Gimme 2020 Year in Review

We made some bets on our product before COVID-19 turned the world upside down. We are better positioned than ever to meet our customers’ complex needs because we took those risks.  

I would be tempted to attribute these decisions to luck if it were not for the insistence of the gifted members of our small but maniacal and highly-competent team.

Gimme Product Manager Colton Chastine and I were named to the Automatic Merchandiser and Vending Market Watch’s 2020 Pros to Know list.    

This is the fifth year in a row that skilled leaders on Gimme’s executive team have been given this prestigious recognition. 

That kind of record suggests to us that our obsession with continuous innovation is working.

We Trusted Our Gut with These Software Brands. We Were Right.  

We saw potential in Flutter and adopted it while it was still an experimental beta. At the time, our front-end applications were exclusively developed for devices in the Apple ecosystem. It might seem reasonable to double down on Apple’s Swift language and perhaps paradoxical or risky to switch to an open-source toolkit, running on an Android operating system, created by Google. We took the risk. The promise our team saw was better developer support, lent by its status as an open-source project. The value we could extract included faster development of front-end apps and the future value of expanding to new platforms, Android and Windows, from a singular codebase.  

Our team was right, and that potential has gone kinetic. Flutter is now the leading cross-platform framework around the globe. We use Flutter to develop for iOS, Android, and Windows platforms from a single codebase. I would estimate Flutter (+ Dart) is about 2x more productive than Swift + UIKit. Hot-reload is the biggest time saver here as there is no need for a lengthy compilation step after small changes. Often, if compilation time is more than 30 seconds, developers could move onto other tasks and it takes time to get back in a flow state.

We took a calculated risk with Kubernetes when it was still in beta. At that time, it forced us to change our architecture to support an approach based on clusters and microservices. It made big promises of automation, flexibility, and scalability without hiring additional DevOps to support growing server infrastructure. They pulled it off, and today Kubernetes is the baseline for scalable and stable projects. Scalable as in “planet-scale,” with the same design principles that allows Google to run billions of containers a week.  

For our back-end programming language, we chose Rust over C++. It was a more complicated choice. It had a higher upfront investment and more risk attached. If our team could get over the steep learning curve, then it promised the highest levels of system performance and reliability. We accepted the challenge and went to work climbing up the learning curve and building our back end system on the new language.

Since then, in a move that benefitted us and others on the platform, Mozilla spun out control of the Rust language to a new independent foundation. In addition to Mozilla, it is now backed by AWS, Huawei, Google, and Microsoft. The most prominent players in tech validated Rust is delivering on its promises of code safety and efficiency. It’s not surprising that Rust recently won the “most loved technology” award for the fifth time in a row.  

If you’re following our team, then you know that everything we’ve built so far is only the infrastructure to support even more exciting and valuable projects down the road. A modern, flexible front-end on top of a powerful, fast, and easy to maintain back-end is necessary to push our AI and computer vision ambitions forward.

For our AI choice, we took a page out of Andrej Karpahty’s playbook. If you aren’t familiar, Andrej is the brilliant director of Tesla’s AI and Autopilot vision. His number one advice to AI developers is “don’t be a hero” and pick the most related model from an existing one. With this mindset, we chose Tensorflow. Instead of “being a hero” and trying to create all-new models for our computer vision projects, its end-to-end open-source platform helps us use existing configurations and pre-trained models.

We believe the calculated decisions we made choosing our technology stack, and the value of the outcome, are part of the reason why Gimme was named to the Technology Association of Georgia’s 2020 list of Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies. We are honored to be included among the most revolutionary tech brands in the state of Georgia. 

New Moves in Our Playbook, More Wins for Our Customers 

We did a lot of customer discovery and product innovation last year. Now our customers stand to reap the benefits of our brand-new software and hardware developments. 

We took what we’ve learned about our customers to create the Gimme Key Pro. A major upgrade to our previous wireless DEX adapter, the new Gimme Key Pro is remarkably durable. It features an expanded battery and software development resources for our brand and VAR partners. Plus, Evan and I had a blast making its launch video.

We worked hard in 2020 to launch Gimme Vending Management System (VMS). It was a monumental effort, taking longer and requiring much more effort than we originally anticipated. We became yet another proof point for Hofstadter’s Law. Yet, in a way we could never have planned for, this afforded us an outrageously lucky opportunity. We were able to incorporate the changes our industry was going through, to thrive in a post-COVID world, into the finished VMS product. We were able to deliver and deploy the VMS to customers in 2020. The evidence of the advantages of our unique technology improvements and their value over competitive offerings became apparent as the year went on. Gimme VMS won the Automatic Merchandiser’s 2020 New Product of the Year Award in the technology and equipment category. 

The value we deliver to new customers is accelerating. In the early months of 2021, we’re already making traction with nationally-recognized vendors using Gimme VMS to run their multi-state, multi-warehouse foodservice operations. About 10% of Canteen franchises now use Gimme VMS to manage their operations on hundreds of vending routes and tens of thousands of points of sale.

2020 battle tested our technology and new products. Now we are at the beginning of our growth curve and value proposition.

2020 Proves Our Brand is Built to Last 

The traction we saw overlap the end of last year and into the first weeks of 2021 confirms that we’re ahead of the market. Because of our modern and unique technological framework, we can continue to create and deliver new products that are unparalleled in today’s competitive landscape. Our new architecture allows us to build things our legacy competitors are not able to.

Moving forward, we’re exploring a down-market expansion. We’re confident that we can leverage the ease of our deployment and minimal tech requirements to tap into smaller sized operations. 

We’re proud of our ability to create products that keep customer operations of all sizes secure, even in an unprecedented year. 

Cheers to 2021 and what’s to come! The evidence suggests whatever that may be, we’ll be ready for it.