As a growing company, each day at SocialCops is about going beyond our boundaries and working to build a company that not just sustains, but thrives. In the last three months, we learned, failed often and achieved milestones, but most importantly, we grew. We grew as a team, as individuals, and as a company in every way — our products evolved, our processes improved, we solved different problems, and we hired incredible people to join us on our quest of empowering billions through data and technology.
Though we’re learning and focusing on the next goal every single day, it’s important to take a moment and celebrate milestones along the way. As we wrapped up the third quarter of the year, we took some time to reflect, refocus, and recognize everything that we did and call it a SHOWDOOWWWNNN!
One of the earliest traditions at SocialCops is our “demos”, where we come together, share about our progress, and show off our achievements. It started when SocialCops was a 10 member team, but it has certainly evolved as we’ve grown. Demos are something that is part of who we are — we always try to ensure that we share our learnings and lessons with each other. While this continues to happen daily over coffee chats, cafeteria conversations, weekly team demos, and Slack channels, it is completely different when we all come together to share what we have been up to, take feedback, find ways to collaborate, and contribute in each of our unique ways. And this time, Showdown is how we decided to do it.
Clash of clans…
After countless announcements, days of preparation, deck iterations, practice, and feedback cycles, it was time for all the teams to come together for the one final battle, fight for the ultimate winner’s trophy, and emerge victorious to brag about their demoing skills for the rest of the year.
Our internal teams shared their learnings, milestones, and achievements with the entire company. In Quarter 3, we processed more data than we had ever done since we started in 2013. We screened more than 2,300 applications in our effort to find the best people to work with us. Our product user base expanded to more than 34 countries across the world and we added 12 new people to our team in the last quarter — something that is really valuable for us in the next leg of our growth journey.
The product teams shared about their customers, learnings, and future plans — the next countries they want to expand to, the product roadmap, the new features that they built and the features that had to be scrapped, the sales and the revenue numbers, and more. Our Talent Team also shared the next quarter’s hiring goals, the positions we closed and some appreciation shout-outs to people who made the most successful referrals.
And there is always some fun…
All the demos, knowledge sharing, questions, and information also demanded some fun. The people who joined our team in the last quarter presented fun profiles to introduce themselves to the rest of the team — something that helps the rest of the team and the new people connect better. From someone who thinks he has a head that looks like a pineapple to someone who lost 26 kgs in 6 months, we definitely had some awesome people joining us.
Do you know about the school life of the person you work with? Do you know about how the person next to you evolved in their career? Do you know how your team members were hired? Well, these are the things we often don’t talk about. “The Showdown Show with Richa” was for all these questions and more. We brought a few of the earliest team members from our Engineering Team together to share fun things from their life and their journey at SocialCops, and answer some rapid-fire questions.
There is no way to know how much we actually know without going through a test, so that’s what we did — we played a quiz to know how many of us actually “know” SocialCops! We divided our team into 7 groups for the SocialCops version of Jeopardy. There were some tough questions — such as “What famous person took a photo with us during our first social media campaign?” (Smriti Irani for Women’s Day in 2014). And there were some easy questions — “In which state have we had the most projects?” (Maharashtra) and “How old was the youngest intern at SocialCops?” (16 years old!)
What’s next? With all the planning, working, innovating, and building, we plan to pour all of our energy into building a great company. So here is to the Quarter 4 of 2018 filled with more hard work, learnings, dreams, achievements and lots of fun!