The Experiment that Turned into Our Marlow Daily Challenge.
Experimentation can lead to great value if you give it a try.
I think it was early November 2017; a few months after we started building the earliest versions of Marlow.
I was sitting at the desk in my 600-square-foot-one-bedroom-but-really-a-suped-up-studio-apartment in San Francisco trying to find new ways to add value for our members.
We were a much smaller team at the time but our creativity and willingness to try new ideas was as strong as it is today.
The main requirements for trying a new experiment at Marlow is that you must have a clear hypothesis and some amount of evidence to back up our hypothesis before we threw too many resources into the project.
For context, in those early days, our only resource was time and I had just come up with an idea that was a big time suck: The Marlow Daily Challenge.
I couldn’t kick the idea that we should be sending an email to our members with reminders for how to invest in their career a little each day. I wanted it to include step-by-step actions they could complete in just 15 minutes a day to lay the groundwork for their career goals down the road.
For example, by the time you’re ready to get promoted, there are about 50 actions you should have completed in the many months leading up to that promotion.
Most of those actions are deprioritized due to urgent (though not always important) tasks.
Similarly, building relationships with co-workers often falls to the wayside until it’s too late.
Every successful team needs trust. It takes time to build trust and we don’t notice how little trust we have until we’re faced with a difficult project, a missed deadline, or an upset customer.
In the hard times, you need great partnerships at work to help you achieve success.
But it’s easy to skip out on the team lunch so you can get your extra hour of work done. Or forget to say hello in the morning because you have too much on your mind.
By the time you realize what you should have done (i.e., say hi to a coworker, prepare more effectively for your 1-on-1 meetings, etc.), it’s too late. The Daily Challenge is intended to solve that problem. It’s designed to remind you that you need to take strategic actions on a regular basis across many parts of your career.
If you’ve been following the Marlow story, you know Chelsea and I started Marlow a few months after she moved from San Francisco to New York. We went into this knowing that we were going to be working from a distance. So I shared my crazy idea — an email every single day. And we got to work to make it happen.
It’s a free email newsletter and our members absolutely love it because it’s bite-sized (usually 2 to 4 minutes to read) and can be completed in 10 to 15 minutes a day.
Today you have the option to get the Daily Challenge every day or a couple of times a week.
Entire teams are starting to sign up for the DC. Just last week I noticed 10 people from the same company sign up in a matter of a few hours.
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Mary Fox is the Co-Founder and CEO at Marlow. You can subscribe to the Marlow Daily Challenge here.
