2021 was an adventurous year for us at the RapidIteration. I can say it was more crazy for the world, but we managed to go through it without letting it crash us. Everything that kills me makes me feel alive, that happened to us and we keep singing that song from OneRepublic. Such a great song!

Back to RapidIteration, we managed to keep serving our clients and although we had no direct business development efforts, managed to get a couple of additional clients. As a company who still tries to find its way among elite crowd, we are sacrificing a lot in terms of the cost and say Yes more often and no less so. That has its negative effects, but we are aware of it and want to change that as we grow.

Everyone at RapidIteration is here because they love to learn and grow. This is the most fundamental thing I urge and communicate with everyone in the team: in a constantly moving world, standing means going backwards. I don't have to worry a lot, because everyone in the team is living by that standards anyways. I also tell them: do not do it for me, for RapidIteration or for this and that, do it for yourselves. Thus, we are already keeping a good pace with the changing world.

Having such growth mindset, we grew in multiple aspects. We grew our executive leadership team size to add six new people, with diverse technical and management skills. In our offering, we expanded the area of services to Software Development, ICT consulting and Staff Augmentation to better support businesses of medium to large size in their day to day operations. We previously only focused on startups.

In the year 2022, our goal is to keep learning and expanding our client base and serve more businesses. For our products, we will be mainly focusing on YaganKar and CodeWeekend and scale them to new audiences and geographies. In terms of RapidIteration, we want to expand our focus to support medium to large size businesses in their day to day operations.

CodeWeekend

In addition to serving clients, we continue to give back to society. Through our CodeWeekend initiative, we started a new cohort of our coding bootcamp. We enrolled 75 students into the program and offering them a career pathway that will help them get remote or in-person jobs as web developers in companies anywhere in the world.

Among many nice things that happened to CodeWeekend, one was getting featured by MIT Technology Review. It is a very well written piece and explains in detail about our work, the importance and the role our efforts plays considering the situation in Afghanistan and how to support our efforts. You can read the article here. Additionally we were featured by an Italian news outlet that you can read it here.

Our goal this year with CodeWeekend is to finally start scaling our activities. We will look into expanding our chapters and start a new cohort of our bootcamp program mid-year. We also aim to strengthen our work through meaningful partnerships with relevant organizations and companies.

YaganKar

We are also helping freelancers finding new and better jobs through yagankar.com, focusing and starting from Afghanistan and planning to cover refugees in general.

This year, we had a significant downstream growth. YaganKar has over 300 registered freelancers that over 80% of them happened during 2021. We have good traction in terms of helping people find jobs, but that part needs some more work. We are now in research of multiple avenues we can go and after identifying that, we should be in a good situation.

Our goal this year to expand beyond Afghanistan and cover refugees as well. We also see if we can continue under the name yagankar or we should go for a name change, we will see.

New Website

All of the above, but we could not stop ourselves to do one more thing this year and that was to launch a brand new website for RapidIteration. The product team at RapidIteration worked tirelessly to get the website up and running and there are a lot of coordination and hard work in launching this new website. Please browse through various navigations and reach out to us in case you have any comments or suggestions.

RapidIteration - New Website

Wishing you all the best in the new year and if you are reading this, hope we cross paths and work together, if we haven't already :)