The year 2020 has been a year of struggle for me...Not only because of the COVID. At some point, I was extremely tired, angry and almost depressed. I remember banging the desk and shouting while on a meeting with Jerry and Clement about the Streamline app. Work stress affected my family life.

I don't want this to happens ever again.

The main reason was all the problems around the development of the Streamline app: constant bugs, features taking months to code when they were supposed to be done in days, launch always postponed, budget exploding... 😭📈💸

What a contrast with today! It is such a delight to work with our new developers team (Jerry, Fyodor and Victor), and we rapidly progress and build stronger foundation for our app.

Now that the Streamline app is on good tracks, I can focus more on producing (icons, illustrations) and selling (marketing). I want to delegate more of these parts and focus only on the strategy.

I am super optimistic and excited for 2021. I have big plans. I feel that after 10 years of starting this icon business, this year Streamline will explode :-) 🚀

For the first time, I'm sharing with you about everything that happens last year, so you can have a better global view of the projects and company development. I plan to share with you a similar report every trimester.

1- The Streamline app rollercoaster 🎢 🤯

After all the struggles with the Streamline app, we finally have an amazing team of developers. I feel that we share the same values ('calm' company, care about users, asynchronous work, team before ego, etc.) and it's a pleasure to work together :-)

• Clement left the project (fall 2020).
• We now have 3 amazing developers, all with a 'indie maker' background, coming from all around the world and all working remotely.
  • Jerry – Started February 2020 (from Nigeria)
  • Fyodor – Started August 2020 (from Russia)
  • Victor – Started October 2020 (from Brazil)
• They have worked hard on improving performances (the app is now so much faster!), fixing tons of bugs and even rebuilding from scratch a lot of parts of the app, adding plugins, etc.
• Part of problems with the Streamline development are my responsibility. I made some strategic mistakes, changed my mind, pivoted to new strategies... All that because of the lack of time, I was too busy and cannot focus because I take care of too many things (marketing, project management, customer support, art direction, advertising, networking, etc.)

→ See the last features added here (to be updated, we've added more features than that ;-)

2 - Rise of the illustrations

2020 was an attempt to diversify Webalys income and be less dependent on icons sales. Streamline UX + Brooklyn illustrations + a ton of new illustrations projects.

• Finally launched Streamline UX 2.0 on July 2020 (it was very, very late..)
• Since this launch, the Illustrations are now available in the Streamline app (with color modifications). Now it's easy to add other illustrations sets.
• We've developed a ton of new illustrations packs:
• San Francisco illustrations. Started by Bomb on January 2020.
• Geneva Illustrations. Started by Ice on January 2020.