Thimble is Fast Company’s 2021 #1 Most Innovative “Small And Mighty” Company
By Jay Bregman, CEO @ Thimble
We won!
The team at Thimble is truly honored this year to join the ranks of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, an annual look at the organizations who are building the world we all want to live in. And across industries and sectors, we took first place in the “Small And Mighty” category! For the first time in Fast Company history, they’ve awarded companies of under 50 employees like ours who are consistently swinging above their weight class. Winning big in this category is solid proof of a core belief that we share with our users, thousands of everyday business innovators all over the country: that small is powerful.
But we’re just getting started. Let’s take a quick look back at the progress we’ve made to earn this award.
What’s so innovative about Thimble?
We keep it pretty simple: smarter coverage, stupid fast, total control. Thimble is “smarter coverage” because you can get essential business insurance from an hour to a year for exactly when you need it — and save money when you don’t. Thimble is “stupid fast” because you can go from a quote to bound policy, end to end, in under 60 seconds. We’ve made the process as fast as three questions for customers who just need to get to work. And lastly, Thimble offers you “total control” because you can change, pause, or cancel your policy instantly, with no wait and no hidden fees. If Fast Company has its sights set on the world we all want to live in, we think Thimble is building the insurance products to get us there.
At Thimble, we’re constantly asking our customers and ourselves, “How can we use design to make insurance as easy as it should be?”
How did we tackle 2020 head on?
In 2020, we made some particularly great strides to grow from an on-demand service into the ongoing insurance provider relied on by thousands of full-time business owners. We did it through Thimble Monthly, our best-in-class business insurance subscription that works more like a streaming service and less like a dusty stack of papers. Launched at the beginning of 2020, we’ve now seen over 70% of our customer base shift to using Thimble Monthly, which tells us we’re finding bigger product-market fit and building loyalty in really meaningful ways.
Last year, however, loyalties to brands like ours were tested maybe more than the world could ever imagine. At the onset of COVID-19, we knew small businesses would be dramatically affected by state lockdowns, so our team rallied together to build Pause, a feature of the newly minted Thimble Monthly that allowed customers to skip a month’s payment, without cancelling their policy. The message from Thimble was clear: we’ll continue to go to bat for small businesses, we’ll continue to make business insurance accessible, and we won’t leave you hanging. I consider the launch of Pause as a feature of Thimble Monthly one of our biggest achievements as a company so far.
After Pause, we continued to roll out more product innovations, including new coverages like Business Equipment Protection (also known as “inland marine insurance”) and Customer Property Protection. We partnered with Hiscox to provide our short-term policies to more small businesses. We launched the Thimble API with the top service marketplace Angie’s List, and we even built a platform for Additional Insureds to better capture their demand: the Thimble Certificate Manager. At Thimble, we’re constantly asking our customers and ourselves, “How can we use design to make insurance as easy as it should be?”
We made big moves in 2020, but none bigger than becoming a 100% remote organization.
“Staying human means making time for the things that matter.”
How did we preserve the culture amidst all that growth?
It’s a big question. One of our core values is “stay human,” because we got our footing as a company by working side by side, with the flexibility to pull the right people into a meeting room or hash things out over Monday morning bagels. Team Thimble likes being together, so when we made the decision to become a fully remote organization after a few months of working through the lockdown orders in New York, we didn’t take it lightly. We learned that “staying human” was going to mean creating opportunities for team members to build relationships in the circumstances we were given. And as always, we got creative; we’ve done Zoom magic shows, murder mysteries, escape rooms (escape Zooms?), cooking classes, and a year later, people still show up on Thursdays at 4:30 for a very heated weekly game of virtual Scattergories.
That level of intention wasn’t only taken with the fun stuff, but it was also applied to high-level strategic thinking. When your environment doesn’t change much, it’s easy to get lost in a flurry of emails and meetings, but we still made time for “offsites.” Obviously, we’ve been about as offsite as humanly possible in the last year, but we’ve still dedicated days to deep thinking as a team, in order to confront the issues that are existential for our business. In work and in play, staying human means making time for the things that matter.
Going remote allowed us to share fun new experiences, and it seriously opened our pool of talent. We made several key hires in 2020, including Terri Hitchcock, our Chief of Insurance, along with the best and brightest from all over the country in functions like marketing and support. So when it’s time to work together in person again, Thimble may flip the script and have periodic “onsites’’ instead.
What’s next?
With the right people on board and a culture engine firing on all cylinders, we’re looking forward to even more product innovations in 2021. We’ve got new coverages like special events and BOP insurance coming soon, because it’s clear that our customers are growing with us; 70%+ of users with a Thimble Monthly policy is a clear indication that bigger businesses are ready to switch to Thimble, and 2021 will be about offering the more robust insurances they require, with our signature can-do, bend-the-rules attitude.
Congratulations to our fellow Fast Company Most Innovative honorees for all your contributions to society! Here’s to staying human. Now let’s get back to work. 💪
