getworkrecognized

A tool to create Performance Reviews to get you promoted

No Employees
Multiple Founders
Founders Code
Growth
Jobs & Hiring
Productivity
Programming
SaaS

Personally, I work for a big tech company in Europe. The Promotion Process includes the section of writing a Self-Review. I never remembered what I did so I wrote this application.

May 14, 2021 Lots of updates

In the past months, we have made some updates again. I got a bit of motivation to work on the project again and did the following things:

New Career Ladders

I have added two career ladders to our career ladder explorer:

I hope to get more traffic from these valuable pieces of information, but it does not seem like taking an uplift yet. Probably because I do not have a lot of backlinks yet. I will try to work on that a bit more in the next weeks.

Blogging

People told me as feedback that the site does not offer a lot of success stories. I have written a blog article now on how I got promoted relatively quickly within one of the biggest fintech companies in Europe. You can find the article here: "From Junior to Senior Software Engineer at Klarna in 2.5 years".

Blog upsell banner

I get more and more traffic throughout the blogging efforts but the number of users signing up to try the app is not high. I have worked on introducing a banner to motivate people to actually sign up. You can find an example of how it looks in the following tweet: https://twitter.com/kevinpeters_/status/1392960588884725761

Login Changes

The login changed a bit over the last months:

  • I have enabled the email/password signup + login, so people can login with GitHub, Google or via email/password now
  • I have also redesigned the login to include more social proof. I did this based on a tweet by Pieter Levels on nomadlist increasing their signup rate with a really testimonial driven signup page

redesigned login page of getworkrecognized

Onboarding Tour in the app

I have invested some time to implement react-joyride on the website. So when logging in now, you will see a small guided tour throughout the app.

Lowered Prices, Free trials

In a surge to get paying users now, I have decided to reduce the prices and enable people to signup for free. I think the prices are much more bearable now and cheap enough to just try it out. But let's see if it will have an effect. I still have to work on converting users.

Project Link: https://getworkrecognized.com

October 26, 2020 Landing Page Update + New Tool

After a long time, I finally dedicated some time again to upgrade dependencies, work on a new tool, and do some housekeeping. So what have I done:

Updating dependencies

Whoever worked with Node.js projects know this feeling: Updating dependencies. It is most often quite straightforward but there are a lot of tools that can help you with that like Greenkeeper or dependabot. A problem arises when there are breaking changes though. After not updating dependencies for a while I updated mostly everything now. And two big things happened. styled-components were updated from v4 to v5 and saved some CSS size and performance for server-side rendering meaning our build times decreased but also the page loads faster for users. Another thing I did was removing MobX and instead replacing it with pullstate. It is far easier to understand than MobX and I am quite happy with it. Fits in super nice with hooks and Next.js.

Optimizing Images

The main landing page had some Lighthouse performance scores around 60. Mostly attributed to slow loading images. I am using next-optimized-images which is an awesome package to do image handling in Next.js applications. Problem is, it is not loading images lazily with the browser's default feature. Introduced that and scores went up significantly:

picture showing new lighthouse scores

More improvements can be done on several other pages, but more later.

New Free Tool: Career Ladders Explorer

career ladder explorer

馃敆 Live-Version

Some of the biggest companies have published their career ladder publically. I integrated some of them in the main application already, but the content was hidden behind a subscription. I decided to make this data public now with this tool. It is an ongoing process but I plan to add more and more career ladders to this tool. It should be the ultimate source of truth if anyone is ever looking at how a Career Ladder works at Klarna, Monzo, or Amazon works. I plan to add one framework per day now for the next 30 days or so. That should be enough content for quite some time then.

October 5, 2020 September Update

Long time no update since I was focused on different things in life:

馃挵MRR: $0 | +0%
馃榿Visitors: 147 | + 69 (+88%)
馃敟Subscribers: 0 | 卤0 (卤0.0%)
馃挃Churn: 0% | 卤0 (卤0.0%)
鈿onthly Active Users: 1 | +0 (+0.0%) - just me :(

I am not really sure where to go with this project. I should finally focus on marketing and making sales where I am honestly really bad at.

So yeah the plan for this month is:

  • Create some marketing pages
  • Open Source some of the Leadership Skill matrices as some kind of free product and hope people sign up through this
  • Maybe reducing prices
July 22, 2020 Landing Page Update

I received some feedback on the landing page and updated the landing page based on this feedback.

What are the improvements?

Example Self-Review

I included a link to an exemplary Self-Review created with the Platform. This should act as Validation for the tool. Seeing the end result of the product is important for the customer to see the real value.

--> Check it out here

Clearer Value Proposition

One thing that was missing the real problem the application is solving. I listed a simple list of possible problems customers might have on the landing page, hoping this will keep users on the site.

Used some fancy CSS patterns to let images outstand

I used some CSS Patterns to let images highlight. For the pattern, I have used some library called pattern.css. It was super easy to integrate and get us outstanding images. I have planned to make video overlays at some point on the pictures, but this will take some time.

Added Customer Testimonials

More validation by customer's voices. I have added some basic testimonials that are also linked to our feedback page. Nothing big.

Added FAQ

The last thing, I have changed was the basic FAQ. Based on some tips from SEO gurus I just added this basic accordion with questions. A page dedicated to Questions will be created soon I hope.

You can also see all changes in our Changelog as well.

July 3, 2020 June Update

馃挵MRR: $0 | +0%
馃榿Visitors: 199 | +74 (+59.2%)
馃敟Subscribers: 0 | 卤0 (卤0.0%)
馃挃Churn: 0% | 卤0 (卤0.0%)
鈿onthly Active Users: 2 | +1 (+100.0%) (Beta users, I am still onboarding them)

We actually started to go live at the end of the last month. This also means we are charging now. Subscription is currently at $9.99 per month with a 10-day trial.

We also implemented a lot of features and made a lot of changes to the application:

Next month, we will focus on:

  • Improving the onboarding workflow
  • Onboard most of the Beta user and some user outreach
  • Get the first paid customer
  • Write some more content, blogging, content marketing on how the app is working and helping you + more leadership templates that will get introduced - BuzzFeed's Product Design Principles are currently integrated
June 14, 2020 New Login Method

We focused first on Software Engineers during the beta launch but figured out a lot of non-programmers were signing up for the app, so we decided to offer login via Google too.
Implementation
Since we are using passport and express implementation was quite easy actually. We have just used the passport-google-oauth20 npm package and added the specific middleware to our server, added the secrets, and added the Google Profile model. You might wonder what this Google profile model means. Let me explain:

Over time you might add different login methods. Maybe some methods should be merged at some point and adding every detail of a user to one table does not grow as nicely as with separate tables, so currently, we have something like this:

https://i.imgur.com/xsyD2HW.png

This will help us in the long-term to add metadata to the specific profiles but will also make merging/splitting accounts easier.

May 11, 2020 Blog Article #3

After Blog Article #1 and #2, I released a new Blog Article during the weekend:

鉃★笍How to Share Your Work Achievements During COVID-19

The blog article is describing how you can share your work achievements within your team to be up to date with everyone else and get a feeling of what work they are doing. In times of the Coronavirus, people might feel their work is not worth it. Sharing the achievements will help you to get work recognized though and will boost overall morale.

Product

On another note, we also invested some time over the weekend into the email setup for the application. The goal is to create email notifications that remind you to write down your work notes. Setting up Amazon SES was fun but also a bit quirky. It might be an opportunity to write a blog article about it.

May 6, 2020 Beta Signup Available

After long development time, I or we (my co-founder kind of dropped out), release the landing page of our application getworkrecognized.

Getworkrecognized will help you with tracking your work achievements and creating a Self-Review.

Why?

I always found myself at my current company, Klarna, in a situation before the promotion period where I needed to create a Performance Review of myself. The company called it Self-Evaluation and I always struggled to remember what I actually did in the past 6 months.

How?

There are two main functionalities of the application. One of them is to actually write down on what you have achieved throughout the day. Yeah, you could use something like Google Keep or Notion for this. But sorting/grouping these notes can get quite complicated at the beginning of the promotion cycle. Another pain point was sorting individual items to the leadership principles of the company. You can see here how the leadership principles get applied at Klarna. So tagging the notes would be an ideal first step.

Another problem I had was to actually write down what I have achieved throughout the day. Most of the times I actually forgot to write things down. At the same time, I also discovered Duolingo and was fascinated by their streaks. It kept me going learning Spanish (yo hablo espanol un poquito, que necesito aprender mas :D) and I wanted notifications and something similar to remind me to actually write down my work notes. This is not implemented yet but will be done via email notifications in the first place.

What鈥檚 the state?

I have pitched the tool to some colleagues and friends already and have some names in the onboarding pipeline already. And even one random email I do not know which is super exciting. I hope I will get some more emails soon, but it will probably take some time until we go into beta.

TLDR:

  • Released landing page => https://getworkrecognized.com
  • Had problems writing down what I actually did at work, created this app to:
    ** Write things down, keep me accountable
    ** Organize them for a Self-Review
  • Have some beta signups already, mostly friends and colleagues
April 23, 2020 Went live on Indiehackers

Being a silent reader mostly on Indiehackers, but still an aspiring Indie Hacker, I wanted to create an application.

The Problem

In my company, the promotion process includes a section called Self-Review. Basically this Self-Review decides if you get promoted or not. It showcases what you have worked on and rates yourself against the current level you have. The big problem with this is that I never remembered what I have done in the past 6 months at work. I think a lot of people can relate to this.

The solution

I got hooked up to Duolingo in the past year. The mechanism with losing your streak and notifications motivated me a lot. I wish the same would exist to write down your work notes. This and organizing the process of grouping notes to special bundles was always a pain for me in the current company. Creating this application should help and a lot of other people with this problem.

That's it for now. Follow to get updates. The plan, for now, is to go into a private Beta since I know some colleagues and friends are interested in this tool already.

About

Personally, I work for a big tech company in Europe. The Promotion Process includes the section of writing a Self-Review. I never remembered what I did so I wrote this application.