In the coming weeks and months, we want to take you on our journey how we build Triggi. Not just the app, but also the company. How do we build #teamTriggi and what challenges do we face? From the growing crowds at our demodays to the conversations about laptop-stickers, our new office and how to grow as a team. Subscribe to our channel if you want to get notifications on new stories.
As told by Frank Meeuwsen, Community Architect of Triggi.
“Here we are now, entertain us.”
In the autumn of 2015 I met with Tom Meijeraan, one of two founders of Triggi. Back then, Triggi was a small team of 8 people, building a new app to connect smart devices in your home to make them work smarter together. I was immediately triggered (yes, I know what I did there) by the expectations of this company and what it could possibly mean in the burgeoning field of the Internet of Things, Smart Cities and connected cars. I wanted to be part of this. So a few weeks later I joined the company with the idea to not only help building a community around the Triggi app, but also help building a company.
Building an app with a team of seasoned developers is one thing, building a company is another. It‘s actually something we think about more and more. Right now, we occupy two small offices that feel like squatting the place until we find something better. It’s not bad, but to be honest, it’s not the place were we want to stay and really build Triggi, the company. We first need to build Triggi, the app. We need the MVP to be on the market really soon, but in the meantime we are growing with more people and we are on the lookout for a new place. So while we’re building the app, we also need to build the company. One can’t go without the other. It’s a challenge we love to take.
Location is one part of building a company. It’s where you are. It’s the place you want to call home for the latter part of the week when you’re actually not at home. It’s not only the location as a pin on Google Maps, it’s also what’s behind the doors. How are the desks arranged, what’s on the walls, do we have our own totems and desk toys? Not enough to my liking. It’s all because we are in between spaces. We need a place of our own. But building a company is so much more than that. It’s developing a company culture. That doesn’t just mean free lunch, funky office chairs and nerfgun-battles. Then again, a few tech-companies ago we used to have Fridaynight Gamenights where we would order spareribs and load up on drinks and multiplayer Duke Nukem (Hail to the king baby!). This definitely build a companyculture with our own inside jokes, rituals and collective history we can still grab back to. But it’s not only those fun parts.
Mental vs physical location
A company culture is also how you view your work. How you want to do your best work and you’re loving it without getting stressed out about it. It’s the way we want to hire people and how we decide together what roles we need in our company. And more specifically what sort of roles we don’t want. It’s the environment in which you should feel safe to be who you are 24 hours a day, not an environment where you think you should act as someone else just because you’re at work.
A company culture is not something you construct with a couple of building blocks and a manual. It’s what’s between those building blocks we can’t see yet but what will be the glue that makes Triggi what it will be in the future. We give it our conditions and our prerequisites of what we want and don’t want. But other than that, a culture builds, unfolds and will show itself best in hindsight. To me, this is an exciting journey I would love to share so I can learn from others as well.
What’s next?
You want to keep up to date on everything that happens at Triggi? Subscribe to our channel here on Medium or subscribe to our own newsletter to get even more stories and inspiration. Or you can do both. Which would make us double unicorn-happy of course.
