Celebrating Seven Million Creative Ideas. In One Day.
John Lennon famously said that life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.
We’ve certainly been making a lot of plans in the five months since I joined WeTransfer. But while we’ve been thinking and talking a lot about the future, it’s easy to get immersed in the day-to-day experience of running a fast-paced, international company.
Sometimes you need something that pushes you to step back for a bit and think about things in a different way. This week, that was hitting a milestone. For the first time ever we have passed the 7 million daily transfers mark. To put that in context, before we launched the new platform last autumn, our daily record was 4.8 million, and it’s been going up ever since.
On one level, seven million is a nice round number on a screen, in a spreadsheet, in a blog post… But it’s humbling to think about what that means in reality. That’s seven million transfers going through the site in 24 hours — or nearly 5000 transfers every minute. Seven million sets of multiple files. Or, with so many of our users working in the creative industries, seven million sets of designs, photos, videos, blueprints, flatplans.
Seven million projects. Seven million ideas. Seven million leaps into the unknown. It’s an honour to be trusted with these, and a responsibility we don’t take lightly.
My job over the past five months has been to protect and encourage the things that make WeTransfer successful (and we think special) while exploring those areas, both big and small, where I think we can continue to improve, serve our users better and so grow the business faster.
We’ve hired 18 people since I arrived, with plans to hire about the same again over the coming two quarters (check out our current listings here if this is already sounding interesting).
We’ve introduced a new way of working, based around six-week cycles, that has re-focused our energy and our priorities. We have created multi-disciplinary product development teams devoted to sprints with stretching ambitions.
At the end of every cycle, we ship something, no ifs, no buts. Of course there have been teething problems and we are continuing to improve every cycle, and, as Nalden always quotes, the key is to learn, unlearn and relearn along the way.
We are very proud of our product, our service and our brand. We are very grateful that so many people put their trust in us every day. But the world doesn’t stand still, and the tech world moves faster than most.
I have had many energising conversations about the future of our industry and the future of WeTransfer within that. We are all about the transfer of creative ideas and that has led to lots of questions. How do they start? How do they grow? What will collaboration look like?
In turn, these questions lead to all sorts of fascinating discussions. I am very excited that over the next couple of months, we’ll be releasing some of the fruits of those discussions, in relation to our receiving experience, our mobile proposition and our premium WeTransfer Plus service. We can’t wait to share these new things with our users.
So maybe John Lennon was half right. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. But as CEO, my job is to make room for those other plans to flourish too.
