A startup journey in tl;dr pictures

We get asked a lot: “What’s it like working in a startup?”.

So we thought rather than tell you, we’d show you. 🙌

We hang out *A LOT*

Be prepared to spend most of your weekday waken hours (some of your weekend ones two) with the same people.

Look at these clowns.

En route to a good old fashioned night out.

Camaraderie is super important as a startup.

It gets intense.

Christmas was in the middle of a big app push so needless to say our engineers decided to let off some steam.

Beer?

Beer?

And a tie? What is this?

The Crab of doom.

Find this fella in your drink and you’re doing it in one.

If you’re not with us, we’ll snapchat the shit out of you.

And when we’re out, we’re always working!

It’s not the healthiest way to live…

Working from dawn ’til dusk isn’t very conducive to eating well. It’s easier to drink a metric shit ton of Red Bull and Jaffa Cakes than walk 8 mins to the nearest salad shop.

We have a central repository of snacks that generally aren’t healthy.

These tend to include Jaffa Cakes, caramel biscuits, Lucozade, Red Bull and strawberry laces.

When we’re feeling lucky, we rock some Mallow and Marsh bars.

A lot of the silly challenges in the office (I bet I could…) are to do with eating.

Having said that, there is also a lot of chocolate in the office.

We don’t eat at our desks so we bring our work to our food.

This is an example of a healthy lunch.

We had olives.

We spend a lot of time raising money

To build a startup (especially one like Sup), it takes a lot of money to get up and running and this requires constant pitching. Thankfully, Rich takes care of this for us.

This is Rich’s game face. Doesn’t he look trustworthy.

We think so.

He also used to work at Google.

Pitching is the only time Einstein is wrong.

You need to do the same thing over and over again and eventually you will get a different result!

We get to build cool stuff

We work with cutting edge tools and build cutting edge features. Our engineers are building the infrastructure of iOS development.

Oh and the Apple Watch is stupid hard to build for.

Peak and Pop for iOS 9!

Man, we cool.

Quick actions too?

That shit cray!

We built a watch app.

It was hard (did we mention?).

All you need. On your wrist.

I told you we hung out a lot.

We also build stuff that doesn’t work

Not all experiments work. So we kill them

This pissed *A LOT* of people off.

People don’t do notification management.

They do delete.

#offBrand.

Graphical, dynamic watch content? #pfff

Come back to me on V4.

Launching is super fun!

There is a lot of hard work and stress that goes into building something that people want to use but it’s awesome when thing go well.

We’re on the App Store baby!

Look at those shiny screenshots. What a relief.

Notice our amusing satirical joke about Donald being nearby.

We appreciated that!

(I promise I haven’t downloaded Candy Crush..)

We got Product Hunted baby!

That was exciting. A huge boost to the numbers and to our website views.

It was also super cool to get feedback from super geeks.

It takes a while but we slowly started to climb the rankings!

We were constantly refreshing AppAnnie.

See ya Bebo.

We started to get featured in some cool places.

This is a random feature: #1 in the US for Apps Enhanced with 3D Touch in Social Networking.

We’ll take that!

Top of the Pops baby!

We started at the bottom and now we’re at the top.

This felt great!

It’s not all glory. Growth is hard…

Being on the App Store is super handy at spreading the word but there is a lot that goes into growth that is just grind.

A lot of talks about who we are and why you should download the app.

If there isn’t anything planned in for an evening then we’ve missed an opportunity.

Life’s not always full of haters…

Post talk banter

We even Periscope our events.

That’s an extra 8 people!

Every user counts :)

We ordered 15,000 flyers.

And then 15,000 more.

And we got to work.

Handing our flyers at 07Early is not that fun…

But growth is not easy.

So we decided to do some sticking…

It started to get a little crazy…

Then a little out of hand…

Then it went bonkers…

Engaging the community!

#crushingIt

We have had our fair share of bugs :(

We have bugs, sometimes the multiply and we do our best to squash them but some do get past us.

The downside of building an app is that it takes *A LONG* time to get bug fixes accepted…

These are a few of our favourites:

Am I drunk?

Seeing double…

Lot’s of invisible people.

#hmm

Wow! You are popular my friend.

Ahhh! My eyes…

I think we got the message.

And my personal favourite, we launched the first version of the watch with a static notification message.

This was a hint at my call of duty play style.

Which, for the record, is false. I’m all #runAndGun.

Real world press is a lot of fun

Online press is cheap and doesn’t mean much. When we’re lucky enough to get in real magazines we freak out.

Best Travel App!

Love that.

We’ve also stopped using the word serendipity.

Shit just got real!

Can’t argue with that.

We love getting feedback from users

When you start up, feedback from real people is terrifying but really fun. We try to share what we do with as many people as possible.

As much as we hate it, negative feedback is often better.

One of our first reviews. Thanks to Jake Boys for that :)

Our customer service on point.

Danny pwning Twitter feedback.

Sometimes it’s actually funny..

Especially when they’re trolls.

We have *A LOT* of fun

We started the company to work with smart people, build an app we all want to use and have a lot of fun.

Rich got a pink phone.

We found this funny.

Very funny.

We play *A LOT* of Xbox.

And Alex is by far the best.

#standard

…

I told you to git rebase -i first!

A minor diversion from fun.

Wait. No, this was funnier.

Danny should have shorter hair.

Rich has a new game.

Rich was very pleased with himself.

We’re always learning.

Off to buy office Christmas presents.

We got a drone.

And flew it into Danny’s long hair.

We do a lot of challenges.

Always for a bottle of Champaign (prosecco)

Here we see Duncan cheating.

#noWaterDoucheBag

The chocolate was finally finished.

About time.

Standard tools for a day in the office.

Always working. Always having fun.

Fin

That’s it. It’s like working in a big company except what you do matters and you get to be silly.

You also work very, very hard.

But, then again, you get to hang out with this guy:

#next