How would you say your service compares to Gengo.com? It seems you're a lot cheaper. Does that mean we could expect lower quality? What sort of QA do you have in place?
2 karma · joined November 7, 2013
At the same time though, we've had massive pull from enterprise customers for consulting to go alongside the tool to help them do really good internal collaboration and culture change to a more distributed leadership model, as well as facilitate constituent and stakeholder collaboration. That's been a significant source of income for us.
Overall, the commitment to "pay what you can" has been core to our model and our values, and we're sticking with it, but we're experimenting with interpreting it in different ways. It's very important to us to both be independently financially sustainable, and to give our tool to groups doing great stuff in their communities regardless of their financial means.
We built a tool that was instantly useful to them, and in exchange we instantly had 100+ users. We released an extremely "M" MVP and had real users from day one. Because they were using it free and we were building features in response to their direct feedback, they were very understanding about it being a rough prototype. Two years later, they voluntarily opted to generously backpay us for use of the tool (we didn't even ask them to).
If you can get real users from very early on, even if your tool is rough, do it! It will help you build what's really useful to people, and involving early users in the design process actively means they are motivated to use the tool early and help you make it work as well as possible as quickly as possible.
We ended up sticking with Nimble due to the preferred workflows of the Sales team, but I still regularly recommend both products to lots of other people, some of whom have gone on to become paying customers for those services.
They are both great CRM tools, and because the people who run them were so understanding and provided great service by understanding our genuine need for a discount, I will be forever grateful and will recommend them. We've also mentioned both on social media.
So that's the flipside - if you do give discounts now and then to those who need it and are grateful, you'll earn a lot of loyalty. I think the answer is to be human about it. Listen to people, give them the benefit of the doubt, and decide things on a case by case basis.
We were shocked and delighted when our international user community had massive enthusiasm for translating our app into different languages, and now it's live in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonian, Dutch and several other languages, with more like Telegu, Malayalam, and Japanese in the pipeline. It's opened up whole worlds of users who otherwise wouldn't have ever had access to the tool.
As some other commenters have noted, there is definitely a social inclusion aspect to releasing in various languages - not everyone has the same access to education around the world. Furthermore, we'll have a much richer community and society if we open communication to everyone and don't expect everyone to learn English, which is a more or less arbitrary standard. We've also recently released a feature where you can translate comments in the app instantly, meaning people who speak different languages can communicate in the same conversation! It's so cool to see.
We've had a great time using Transifex and I can recommend it to any software project hoping to support a translation community. For us as an open source project, we have been very grateful that all our translation has been done by volunteers, and Transifex makes it really easy to coordinate with them. If any other projects are interested in how we manage translation on a technical level, we wrote a blog post about it [0] and will be publishing another, more in-depth one, shortly.
Even if we got contributors banging down the door tomorrow, I am not sure we could spare the people-hours to properly make use of them - catch 22! Right now most of our community contributions have come in the form of help translating the app (more than a dozen languages now!) which is great, but only one part of the puzzle.
This is our github: https://github.com/loomio/loomio - as you can see we have pretty basic documentation. What would be the most important information we'd need to help people be able to contribute more easily?
We[0] differentiate by keeping it as simple as possible: have discussions and make decisions together, that's it.
Other tools are great for other types of projects, such as Trello[1] for a sort of collaborative to-do list.
In New Zealand (as in many other countries) we have a very reasonable system whereby you repay student loans as a small percentage of your income after graduation, taken out of your paychecks until they are fully repaid. If you're unemployed, you don't have to be making repayments. This means no one is under undue strain month to month and seems like a much more humane approach.
At the same time, burnout is real. I tend to moderate myself on a daily basis, taking the time I need to get enough sleep, exercise, eat well, socialize, etc. Others follow a pattern of working too hard daily and then need whole weeks off to recover now and then. But looking at rest, whether daily or in chunks, as an investment in long term productivity, is the only thing that makes sense to me.
But in order to do that you have to effectively align incentives for them to solve the problems. If companies treat employees as disposable automatons, and do not allow them to share in the success of the business or benefit from improving workflows, they have no motivation for doing so.
So many companies shoot themselves in the foot by bringing in "experts" when the real experts are right there on their payrolls, but no one is asking them their opinions or creating a situation where they would be inclined to give them anyway.
Just like how whether your in person conversations are substantial or not depends completely on who you chose to associate with and how you chose to communicate with them. Surely the author and the psychologist have observed countless people blathering on in person about utterly trivial topics, or sharing the equivalent of "verbal selfies" with their self-centered monologues?
You can easily create deep, personal, high quality conversation online, but it takes conscious effort, just like in the rest of life. The same goes for whether your online usage is isolating, or serves to deepen your in-person connections - it's totally up to you.
Some quick stats from Wikipedia:
> The average salary for college or university graduates is greater than $51,000, exceeding the national average of those without a high school diploma by more than $23,000, according to a 2005 study by the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2010 unemployment rate for high school graduates was 10.8%; the rate for college graduates was 4.9%
Of course, college is not a panacea for everyone, but having a degree significantly reduces your chances of unemployment and poverty in general.
In addition, education confers life benefits beyond simply employment, such as increased understanding of the world and critical thinking skills, writing ability, numeracy, etc.
As a non-US startup, we're still using Heroku and AWS because we don't have the resources to make the jump to something more secure, even though we'd really like to. As soon as an accessible alternative appears we'd switch in a heartbeat.
> Agile processes are optimised for constructing technical systems conceived and built by programmers, but poorly suited to building socio-technical systems that seek an integration between humans and technology—a model that requires software engineers to embrace a wider range of disciplines and skills as equals, and adopt a more comprehensive vision of what it means to successfully build software. Failing to make this transition is very likely a death sentence for the Agile movement.
But at the same time, much of the networking advice out there is biased toward the stereotypical middle aged man in a suit at a business function, so I found it refreshing to see a context I find myself in a lot more often discussed in this article.
I guess the real trick to good networking is being able to correctly read the subtleties of social contexts and adjust accordingly - harder to encapsulate in a blog post unfortunately!
We are running a completely flat organisation, but with the full awareness that just saying there's no bosses in no way removes the power dynamics from human interaction. Breaking down power hierarchies and reconcieving leadership in the way Rand eloquently describes here requires constant conscious effort and innovation in information flows, communication, delegation, and decision-making.
Through practice, we've come to the very same conclusion that the fallacy at work in traditional hierarchical organisations that fail by many humanistic measures (happiness, creativity, autonomy) is not that management and leadership are important - they absolutely are - but that the people who perform those functions should be placed higher on some sort of pyramid and paid more, and that the work of management should be necessarily embodied in specific people as opposed to a function that can be spread amongst many, according to their specific abilities and capacity.
We're still working out the specific mechanics and processes, but we're making headway. It's great to see others thought leading in this space.