Are you good at making smiles?

Published in

Crew Dispatch

6 min readDec 19, 2013

When you stare at a screen for most of the day, it’s sometimes easy to forget that pretty much everything you’re doing will ultimately come down to how you make people feel.

If you’re building a website, the backbone of your product is not your site architecture. It’s the people who use your product.

Depending on your business, your customers might just be as big a part of the product as the code you write. Some of them might be on your website more than you are. And some customers even take the time to write thoughtful messages about how you could improve.

They want to be on your team. So let them.

At Crew, we’re believers of the principle 1,000 True Fans. We think of 1,000 True Fans as a state of mind for how we should interact with customers. It’s much better to have 1,000 people who love you than 10,000 people who like you. Each customer we talk with has the potential to become a raving fan or not.

Treating people right is product design

We believe that any interaction you have with our company should feel good, whether it be using our product or an email exchange with our team. Both are part of the product.

Early on when Crew was nothing more than a MailChimp email and Wufoo form, treating people right is what made things work.

I gave my cell phone at the end of every support email.

We offered our Skype handle for real-time support.

When we were traveling in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, coffee shops became our offices. In between meetings, we would nab Wi-Fi for phone calls at random locations. I recall being on one phone call in the corner of a shoe store.

We had customers message us saying that our responsiveness and willingness to help made up for a limited product.

This is the impact of treating people right.

As a founder, I aim to answer every ‘human’ email I get. As a team, we try to answer all customer questions within 24 hours (but we actually want this to be much faster).

We’re a small team of four with wonderful customers, and we want our customers to feel shouting-from-the-top-of-a-mountain happy. If you’re a customer of Crew, we want you to feel like signing up was the best decision you ever made.

Here’s where you come in

Every day we get to chat, tweet, and exchange messages with innovative people and some of the most talented creative professionals in the world. To exchange tweets with designers that I looked up to when I was working as an independent designer is inspiring.

We’re looking for someone to work with us to help our customers have a memorable experience using Crew. You will be the Happiness Concierge. From our Manifesto,

We envision a system that values the results of the work done, not just the dollar price. Where project owners receive quality results, professionals are paid what they’re worth, and exceptional products are created.

We want to help our customers make the best products. To create something that both the client and maker can be proud of.

Sometimes this means sending a helpful tweet, replying to questions on Live Chat, or sending a care package to the United Kingdom:

Here are the skills we’re looking for you to have:

you have worked as an independent professional or project manager
you’re capable of whipping out a gif in less 30 seconds
you love talking to people, even by phone (old school!)
you can land a joke (our CTO Angus does standup sometimes)
you’ve probably read or plan to read the following books:
Delivering Happiness
Trust Agents
Enchantment

The most important thing is you can identify with someone and uncover options that help them. Like really help them. Like you would help out a friend.

The ability to listen and take genuine action to solve something for someone. That’s what matters most.

What it’s like working at Crew

We have a lot of fun at Crew but we also put in the work because we enjoy what we do. We love being around people who love the work they do and want to keep getting better.

Trust

We trust one another’s ability to do great things and we don’t want to get in the way of your craft. We want you to feel like you run the ship for whatever project you’re working on. You will get all the support you need, but you will have the autonomy to manage yourself.

We also don’t work set hours. You will make your schedule and can work from wherever you want most of the time. We have a few meetings where we need to be together, but you are mostly in charge of how you want to shape your day.

We’ve seen this do wonders for productivity. Sometimes I might prefer to work in the morning while my teammates Angus and Luke enjoy working when the only thing on TV is infomercials. We believe you should be able to structure your schedule for what makes you feel the most energetic, creative, and happy.

We hire you because we trust you will do great work and we want you to feel awesome while doing it.

Curiosity

We love learning and sharing useful things, whether that be a project we create like Unsplash, or discovering whether you should have a coffee or beer to be more creative.

There’s a lot to learn about why things are the way they are so when we find something useful, we try to share it. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs said,

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

We love people who try things, who tinker. If you’ve got ideas that would be useful for our customers, we won’t hold you back. Instead, we’ll help provide the resources to make it happen, whether it be helping with design or getting press coverage.

We want to give oxygen to your ideas.

Fun

Starting a company is hard so it’s important to chill out sometimes and take in what’s happening now. We may look back and realize that right now is one of the best parts of our lives.

It’s amazing how far a smile can go: ☺

If anything in this post resonates with you and you want to make an impact on a small team, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at join@pickcrew.com

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