Remote Working : Divided by Distance, United by Mission
We all must have started off this year with immense hope and excitement to begin the new Decade. In those last 10 seconds before 2020 began, on New Year’s Eve, we all must have thought to ourselves about all the things and resolutions we must achieve, thought about how “2020 is going to be MY year!”. And then, just two months into the year, a small tiny virus hit the world like a monster truck, bringing everything to a standstill. Schools, colleges, offices, shops, all of it was closed and the fear of being affected by the virus rose day by day.
Amidst all this, at FamPay, we were just a team of 9 people working on our product launch and brainstorming on ideas to achieve smaller targets laddering up to a bigger one. And since, it was just a team of a few people, shutting down and working from home didn’t bestow upon us as much worry then. But the one thing that we were left tensed about was our product launch, what to do, when to launch it, and will we get the audience we wished to achieve otherwise?
With all these goals in mind, we started growing the Fam. A bigger team meant multiple different perspectives, but unified by our mission and vision. From March till May we expanded our team from 9 to about 17 people and we got to work! After a great amount of market research, we launched our product, the FamCard, on July 16th, 2020, India’s first numberless card created solely and with lots of love for the teenagers of our country!
Things we do to keep us grinding
While the pandemic has left no opportunities to bring down our morales and push us into a void, we keep experimenting with things to keep us going!
Communicate
We can’t possibly emphasise enough on how important it is to make sure that everyone stays well connected! We make sure that we all stay well in touch and each and everyone in the company knows about what we are doing and why we are doing it. We hate the fact that we can’t celebrate all our small victories and know for a fact that if we were all together, our energy has been on a different scale! But keeping all this aside, we communicate a lot, we update each other about what’s going on in our personal and work life, we are not just employees working together for a company, we are a Fam that though is far off from each other but is still living together.
Fun time!
We make sure that we do things to relieve us from all the work stress. Our target audience is GenZ, and we believe that we can only cater to them greatly if we know what it is like to be them, hence, our mantra is - Live Life like a GenZ. Having regular fun times and gaming sessions helps us make through it all! We all meet weekly on Friday night, jumping into the weekend, with lots of laughter and happiness. And sometimes, we even have gaming nights too!
Our MarTech
We rely a lot on technology to stay linked. We use varied platforms to make that happen, here is a list of what we use and what do we use it for -
Mesh - We widely use Mesh to manage tasks, set objectives and increase reliability of us all while working from home!
Slack - Slack helps us greatly with communication. We are able to discuss a variety of things in simultaneous chats without ever having any confusions.
Notion - We really don’t know what we would do without this! Notion helps us document all that we discuss or work on!
Tandem - Tandem is like our virtual office, we can see through each other’s schedules, call in meetings, and whatnot! It is also interlinked with Google Calendar and Google Meet, which definitely adds a good amount of brownie points to it!
Google Meet - We use Google Meet to hold all our meetings and update each other on all the work that is going on!
Google Drive - Google Drive is our storage space. We save everything from photos, to videos, to documents, to google sheets, and whatnot, right here.
Grow the Fam!
While the Product was launched, and had started to pick traction with the growing number of users, our team was also growing with new members and interns. A major issue here was the Pandemic. While most of the companies were cutting down on employees and halt hiring, we at FamPay were hiring massively!
Once we had enough people on board, the next challenge was to ensure that we are able to deliver our message and showcase our enthusiasm to the new member rightly. We worked vigorously on planning out the whole onboarding process of new joinees and telling them our story from the scratch! We took many steps to make them understand our agenda and also our energy as an early stage startup!
Developing a home
We have done the unimaginable in the lockdown, be it taking the decision of launching our product when everything was shut or be it shooting videos remotely to create content for our audience, we have done it all! Our family has increased from 9 people to about 50 people and we have put in efforts in making sure that we are all at the same level of enthusiasm or, as the GenZ calls it, we are all Vibin’ together! It’s difficult to stay connected when we all are stationed so far from each other but our love for what we do and what we aim to do, sews us all together, and that is creating a leading brand for the GenZs!
