Startup culture — stereotypes and reality
Hello.
I work in a startup that creates mobile apps as a Marketing Executive. This blog will be about the windy journey of a small startup, an unfiltered view of our day-to-day challenges and wins. I promise not to write anything like “5 top tips for ASO” and “9 hacks to be more productive”, partially because I have never found these articles useful, but also because the focus in this blog will be on learnings when we have been faced with challenges.
First, I want to tell you a bit more about our startup and what we do so you get the context. We are a mobile venture builder. We come up with ideas, pretotype them (It’s not a typo. I can talk about pretotyping in another blog post) and create new businesses.
At the moment, we are heavily working on Stack, a content-aggregator app. It’s similar to a social network for reading. Stack personalises your news feed. In the app, you are shown news and articles that you are interested in, favourite news sources and blog posts. In addition, you can follow other people with similar interests and read what they are reading.
I joined the team in July and we launched our app on 10th of August. It has been exciting to see the first few hundred users. Of course, not everything has been going smoothly all the time. We’ve had issues of accidentally sending multiple notifications to some of our users, random bugs appearing, or not sending enough articles. Regardless, we have users that are with us from the beginning, and that’s probably the most exciting thing about this job.
In this first blog post, I want to talk about what I imagined startup culture to be like and what it actually is (at least in my experience).
Before working in the startup world I had read and seen in movies and TV shows about the Silicon Valley startup culture:
- awkward guys working from basements,
- CEOs either obsessing about their startup or meditating in their office, embracing all-will-be-fine approach,
- working environment looking more like children’s nursery…
I couldn’t imagine that the same will be true in the London startup scene. However, I certainly expected that people working in a startup would be very committed and engaged in the work they were doing, which turned out to be true.
Some things that lived up to the almost stereotypical expectations in my work environment are:
- a trendy-looking canteen that has a DIY cereal bar and offers chia puddings and quinoa gym pots,
- free drinks and inspirational team talks once a month,
- flexible and relaxed work environment,
- some geeky conversations with my team members (although they are not socially awkward).
Thanks for reading and let me know what’s the work environment in your startup. Does it live up to the stereotype? Next week you can expect more inside info about the startup world from my colleague Callum.
Hristina
