I'm very excited to start a new chapter in Sliptree's journey today. I've been working hard behind the scenes for the past few years to make it easier to send invoices across the borders, and today I'm proud to announce that we've finally launched the new Sliptree platform.
There are too many changes to list in this post, but here are the highlights:
Plus, thousands of under-the-hood improvements to provide a better experience than ever before.
Sliptree was built out of my own necessity to create good-looking invoices in a reliable, and simple way.
I had created invoices using spreadsheets (Excel), and Word documents before. While easy to get started, these methods quickly grew out of hand when I had to issue more than 1 invoice per month. Sometimes I missed updating the invoice number, sometimes I mis-calculated taxes, and sometimes my invoices were lost due to a hard-disk failure on my PC.
I looked into accounting software, and while they took care of ensuring correct numbering and tax calculations, they were rather complicated, as I did not need all the features they offered. I also found them to be quite expensive for a small business owner like me.
Thus, I teamed up with a few people at a Garage48 event, and built the first version of Sliptree in 48 hours. Later on, we continued to develop the product on the side, sometimes pushed by "pay-it-forward" events hosted at Garage 48 HUB.
Fun fact, Sliptree was originally named Ranits, which is an older term for briefcase (or backpack) in Estonian. We changed the name to Sliptree later on, as it was easier to pronounce and remember for our foreign users.
The free invoice template was great for validating the idea. It gave us enough confidence that there was a need for simpler invoicing software. We built login and registration, so that it would be possible to store invoices and customers, and later on added the ability to send invoices via email.
In 2015, we launched a redesigned version with more functionality and more languages. We gradually added new features and tweaks -such as eInvoicing -, but some of the technical decisions we had made with a scrappy startup mindset started to hinder us from moving forward. We wanted to add more features and move faster, but the old codebase was holding us back.
Technology has evolved a lot since we started, and we wanted to take advantage of the new possibilities. We wanted to make the app faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain. We wanted to make it easier to add new features and improve existing ones. We wanted to make it easier to scale the app as we grow.
I made the decision to rewrite the app on a modern tech stack, and I'm very happy with the results. The new version is faster, more reliable, secure, and easier to maintain.
Since we're using a well-known and maintained framework, we get a lot of benefits "for free", such as solid authentication and team capabilities. This allows us to focus on user-facing improvements and new features.
We have a lot of exciting features planned for the future, and we're looking forward to sharing them with you. If there's anything you'd like to see in Sliptree, please let us know by reaching out to our support.