Inside our community: Past, present and future of the heart of Unbabel
Hugo Macedo, our VP of Community, took us to a walk down memory lane on Unbabel community and shared some of our predictions for the future
“If someone who had visited Lisbon 10 years ago were to come back now, they would still know the city, but at the same time a lot will have changed”. That’s how Hugo Macedo, VP of Community, explained his return to the team this year. Six years ago, he started at Unbabel managing all of our communities. The business grew and he moved to Marketing. Now he’s back, and he still knows everything about the Unbabel community, but like Lisbon, it’s undeniable that our communities have changed.
“The growth has been gigantic”
So how would Hugo describe our communities today? “The growth has been gigantic,” he said. In the early days of Unbabel, when there were only eight employees, he was in charge of creating and growing all of our communities from scratch. “From the very beginning, we always said that Community was strategic for Unbabel because of the value it brings to the customers and the company,” remembered Hugo.
Once upon a time…
In reality, before he joined and before the company was officially founded, Hugo was already shaping what it was going to be, or better, how it was going to sound. When it was just a prototype and a landing page it was called Vakrit — he immediately felt it was not a good name, too geeky (it had some clever meaning in an obscure language) and not relatable at all. After some brainstorming with the founders, he came up with “Unbabel”. He likes to emphasize though that it was just an option, the founders made the call to adopt it. Fast forward some months and he joined the company now called Unbabel.
One of the biggest challenges for him and the team was to find people with the linguistic abilities they needed. At that time, everyone could sign up and become an editor, without any tests, and that’s how they managed to grow organically at a very fast pace.
In the beginning, they supported only the most common European languages, Brazilian Portuguese, and Latin American Spanish. There were about 5,000 registered users, but of course, they were not all active. Back then there was a system of community feedback where editors would rate each other on quality. Hugo remembered that he could segment editors as “selfish” (that would rate negatively to remove competition) and “caring” (the ones that would always rate positively because they didn’t want to harm the others). They couldn’t really make it work and as with many ideas and experiments, they decided to shut it down and implemented professional-quality evaluation.
“We wanted to find out what we were really good at”
In addition, Unbabel also offered different kinds of content for editors to translate. One particularly challenging was recipes! They had to train the community to translate culinary terms and maybe even adapt ingredients and measurements to their country. “We soon realized that we needed to identify editors that liked and knew about cooking so they could do a good job. This was one of many experiments we were doing with different kinds of content. We knew that in theory, we could do many things, but we wanted to find out what we were really good at”, said Hugo.
One of the things that always stood out was speed. The editors were online receiving and delivering translations at warp speed, and this led Unbabel to focus on customer support tickets — that today is one of our main applications. There’s no doubt it was a big change.
The humans behind the translations
The feeling of being part of a family was not restricted to Unbabel’s office. That same sensation was present in the relationship that our team created with editors. In these six years, Hugo had witnessed interesting and unusual stories.
“There was this guy that started translating for us and he seemed to be very good at languages. Some months later, this same guy applied for a job at Unbabel and became a developer here”, said Hugo. We also have other employees that used to work for us as editors.
It’s also very powerful when we find out that more than managing communities, we’re participating in the editor’s lives. Hugo remembered one time when an editor invited him to visit her hometown in France.
In another remarkable situation, an editor from Brazil once told us that she was grateful for having Unbabel to pass the time (and make money) while she was in the hospital treating her cancer. That’s pretty much why working with the Unbabel community is so inspiring for our team.
Speaking of Brazil, Hugo remembered when another Brazilian editor actually came to the office in Lisbon. “She was visiting Portugal and wanted to meet the team, a lovely 70 years-old lady that had been Executive Assistant to the PepsiCo General Manager in Brazil and now, retired, was glad that she could contribute to Unbabel by doing translations”.
Community in the center of the conversation
Community is the biggest asset for Unbabel. The core value of the business is the native quality we can provide to our customers, and that’s why they want to work with us in the first place.
“As with any growing startup, acquiring new customers became the priority for Unbabel. However, we quickly realized that the community needs to be just as important so we decided to bring it to the center of the conversation,” and that’s why Hugo is back on the team.
“We are in control and ready to look into the future.”
Unbabel has seen astronomical growth in the last couple of years and our communities have had to keep pace with this. It’s, therefore, no surprise that this has become one of our biggest priorities. For Hugo, the biggest difference from how Community looked like in the past compared to now is scalability. “Since then, we’ve built the community management team that knows how to work with editors and how to respond to their needs, building sustainable relationships. We are in control and ready to look into the future.”, said Hugo.
The future looks bright
However, as much as we are proud of how much we’ve matured, there are still many challenges to tackle to offer the best service to our communities. Through those challenges, we have a goal: to build a community that will work with us to fulfill Unbabel’s mission, to enable everyone to understand and be understood in any language. In Hugo’s opinion, “that means building the product together, creating the space so that the editors can help each other within the community, working collaboratively when it comes to translation, among others”.
Our priority now is to build a product that will optimize our editors’ experience in the platform. At the same time, we want to understand what our communities expect from us, so that more than meeting their expectations, we can actually exceed them.
“There are different ways of motivating a community and no one knows the best way to do it, so that’s the challenge for us”.
Hugo tells us that engaging our community can be challenging, but also rewarding: “The more engaged people are, the more satisfied they will be and the more they will give to it. They will also feel engaged because they see they share a mission with us. There are different ways of motivating a community and no one knows the best way to do it, so that’s the challenge for us”.
Engagement at the core
When describing the evolution of Unbabel’s community, Hugo used the word “scalability.” For the future, the word that we’ll be looking for is engagement. We want our communities to participate, co-create and build the product with us.
Building universal understanding is a value that starts in our own team and within our company. The Community team and our editors will always be able to express their feelings and opinions about Unbabel and our service, so we can understand each other. This way, we can create an empathetic and collaborative environment for everyone, which is the true meaning of community at its core.
