Celebrating 3 years at thiken.

The 3 years have gone by so fast. We’ve worked on more than 50 projects, worked with clients from all over the US, partnered with some amazing companies so far and it has been a great learning experience.

The love for startups was there from the high school days on and off, but the spark that fueled us to be here today, came when we got selected to the finals of the Innovation Challenge that was held at NDSU. Once graduated we were working on all sorts of different things, ranging from games to “potentially” world-changing ideas while working our full-time jobs until we eventually landed a mobile development gig through a friend, randomly. We had no official business, less than $5,000 in the bank, no idea of how to run a digital product company or the slightest idea of how to find projects at that point.

Fast forward 3 years, with 0 sales people and minimal marketing we’ve worked on 50+ projects across the US and have partnered up with some amazing businesses. The only “sales” we’ve done is giving a shit about what we do at our core, building great products and truly caring about our customers’ success.

Even though we didn’t know a thing about what we were getting ourselves into when we initially launched, we knew one thing, we were not going to build just another app development firm to make a buck.

I know that’s a cliche, that’s the story that every single entrepreneur keeps chanting but hang in there with me for a second.

To be perfectly clear, here’s what we wanted to do at our core from the very beginning,

• Build super high-quality products that are beautiful and people actually want to use.
• Build a company culture that is built on passion and entrepreneurship.
• Provide a customer experience so personal that our clients feel right at home talking to us.

If as a company we failed to internalize these values, I mean if we failed to blend these right into our core,

• We wouldn’t have PMs running around deeply frustrated and cursing in every single language they can speak when they find an app experience disturbed by the slightest issue, be it a bug or a UX issue.
• We wouldn’t have devs working 16 hour + days over a period of 2 straight months to make sure we deliver on time.
• We wouldn’t have UI/UX Engineers who can’t differentiate day from the night swearing-in slack channels and around the office because a button was off by a couple of pixels.

And on top of it all,

• We wouldn’t simply have been able to build Thiken into the company that it is today, Period.

While all that is interesting, we have much bigger plans for the next 3 years. Starting with expanding Thiken to a new city ;) I’ll dedicate a separate article for that in the coming 2 weeks.

All in all the journey so far has been wonderful and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, we’ve had a lot of ups and downs & we’ve been through a lot, but through it all we’ve been able to keep our heads high. I’m incredibly proud and honored to have taken this journey and wanted to thank our amazing team, from janitor to the top seats for putting 120% into work and truly caring about what you do, all of the families of our team members for putting up with the late nights and crazy schedules, the community for trusting us and spreading the word and most importantly our clients, for trusting us with your life’s work and sticking with us through thick and thin. Thank you!