Reflecting on Twin Sun's 2024

We have a lot to celebrate!

Awards, product launches, ... kittens (photos at the end!). We have had an eventful and and enjoyable year at Twin Sun, and we want to share it with you.

Our vision for Twin Sun is to be the most reputable software team in Nashville. A good reputation requires doing great work and being known for great work.

Here are some great things that happened this year:

We launched Podcraftr in partnership with 12South Marketing 🗣️
Clutch recognized Twin Sun as a Spring 2024 Global Award Winner 🏆
Chris and his wife had a baby! 👶 Miles just turned one a few weeks ago
Artful Agenda launched Habit Tracking with Artful Plus 🗓️
Caitlin and Wilfred built a true MVP for One Tap in under two weeks 💪
Chris ran a half marathon 🏃
Objective Zero Foundation Executive Director Betsey Mercado was selected for The George W. Bush Institute's Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program 🇺🇸
Caleb released an EP. 🎶 He continues making dubstep in his spare time
NashBio tapped us to build an interactive Patient Journey to showcase the breadth and depth of data they make available to researchers 🧑‍🔬
Jami's son started kindergarten this year 🧑‍🎓
Chris and DL attended RALLY in Indianapolis and 3686 in Nashville 🧑‍💼
DL joined the Nashville Entrepreneur Center as a startup advisor 🧑‍🏫
Austin, Brandon, DL, Greg, and Jack joined a team for the NTC Hack 4 the Community Hackathon, where we built a new website for the Community Resource Center (CRC). The new site isn't live yet, but you should check out the necessary work that CRC does in our community
Austin shared hackathon tips and tricks on Dr. T's livestream 🧑‍🏫
Greg rescued a litter of kittens and their mother 🐈
Austin's family adopted a kitten 😻 (one of Greg's, naturally)
Caleb, Chris, DL, and Jami were featured at the Cereal with a Serial Entrepreneur series at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center 🎤
Chris joined the Entrepreneur Organization 🧐
Jack and his wife traveled to Peru and the Galapagos Islands, and successfully summited Huayna Picchu ⛰️
Clutch recognized us (again!) as a Fall 2024 Global Award Winner 🏆
Jack played a set in a Bush cover band 🎸
Zak moved into a new house 🏠
Jack helped out as Santa for Borderless Arts, an organization that does arts education and activities for adults with intellectual disabilities 🎅
Wilfred made the long trek from Hawaii to join us in Nashville for our holiday party. He brought everyone chocolate covered macadamia nuts (thanks, Wilfred!) 😋
We helped 35 of our clients achieve their technology goals ❤️

Looking forward to 2025

Since founding Twin Sun in 2017, we've said that technology is the easy part of building a business. In 2025, we intend to make working with us even easier.

For new clients, it's easier to get started.

When you first started working with us, there's a good chance we gave you a laundry list of things to do. Accounts to set up, forms to fill out, app store fees to pay... We have always had clients do these things because we want you to own your own accounts. But what's stopping us from doing the grunt work for you and handing accounts over once we're done? Nothing at all. So we will take care of these steps going forward. If we can do it on your behalf, we'll take care of it.

We also offer a managed hosting service for new projects. This hosting service utilizes the same scalable AWS infrastructure we've trusted for years, but comes with routine monitoring and maintenance baked in.

We also help people get started earlier.

In the past, we have turned away some prospective clients if we felt they were not yet ready to build a product. Turning early founders away when they need help felt like the opposite of what we say we do for people. So, this past year, we have identified a few ways we can help early-stage founders get their businesses moving. When it's appropriate, we offer a product discovery service that outlines a detailed plan for an initial test of a product idea. If a founder is not yet ready for that step, we have partnered with companies we have worked with and trust to assist in researching and validating a market. We are also connecting with local organizations that help startup founders, such as the Nashville Entrepreneur Center and StartupNash, so we can point new entrepreneurs to the resources they need to find success.

For current clients, we offer more peace of mind.

This year we have added security scanning tools to all of our software. We detect and fix any newly discovered vulnerabilities and potential ways to attack our code every time we work on your product. This approach means that we fix security vulnerabilities before they ever impact your users.

We are introducing security monitoring and remediation even when you are not actively working on new projects with us. If we find any critical security vulnerabilities or necessary infrastructure upgrades, we will proactively let you know and fix everything up for you.

Additionally, we have refined our weekly routine. Twin Sun team members have an internal weekly meeting to share client goals and objectives and discuss how to overcome obstacles on projects. These conversations better prepare team members for weekly project meetings with you, where they share budget and timeline info to keep you apprised of how things are progressing. We are creating a discipline around identifying and achieving your goals, ultimately asking ourselves how we can better serve our clients.

Our team members are building a better place to work.

We all seek purpose in our work. It's necessary for staying motivated and maintaining a high standard of excellence. We have sought opportunities for team members to get involved in all areas of the business, and encourage folks to take the lead on things they care about. Our newest team member, Brandon, suggested that we should automate an onerous part of setup for new projects. That idea led to an automated AWS infrastructure setup tool which eliminated hours of tedious work on every new project. Sarah recognized that paid parental leave is something we have offered team members as part of our flexible time off policy, but we have never advertised parental leave to new hires. Paid leave is now an explicit benefit we will share with potential hires, increasing our appeal to candidates who plan on having children.

These types of contributions are exciting! It means our team cares about our work, about the environment we are building, and about our future working together.

Thank you for working with us

This newsletter has given us an opportunity to reflect on all of our shared successes. Whether we've worked together for years or have just recently met, thank you for being a part of our journey.

Happy New Year!

- Caleb, Chris, DL, and Jami