2020 is certainly not what we all imagined. After only two months of normality, everything suddenly changes in March. The world comes to a standstill, everyone works from the home office and overnight the whole working and everyday life is digitalised. But despite all the difficulties and the many new, unexpected situations, 2020 was still a very successful year for fileee. In 2020, we "crunched" some numbers. This year our team has grown to over 30 people. And that's because of you. Over 50,000 new users registered in 2020 and we have now passed the 150,000 user mark. Of course, so many users are also busy. In 2020, over 1.5 million documents were uploaded. Our review of the year 2020:
fileee is a guest at the "FuckUp Night" in Münster. Our founder and CEO Marius talks about the things that have gone wrong in the 9 years of fileee and - more importantly - what he has learned from them and how these setbacks have helped him and us to become even better. You can get a little insight in the interview with WDR:
With the "Digital Demo Day" and also the "CCW 2020", the last trade fairs take place at the beginning of the year. Many visitors, full exhibition stands, shaking hands - a very unusual and hardly imaginable picture today. At this point in time, no one can foresee that all the other trade fairs this year will not be able to take place at all or only completely digitally.
After months of work and many initial success stories at well-known companies, fileee Conversations powered by ThinkOwl is launched. The vision of fileee is and remains: Do away with paperwork! But this time we're going one step further and saying: "No paperwork at connected companies - and for both sides!" Together with our colleagues from ThinkOwl, we have created a customer-centric and smart solution for simple customer communication. This allows companies of all sizes to make their customer and employee processes simple, digital and "paperless". As a fileee user, you save yourself the trouble of logging into countless customer portals and communicate digitally with all the companies that are relevant to you.
Suddenly everything is different - or is it? Deserted streets, empty cafés and restaurants, discussions about toilet paper and noodles. Within a few days, our everyday life changes completely. Even our beloved fileee office is deserted from one day to the next. No more meetings, no more chatting over coffee or cooking together in the lunch break. While for many companies this step was also a big break from a technical and cultural point of view, the change to a home office has been very successful for us. Since all employees have always had the opportunity to work completely independently of location, all digital tools were already available and part of our daily routine. Thanks to Slack, Teams and, of course, fileee, work continues smoothly even in the home office.
Together with our partner Deutsche Telekom, we took part in the #WirVsVirus hackathon initiated by the German government in March. There, we developed the SME Credit Assistant. With this, a credit process can be completed in just a few minutes. Completely digital, without paperwork and written documents, with intelligent questionnaires and chat(bot) for queries. Ideal for helping small and medium-sized businesses quickly obtain the loans they need to support them in times of crisis.
In May, the server move to the Open Telekom Cloud (OTC) was officially completed. After months of work, all services are now securely housed on our new servers. Synchronisation with other services has become more stable and your documents are now processed faster. Searching your documents has also been stabilised and is faster than ever before. The improvements apply to both the web app and the mobile app.
In 2020, we also welcomed many new cooperation partners: with anybill and epap, you can say goodbye to crumpled receipts in your wallet. At Degussa Bank, you can use the digital construction financing assistant for your own home. At DEVK, sales partners can now communicate with DEVK easily, quickly and securely without paperwork thanks to the DEAS Mobile Scan App from fileee. And with GetMyInvoices, you can automatically import invoices from 10,000 online portals into your fileee app and save yourself the hassle of logging into different portals.
Our beloved team events and activities such as cooking together, barbecues, video game evenings or team activities unfortunately had to be cancelled in physical form this year. In order to maintain the social togetherness and exchange among colleagues, we organised many different digital events throughout the year. From scribbles and coffee together in the morning, to a digital lunch break, to a digital after-work beer, everything was there. Although such digital events can hardly replace a real meeting, the digital events were fun for everyone and were always our highlight of the week.
For the successful digitalisation of the application process for private real estate loans, fileee received the "Best Process Award" from the ProcessLab of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management together with Degussa Bank.
In August, we received a new supply of fileeeBoxes and sets from our supplier, and our office space, where employees used to sit until the lockdown, became a storage area. This also ensures the supply for many of you who have been eagerly waiting for new boxes, as they could perfectly use the time in the home office to digitise their paperwork.
In the summer, we worked hard on the text, design and programming, and then it was finally ready: our new fileee website! A lot has happened to us in the last few years and we have added many new functions and features to fileee, which we can now present to you accordingly. Fancy, isn't it?
With Manu, Basti, Benni, Niklas, Laura, Jasmin, Dennis, Lea, Luis and Justus, we welcomed 10 new employees to the team in 2020. We would like to make a special mention of our new Chief Happiness Officer (CHO) Dhala. She also joined our team this year and is always happy to be bribed with treats. By the way, you can find our entire team on our new team website.
With Team Owlsome 🦉 fileee, together with ThinkOwl and PwC, took first place in the KfW funding application section at the #Symbioticon of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. We are mega proud and grateful to have taken the first jury place in both rounds. 🤩
One of our main goals is to do away with paperwork. And that is exactly what we have applied to the legally required contact lists for catering and services:From now on, anyone can use fileee to create a digital attendance list for customers and guests free of charge and in just a few minutes! The form can be easily adapted to any industry and any company. No paperwork, more time for customers and data protection-compliant, secure storage of data in Germany.
Like every year one of our highlights - but this year you broke all records. We have never sold so many fileeeBoxes and sets in one day. We thank you for the many orders this year and are very happy to help you digitise your paperwork even better with our boxes and sets.And if you want to save even more: At the moment, you get the first 3 months of Premium for freewith our New Year's deal when you take out a yearly subscription.
With all the new features and functions, it was time for a new fileee product video. We are very pleased to be able to explain fileee even better and more comprehensibly in just 90 seconds. Take a look:
We all hope that next year we will be able to return to normality bit by bit. In any case, we are very much looking forward to finally chatting with colleagues in the kitchen again, to having lunch together and even to holding meetings for hours together in the meeting room. And in 2021 we will continue to go full throttle for you! You can look forward to many exciting new features and functions in the spring to further our mission of "A world without paperwork". Until then, we wish you a good start to the new year and good health! We are looking forward to a great and exciting year with you! Your fileee team
