Crowdfire’s 2016 in Review - Initiating Lift-Off
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
The year 2016 for Crowdfire has been…eventful, to say the least. Now that we’re boldly marching through the first week of 2017, we thought it befitting to take a moment and reflect on the last year.
These past twelve months, we’ve grown leaps and bounds. We’ve encountered a few setbacks (both minor and major), we’ve cracked some first-rate comebacks and, though all were memorable, let’s prepare to #throwback on the most significant moments.
When we built our very own Crowdfire Chrome extension
We’re always on the lookout for making it easier for our community to share. And what better way than to have a powerful Chrome extension in your browser? Not only did we make social sharing an easier experience, we made it child’s play to share any post from anywhere, to be posted at the Best Time.
Since the launch, we’ve seen tens of thousands of user posts across Twitter and Instagram using the Crowdfire Chrome extension.
Enter the BOT
Crowdfire made a quantum product jump in August of 2015. We went on a work-cum-vacation to Daman (the western coast of India, few hours journey from Crowdfire HQ) which resulted in the genesis of Crowdfire’s chat bot — your super smart marketing sidekick.
This was an all-hands-in decision which promised to change the course of Crowdfire and our 16 million peopled community. We started full-fledged work on it in September 2015 and the first ever prescription was done on 24th Feb, 2016!
We’re still working hard on refining and perfecting it, but it’s out there and we’re proud of it. Read more about how it came to be here.
Crowdfire Expands
As we kicked into the third quarter, we augmented our team strength big time. We’ve added 27 people across all tribes. Yep, we kicked up the stakes and made aggressively important additions across our Engineering, Product, Design and Community teams, all through the months of August and September. We’re now 65 people strong.
Delving deeper, we’ve introduced a Tribe culture at Crowdfire, and categorically placed teams working on projects into Tribes and Squads. This has dramatically improved parallelism, productivity and focus.
For example, within the Community Tribe, we have a Content Squad, a Social Media Squad and a 1-on-1 Engagement Squad.
A lot more details on this in upcoming blog posts (stay tuned!)
Here’s how we’re shaping early 2017 for an all-new Crowdfire
1. Community feedback is now at the heart of the product feedback mechanism at CF. We have our ear closer to the ground.
2. We’re working hard towards our goal of providing world class support at scale, supporting millions of users across our iOS, Android & Web apps. We also do close to 8,000 interactions via Email & Twitter. All this while keeping the team lean and interactions personal.
3. We’re pushing the entire company to be more data-driven, where every decision is backed by hard data. We’re consciously avoiding the temptation to make decisions on the basis of intuition or personal experience. It’s tough, but the process bears fruit to spectacular results.
4. Crowdfire’s new branding is under development. So far, Crowdfire as a product kept evolving but Crowdfire as a brand never did. We’re now working on creating an identity that fits Crowdfire as it is today, and as we want it to be in the future. This includes a new visual identity entirely, that we will then start bringing into the product.
5. The Design team now works directly with product managers and tech, in specific Squads within Tribes, and less with each other. This brought about a change in the reporting structure which made design more in sync with product and less of a separate bubble where the design team would interact only with each other.
6. We’re instituting significant communication changes and fostering laser focus on marketing design. This will include external touch points like the landing page of our brand new website, the way we look on social media, and on the App Store and Play Store.
7. We’re paying more attention to technical debt: code is being written both for quick deployment and long-term maintenance.
8. Responsibility is being moved further down the chain with developers being responsible for their own projects while the infra team provides support. We’re distributing control to all our people.
9. We’ve moved to a fully dockerized ecosystem, which has made Crowdfire faster at deploying features and better at scaling to millions of requests.
10. We’re writing and compiling better, more comprehensive technical docs, leading to faster iteration times.
And most importantly, we’re having more fun than ever as a team, growing and learning and working together.
So, what’s next?
A lot has happened over the past year. We’ve completely changed the way we worked, without losing the essence of what it’s like working in a startup. Safe to say, we’ve kept the corporate chokehold successfully at bay.
And this year, with the combined strength, knowledge and abilities of our team, we’re bringing you a whole new Crowdfire.
We’ll be your marketing sidekick that will help you grow online everyday. We will work with you and help you get there using your website, social media and online advertising; just like a living-breathing marketer, except, we fit in your pocket.
If you’re a:
- Writer who wants more readers,
- Artist who wants more fans,
- Seller who wants more sales,
- Influencer who wants more reach,
- Small business who wants more customers,
- Freelancer who wants more clients,
then Crowdfire is for you.
Now, we have some exciting projects lined up over the next few weeks but to give you a broad outline, you can expect some brand new integrations on Crowdfire. Platforms like Facebook, Etsy, Shopify, Pinterest are all on the roster. So watch out for this.
We’re at the edge of the runway and we’re ready for the skies with one thought and one thought only —
We’d love to hear how your 2016 went, or, if it’s not too early, how 2017 is shaping up for you! Comment away!
