17 Years

We have been working on building AmiWorks for 17 years now. And yet, I feel like we are only at version 1.1. There is still so much left to do.

Today, we also spent most of our time updating PHP to ensure PHP2Shell doesn’t affect us or our customers. Not the most exciting way to spend the day, but keeping our customers safe is part of the job.

Compared to last year, this year was better in almost every way. We worked on some really interesting websites, and overall, we improved on every parameter we had set for ourselves.

Our sales process has improved a lot, but it is still not as consistent as we would like it to be. Our lead pipeline has definitely improved, and we will continue to experiment and find ways to make it better.

Another important initiative this year was improving our project management process. We spoke to our customers, listened to their feedback, and started working on a better way to manage projects so that we can respond faster and serve them better.

We tested the new process with a few customers last quarter, and we are now rolling it out to everyone. I’m excited about how this will help our CX team serve our customers better.

We also started WPoets.TV, our podcast and interview channel, where we talk to people doing awesome work in the community.

Here is what we worked on this year

1. Awesome XP

After several experiments with the Awesome NPS platform, we finally released Awesome XP as a single WordPress plugin. It lets us create Gutenberg blocks without depending on ACF.

We are now working on adding support for WordPress Abilities, which will allow AI agents to help build blocks. We still have a lot to explore here, but it is an exciting direction for us.

2. Monomyth FSE

We worked on Monomyth FSE, our base WordPress theme that works with Awesome XP. Together, they help us make better use of WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) features and help us make awesome websites.

3. BasicPlot

We designed a new look for BasicPlot but didn’t release it. Halfway through, we decided to rethink how we manage projects. We chose to focus on that first, and the BasicPlot update will follow in the coming months.

As I said earlier, this is our 1.1 release. After 17 years, I still feel we have a long way to go before we are where we want to be.

I want to thank the team, especially those who went beyond the call of duty to make things happen this year. I also want to thank our well-wishers who have supported us and continue to believe in what we are trying to build.

If I had to sum up the year for AOE-ROR, I would say this: the world has entered the AI Age, and we are still in the Iron Age.

The conquest has not started yet. We did try, but our first attempt failed. So we are back at the strategy board, trying to figure out how to move forward as the world enters the AI era.

For now, we are continuing to invest in upgrades that will help us prepare for our next attempt at conquest.

We are still bullish on WordPress CMS, and we will keep experimenting and improving.

Today, we are celebrating our 16th Anniversary.

This past year was very difficult. Our friend, philosopher, and guide passed away, and we felt lost.

We survived the challenges from last year thanks to the massive efforts by my team.

We have continued to focus on improving our sales process. We’ve seen some good results, but we need more consistent outcomes. We also added new services, but there is more work to do on the business side.

We made good progress on our internal processes. Our projects are now managed in BasicPlot, the new version of our tool, Plot. We are also using Microsoft Teams more effectively, which has made our teamwork much more organised. We even gave our teams names (if you want to know them, ask me over chai).

This year, we worked on several new releases:

1. WPoets V3: We released the third version of WPoets.com in January 2025. It reflects our current focus and runs on our latest Awesome Enterprise Platform, allowing us to make quick updates.
2. BasicPlot: This is the new name for Plot v3, our project management tool. We released it and are now using it across WPoets. It has become essential to our daily work. It was a long time in the making, and I am very happy to see it in use across the company.
3. Awesome Enterprise: We had two Core releases and three WP releases. Our main focus was on releasing the Awesome NCP. A little work is left, but it should be ready by the end of this month. We also experimented with AI and are happy to share that we’ve successfully trained an AI to write code in Awesome. The team is now using this to help with their work.
4. WisdomTab: We worked on the monetisation aspect of wisdomtab.com, and it will also be released in January.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all our well-wishers, especially Ajit Bohra. He shared how he runs Lubus, and those discussions gave us great ideas for improving our own processes.

In terms of AOE-ROR, we reached the Iron Age a long time back, but we still haven’t started our conquest. The focus is still on accumulating resources, though we have been using them for tech upgrades. I hope we will be ready to start the “conquest” phase from January.

We will continue to experiment. Have an awesome Diwali.

Today, we turn 15.

Compared to last year, this year was focused on consolidation and improving the business side of our story. Our focus was to improve the sales flow and predictability of getting new business; while we have succeeded to an extent, we still have a long way to go.

On the tech side, we have released the following.

1. We launched WisdomTab, our browser extension, to get a daily dose of inspiration from a set of highly curated quotes and questions.
2. We rebooted the PHPCamp, the only (Un)conference for PHP developers in India.
3. In Awesome Enterprise, we did 4 releases and experimented with training AI to write in Awesome. We have made decent progress, and we will release it to the public once AI passes our test.
4. We also build a visual studio code extension for awesome enterprise shortcodes to support code fold and colour highlighting in VS Code. It will be released soon.
5. We also launched two new sites, one for Awesome Websites and another for Awesome Ops, to market our services better.
6. We also made progress in the SaaS version of our Plot app, but it is still not ready for prime time.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our well-wishers, especially Dr. Shraddha Sharma, who helped our team to further improve their communication skills.

In terms of AOE-ROR, since we reached the Iron Age three years ago, we’ve been accumulating resources for conquest. Just when we thought we were ready to start conquest, we got ambushed. We barely survived that ambush, and now all our focus is on improving the perimeter security so that we can never be ambushed like this again. Soon, we will start the conquest; we have waited long enough.

Happy Deepawali to all of you; the experiment continues…

I am excited to introduce WisdomTab, our latest experiment, a browser extension that ditches the usual start screen and throws a random question and quote your way.

To know more about it check this post.

Today, we are celebrating our 14th anniversary!

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made over the past year, and we’re excited to continue to grow and innovate in the years to come.

This year, we focused on increasing sales. We experimented with multiple approaches, and while we found some success, we’re still working on finding a predictable approach.

We also made significant progress on our Awesome Tech Stack. We released 10 updates of the Awesome Enterprise framework, including support for connecting with multiple databases. We’re also working on a new SaaS version of our Plot app, which we expect to release in a month.

We’ve also been experimenting with LLMs and OpenAI to teach them the Awesome Enterprise framework.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our well-wishers, especially Amit Mishra, who helped and made us feel very welcome in Naama Bengaluru.

In terms of AOE-ROR, since we reached the Iron Age two years ago, we’ve been accumulating resources for conquest. This has proven to be a very difficult and slow process, but now we’re ready to start our conquest. It’s time to stretch the limits again.

While we continue to experiment, Happy Navratri, Durga Puja, and Dussehra to all of you.

Today we turn 13.

The effect of Turbulences that started last year, can still be felt. This year we focused on trying to consolidate the type of work we were doing, and our experiments resulted in the insight that the “website is a pain for marketing teams” armed with this, we have changed all our sales and marketing pitch.

We have added to our team size, and we are now focused only on “Awesome Websites” as the business unit. Our internal discussions are now happening in terms of OKRs. Delivery teams are now structured in optimal independent units to give a better experience to our customers.

This year we released the following improvements to our Awesome Tech Stack

1. 800+ ready-to-use UI blocks and all of them are available in XD format as well.
2. 12+5 releases of Awesome Enterprise including support for the code repository
3. A whole new way of debugging in Awesome, along with a debugger app
4. The alpha version of the new form architecture is ready, this will enable us to build form-based workflows at least 50% faster than what we are able to do right now.

I would also like to take this opportunity to remember and thank all our well-wishers. This year I would like to add “Biju Nair” to this list of well-wishers, he went out of his way to help us with the Bengaluru startup ecosystem.

In terms of AOE-ROR, since last year we are in the Iron Age, most of our research is done, and the various unit combinations needed for the conquest are now ready. This also means we are very low on resources to wage a full-fledged growth war, still we are now in exploration mode to figure out the best market to capture while trying to increase our resources for sustained war.

I believe we are now in that make-or-break stage of the game where timing is very critical as the conquest campaign is about start.

As always we are going to continue to experiment with ideas, but this year, it will be focused on increasing our sales.

Happy Deepawali.

Today we turn 12.

If last year was a smooth sail, this year was filled with turbulences. We started this year with aggressive growth plans, and we got hit in the face with attrition. This situation put us on the back foot for a major part of this year, actually, we are still on the back foot and recovering from this loss.

We did a lot of work around documentation of Awesome Enterprise and even started a youtube channel to share the tutorials. We also fully restructured our Github page to highlight our focus.

This year we improved on our process further and did multiple releases across our Awesome Tech stack, including

1. 12 releases for Awesome Enterprise,
2. A ReactNative based App shell,
3. 2 new Apps and multiple services for Awesome Enterprise
4. 100+ UI Blocks to use on awesome websites.
5. A script to quickly set up new servers with all the prerequisites for the new WordPress site.

I would also like to take this opportunity to remember and thank all our well-wishers who continue to support us. I would especially like to thank our teammates who pitched in when we needed them while going through difficult times on the personal front.

In terms of AOE-ROR, our age is Iron, but while we were focused on researches, we had a few skirmishes that forced us to be defensive. Our focus is still on gathering resources and continuing to invest in upgrades & researches that will help us in our conquest plan. This is that phase in the game where you wait for things to fall in place and hope for a breather so that you can gather your full strength. Conquest will start real soon.

As always we continue to focus on making our tools and process better so that we can serve our customers with higher quality and efficiency.

Today we turn 11.

Since last year we were focusing a lot on tools and process to improve ourselves, we have made progress and we are still focused on that. One thing that came out good from this whole covid situation for us is that now we have moved towards remote setup.

Moving to Work from home forced us to fast-track a few process that was in our todo list but we never got to work on it.

On the tech side, we have managed to stabilize our awesome enterprise and have started the work on v3 of Awesome Enterprise Platform. It will be even faster than the current version and more powerful and feature-rich.

That being said, I would also like to take this opportunity to remember and thank all our well-wishers who continue to support us.

In terms of AOE-ROR, we reached the Iron age last year, but we still have few more kinds of research to complete before we can push for the conquest, we are on our most vulnerable condition as most of our resources are tied up with the researches. Soon, very soon we will be pushing for full conquest 😉

We will continue to invest in tools and experiment with processes that will work for us.

 

Today we completed 9 years of our operations.

This was the year of consolidations, where we also shed extra weight that we had gained. We continued with our focus on ‘Awesome Websites‘ program and finally brought it to the centre of WPoets website. In terms of processes, we have improved a lot, but the more we do, the more we realise that there are so many more things to be done.

Documentation, the one task from last year is still pending, though we are now in much better shape than we were, still, a lot is desired. Another thing that is not moving for us is our outbound sales process, this is something we need to now actively work on.

Our work on Awesome Studio platform has paid us rich dividends and we have doubled down on it. In the actual plugin, we did a few minor releases, but we build and released a series of awesome apps, that are being used by most of our customers actively, even though we had built them with WPoets team in mind.  We are in process of improving Awesome Studio platform, and we released the much-improved ‘Awesome Enterprise’ version for our studio platform. It is optimized for use within our projects. In between, we had multiple mini-experiments that did not result in anything.

We had hoped that this year we will have our first release, but we are still in RC 3, simply because we have still not managed to solve some of the teething troubles that keep getting exposed whenever we try to stretch things for our selves.  Some of the major areas where we keep hitting the bottlenecks are sales and technology, they need to be solved before we can confidently say we have arrived.

I would like to take this opportunity to remember and thank all our well-wishers and team members who have continued to support us.

Finally, the best way to describe our current status is in terms of AOE-ROR, we are in Iron Age, but as you may know every research in Iron Age is a costly affair and they take time. We are waiting for our iron age researches to finish and get a few people who can wield those powers before we start our conquest. We will get there soon.

Meanwhile, we continue with our experiments and prepare for our conquest…