The end of one year and the beginning of another is the perfect time to do a yearly review, whether it’s personal or professional, or for an individual or a business.
A year in review also allows you to give yourself a pat on the back for all your efforts during the year and take a moment to be grateful: grateful to your customers, but also to your employees!
The review also enables us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves “what could I have done more, or better?” Or rather, “how can we start the next year having learned from our daily challenges?”
As a start-up company, we did this exercise at xPayrience and here is our 2021 year in review.
Our wins
The development of our platform
To think that in January 2021, our ticketing and camping modules as we know them today were barely developed! Our two modules were in the early stages, and, already in April we put online version three of our platform!
Since its launch, our programmers have not stopped improving it in order to satisfy our partners, according to specific requests for the best management and use of their platform.
As a long-term project, we know that still today, we won’t stop improving it and wanting to make it better!
We also worked on our first seating plan, a 4,000 seat arena, for the Sherbrooke Phoenix (a major junior ice hockey team based in Sherbrooke, Quebec )! It was a completely new concept that we worked on almost around the clock to make it available on time. We are extremely proud of it!
For this, we wish to give BIG “shoutout to our programmers” ! They are in such short supply as the labour shortage is affecting our industry as well. Yet we consider ourselves lucky and are happy to have valuable resources like these experts in place. Thank you for your resilience and availability!
A growing team
With the growing development of our platform and the increasing number of new partners, in 2021 we opened three new positions on the team.
The first position to be created in 2021 was the Sales & Marketing Coordinator. This was the first position dedicated to marketing at xPayrience. A decision that we don’t remotely regret, knowing very well that today, it’s essential to integrate marketing into the development of a company so that we may become known on different digital and traditional platforms. Stay tuned as we’ll introduce this new person in a future article.
We’ve also created the first true project manager position. The project manager position, held by Geneviève, whom you got to know in a previous article (Link to article), was also a decision we don’t remotely regret. Our various partners now have closer follow-ups on the different online releases and have a resource dedicated to their account.
Finally, creating two new programmer positions allowed us to continue our momentum and to develop features more quickly. As mentioned above, programmers are a rare resource, so this is a real stroke of luck in the midst of a labour shortage! Thank you for choosing to join our team Sergio and Bruno!
Moving to our new offices
This move was undoubtedly a big step towards the next stages of our development. Since November 1st, we are located in the “Innovation Hub” of Magog Technopole, a new building where the sharing of knowledge and expertise is everpresent since we’re surrounded by a group of growing companies. This move offers us the opportunity to have new offices, with the latest technology, a creative and open environment, and more space to accommodate new employees to support our growth.
Our goals for 2022
Double our growth
Growth means more daily tasks to manage! With a lack of human resources throughout Quebec, our challenge in achieving this goal will definitely be to be able to optimize the management of our daily tasks in order to maintain our pace and efficiency.
Launch of our new modules
The year 2022 will be synonymous with novelty! That’s because we will be introducing two new modules in the coming months.
The first one, and the most awaited by many, will be our rental module. Although our ticketing module was able to manage a small quantity of activities and products in “rental” mode, it was not optimally adapted. It’s with determination that we want to make it available as soon as possible to all our partners and to all those who wish to be part of xPayrience.
The second module will be dedicated to accommodations. With this new module, we’ll tackle this market with a partner of choice. This new module will allow us to carve a place for ourselves in the tourism sector, which is extremely important for our business model (i.e., multi-attraction packages).
To be the first to know the release dates of these two new modules, we invite you to subscribe to our newsletter!
Just like the summer of 2021, the year 2021 was quite a year for us! We can say without pretense that we’re extremely proud of the work we’ve accomplished. We sincerely believe that we have the strength to succeed, and this is thanks to hard work, but also to the unending trust granted to us by our partners!
To finish on a grateful note, thank you all for this extraordinary year, thank you for your trust and thank you for believing in our project!