Hi, we're Dronedesk

Our tag line is "less admin, more flying" and that's what drives us!
Everyone at Dronedesk works every day to make life simpler for commercial drone operators like you

Here's how Dronedesk was born

This is me

Hi, I'm Dorian - that's me on the left - the Founder of Dronedesk.

I retrained as a drone operator back in 2018 after taking early retirement from a life on the corporate treadmill. I chose drones because I saw huge potential in this nascent industry

It quickly dawned on me though that there was a massive amount of admin needed to plan even the simplest of flights. I hate admin.

Because I had the coding skills, I started building web tools to make my life easier. Scraping data from other sites and bringing it all together in one place.

I shared what I'd done with a few of my fellow PfCO trainees and they loved it because it made their life easier too. That gave me the impetus to build something more scaleable. Dronedesk was born.

After more than a 1,000 hours of development, I released the first beta version in August 2019. Then it all went a bit crazy!

Amongst the 100's of commercial drone professionals who signed up to try that first version, a large number were kind enough to give their time, thought and input into how we could make Dronedesk as good as it is today.

We haven't lost the momentum built up during the beta phase and every day we work to continually refine and enhance Dronedesk. In fact, there's now around half a million lines of code behind the scenes!

What's next?

Unfortunately, Dronedesk is never going to make me rich. But I believe it will make you happy!

Dronedesk is what's termed a "bootstrap startup" which essentially means the project is entirely self-funded by me with no external investors whatsoever.

That's a bit of a double-edged sword in that it means that we run on a tight budget. There's no swanky parties at Christmas or expensive business lunches here. No chance.

But the very positive flip side of that is that we're not answerable to anyone except our users.

We can steer the development of Dronedesk in the direction our users want it to go instead of in the direction that would give investors the best return on their money.

I find that liberating and exciting and I believe it means we can continue to deliver a product that's sustainable, ever-improving and genuinely useful to its users. Forever.

Thanks for your interest in Dronedesk. I look forward to welcoming you on board so that you too can experience the daily joy of "less admin, more flying"!

Dorian Ellis
Founder and Director

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Dronedesk makes it super easy to manage every aspect of your commercial drone business online. Create a free account now and start spending your time flying and earning money instead of managing spreadsheets and filing paperwork.
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