Hello world! You’re probably wondering what is this all about, who are these guys and why you haven’t heard of us before. Without any further ado, let us introduce ourselves; tell you what we do, where do we come from and where are we heading.

We’re from Warsaw, the capital city of Poland (which, contrary to popular beliefs does not share a common border with Switzerland).

We’ve come a long way; from our first idea for a Mac application, through the founding of this company to turning into an international Mac software vendor.

We’ve already known each other for a few years; Wojtek and Zbigniew were doing some part-time web projects earlier together, and later they met Daniel during one of the first Bootstrap events (Bootstrap events are monthly meetings organised by people with all kinds of creative ideas, from wannabe-entrepreneurs, through people who already had the execution phase behind them (successful or not), ending with profitable business owners). When we were starting this Mac thing, two of us still worked full-time, and Daniel was busy running his own web application (an online survey platform).

In late 2008 we came up with a specific idea. Perhaps it wasn’t a particularly thrilling one, but we’ve decided to create an invoicing application for the Mac (yeah, we know – boring). We had a few reasons for this:

1. We were Mac users. We kind of liked it, you know. Although we don’t usually dress like that.
2. We’ve noticed a rapidly increasing number of freelancers – designers, programmers, even lawyers –  who have been switching to Macs.
3. There were no native Mac invoicing applications, which  would comply with Polish tax and financial regulations, and the alternatives were cumbersome: Numbers/Excel sheets, FileMaker runtime applications, invoicing with Windows software under Parallels/VMWare.
4. Last, but not least, as developers, we always wanted to create a Mac application and this idea seemed like a good test of our skills.

We worked pretty hard for seven months, discovering Cocoa APIs, performing a lot of R&D and going through a continuous hell that was the attempt of combining our day jobs with our dream jobs. At some point, we’ve decided to verify our assumptions and perform a reality check, so we decided to give about a hundred potential future users access to the alpha, and then to a few beta versions. They liked it, and we listened to the feedback until there was nothing left to do except for releasing the final product.

Fast-forward to May 2009. Maktura 1.0 was ready (a not-so-witty pun on the Polish word for invoice, “faktura”). It met with enthusiastic response from Polish users, we received massive amounts of positive feedback and sales were good. We’ve passed the exam and we’ve had a lot of fun along.

We could finish this story at this point, but we had this crazy idea of continuing our work. Admiring the efforts of such successful Mac software vendors like OmniGroup or Panic, we’ve decided to establish our own company. A few months later, we’ve managed to find a great place for our office (you can find the pics on our Facebook profile) and Macoscope was officially launched with us on board.

During the following months, we’ve released few updates to our invoicing app (the current version is 1.2.5), got involved in some iPhone projects and plotted to conquer the world.

So, that’s the context; and here we are, with a new product, which is nearly ready-to-ship. We think you will find it interesting.

One of us, Zbigniew, is going to NSConference 2010 (Europe). If you would like to meet him, drop him an email or check out his Twitter feed.