international stage, and for the first time, we took a part in a podcast.
Team members who have joined us two years ago and more have experienced a salary increase of average 29% during 2018. With the growth in profitability, we aim to improve the financial conditions for our employees. In 2019 we will implement standardized bonus and reward scheme for the first time.
From the Philippines to South Africa, From Brasil to Russia, Rentlio was used in 31 countries around the world. It is incredibly motivating to work on global SaaS product which knows no borders.
Measuring the Net Promoter Score over the whole year, we are measuring our customers’ satisfaction. This is the most important metric for us. From 1.015 surveyed users, 83.5% were Promoters, 10.7% were Passives and 5.7% were detractors. This result places Rentlio in World Class products category.
We want to recognize and timely react to potential issues within the team. The honest and regular employee feedback is welcomed. This is why we have started using Officevibe to measure so-called eNPS. We have ended the year with eNPS of 83. We put an effort into building an environment where employees will be happy and satisfied. During this process we make mistakes. The sooner we notice them, sooner we will be able to fix them.
We use Intercom to provide support to our customers. After every closed conversation, a customer can rate the level of service provided with Terrible, Bad, Ok, Great and Amazing. During the whole of 2018, 97% of our conversations were rated with Great or Amazing. We are expanding our Support team - get in touch!
On 21st of December whole team gathered in Zadar for Xmas holidays hangout. For the first time we were able to show gratefulness to all of our team members with a little, symbolic token of appreciation. Customized Thule Backpack, team hoodie, Sigg traveler bottle, Moleskine notebook and the Rentlio stickers made our first ever, historical Swag pack :)
Our development team did 1031 pull requests on a total of 67 repositories. The unbelievably big job was done by a small team of 4 people.
Hotels, hostels, apartments, property management companies, agencies, camps - 1475 of them used Rentlio in 2018 as the only property management and channel manager system.
Happy customers are the biggest motivation to continue developing and improving Rentlio. New 2633 accommodation units have chosen Rentlio in 2018 and we ended the year with almost 6000 subscribed accommodation units managed via Rentlio.
For every like, share, tweet & view, thank you immensely! Without your support on social media, the story of Rentlio would spread much slower. For each of you 3245 on Facebook, 220 on Twitter, 372 on Instagram, 195 on LinkedIn and 22 on YouTube we will continue to put an effort in creating relevant and interesting content.
Our support team did a phenomenal job. As many as 89.169 messages have been sent as responses to our customers’ inquiries. The conversation rating that we have mentioned already, relates to these messages. This is what makes us even prouder of that result.
Channel manager is one of the main Rentlio functionalities. Between Rentlio and online booking portals such as Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, HRS, HostelWorld, HotelBeds and many others, we have synced almost half million reservations for our customers. Wow!
In comparison to the previous year, our revenue increased by 86%. We are proud of this number because 2018 was just the third year since Rentlio is on the market and this is an exclusive result of our devotion and focus. We welcomed the end of the year with positive cash flow and stable foundations for profits in 2019. As Jason Fried and DHH say in their book - we are building stayup, not startup (“profit is the ultimate shield against the bullshit”).
