Dear Chessable members,
The team and I wanted to send you, as well as your friends and family, our best wishes during this festive holiday season. We hope that despite the challenging times our world faces, you found a way to enjoy the holidays.
As is typical of us, we wanted to do a year in review and give you a brief look at what is coming up.
In the last year:
- We’ve grown from 90,000 members to 250,000 members.
- We’ve gone from 43.7 million positions mastered to 111.9 million.
- We have made great progress towards becoming the world’s largest interactive digital chess library, reaching over 450+ titles (with courses by the World Champion and other legends no less!)
- We’ve once again doubled our team size, getting ready to deliver even more value to you in 2021.
- We launched MoveTrainer 2.0 in April and despite some bugs and setbacks, we were able to provide you with the most stable, fastest, Chessable ever.
And we are still, just getting started. On the other side of the coin, our fast pace of growth has continued to give us some growing aches. We have had plenty of challenges and some setbacks but are slowly emerging on the other side, even stronger.
For example, a challenge worth highlighting is the task of scaling from 90,000 to 250,000 users. The technical tasks needed were invisible to you, our dear members, but they had to be done or else the site would be unusable. The good news? This should see us through to 1,000,000 users and beyond.
Also, the mobile app is somewhat late. We had delays kicking off the mobile project right away due to the “rocky” MoveTrainer 2.0 launch. However, I can finally say with confidence that the mobile app is coming within weeks. It will be iOS only at first, but we commit to having an Android version later in 2021.
The mobile team has been small, with just a couple of developers for most of the time, causing further delays. We faced challenges with hiring strong, chess loving, react native developers. Are you one? Do you know one? Please be sure to apply at our careers page! Referrals get a £500 bonus.
Last year we also promised you the translation of the site and content to German and Spanish. Once again, due to similar setbacks mentioned above, we had considerable delays, this is now at most a couple of months away. Once this is achieved, other languages may quickly follow.
I am very optimistic about the progress Chessable will achieve in 2021. Our hiring and onboarding process has improved drastically, and there is a new set of eager developers and team members just finishing their onboarding and getting ready to make an impact. Our bandwidth will have increased drastically for 2021.
We also built out our product team, and we’ve released *most* of our ideas publicly so you can provide feedback on what you’d like to happen next. As always, you are also welcome to submit new ideas and our product team will sort through them and hopefully, eventually, your own idea can make it to the top. If you have not yet seen it, please, check out our public roadmap here. Feedback received via email is also logged here and counts as a vote, so if you prefer you can let us know via email at [email protected].
Despite the setbacks, it has been an amazing year of accomplishments where we have built the foundations that will bring you and Chessable the best for years to come. There is no one more excited than me personally at what is coming up. Thanks to your support as well as the support from the Play Magnus Group, we finally have the resources we need to really make things happen. Stay tuned.
We are wishing you all a happy and prosperous new year, and thank you for being part of this amazing journey with us.
