You don’t have to work 12 hours a day to be productive at a startup

A few weeks ago I was on a call with a stellar candidate who had primarily worked for larger, more well established companies. During the interview she asked me: “Candidly, I don’t think the notion of classic startup working hours is appealing to me, do you see that being a problem at Swyft?” She was referencing the stereotypical 12-hour day commonly seen as “normal” within startups. Her question opened my eyes to how startups are (for better or for worse) evangelized by the media — you know, the classic “Silicon Valley” scene where a bunch of tech bros are huddled around a dining table working away until dawn. I responded that at Swyft, we don’t operate like that. I figured I’d share with you the framework on how we’re able to commit to that & what building at Swyft is like.

Moving slower actually allows us to move faster

I would be lying if I said that our team has never worked a 12 hour day. In fact, there were many all-nighters during Q4 when volume surged and the team stepped up to help cover our bases — approximately 50% of eCommerce volume is realized in Q4. Having said that, our team (currently 14 people) rarely works more than 8–9 hours a day. This might sound counterintuitive to what the media exposes startups to be like, but I can assure you that our team has surpassed many of our OKRs:

• GMV: averaging 30%+ month-over-month growth
• GMV stickiness: growing net-dollar-retention to over 120% across all customer segments
• Margin expansion: increasing take-rate X% and demonstrating early signs of network effects wherein new market launches grow faster than previous markets
• Product: we ship new updates/features bi-weekly that have a real impact on the marketplace (increasing daily throughput 425% quarter-over-quarter)
• Marketplace: we’ve been averaging a 96% liquidity ratio (and this number continues to creep upwards)
• Success: save and except for a few weeks of demand shock in mid-November, we’ve been steadily increasing package delivery rate to 97% and decreased inbound support tickets by 50% by shipping self-serve product enhancements

Looking back, it amazes me how much our small team has been able to accomplish in such a short timeframe while not overworking ourselves to the point of burnout. Swyft Team, I am beyond grateful to you for what we’ve been able to do together. The simple reason we’ve been able to accomplish so much with so little is that we have obsessively cut organizational debt and eliminated unnecessary meetings/processes or anything that slows us down. If you’re interested how we achieve this, read on.

1. Plan for scale from the start

Organizational design and process is the most overlooked function for early-stage companies, we too, fell victim to not giving this function the attention it deserves. Our friend Robbie Khazam has incredible insights around people management (link). A lot of what we ended up doing, we took from his playbook, but here’s a quick summary of how we thought about scale from the start:

1. Give new hires a clear direction of what they’re responsible for and what success looks like (I’m not a fan of time-based milestones, I prefer project milestones instead). An example of this (for our Head of Growth) was loosely: “Every revenue member on our team should be easily be able to track their inputs (activities, actual to plan, forecast, etc.) in a readily available dashboard. This is what success looks like.”
2. Build the right habits from day one. “The customer’s package was delivered to the wrong address”. Why? “Because the driver delivered to the address on the app”. Why? “Because the address on the driver’s mobile app didn’t match the address on the package”. Why? “Seems like the address was altered when it was pushed from our db to route optimization”. Why? “Looks like it was an address validation issue”. Why? “Our address validator doesn’t recognize X, Y, Z.” Great — let’s go fix the address validator and while we work towards shipping a new product feature, let’s introduce a manual fix to catch such errors wherein drivers are required to match addresses (package and app). By religiously asking the question “why” our team always hones into underlying root issues and thereby we cut unnecessary meetings, builds, etc. (all of which slow us down and/or reduce productivity per hour).

2. Nurture leaders

We nurture leadership principles at Swyft, regardless of role, reporting structure and etc and often the best leaders are incredible communicators. Incredible communicators are able to optimize processes, eliminate arduous meetings, and more — all of which allows us to move faster. Early on we recognized that our team comes from a diverse set of backgrounds and in order to standardize what communication ‘at Swyft’ looks like, we’ve been hosting weekly lunch and learns where our team shares lessons around topics ranging from:

• Managing upwards
• Communicating through documents (PRFAQs, design documents, etc.)
• Communicating and presenting data
• Running effective meetings
• Setting, measuring, and gaining alignment surrounding goals

While these meetings do take time away from our team to execute on their roles, we’ve found that by instilling a standardized way of engagement, we’re able to move faster over the longer term.

3. We frequently re-test our thesis

Swyft was founded on a core thesis (back in April 2020) and while our thesis allowed us to scale to multiple markets in North America, win enterprise customers, and create incredible value for our marketplace couriers, we constantly put our thesis to the test. Testing our thesis and its assumptions allows us to stay lean, respond quickly to changing customer needs and ensure that resources are rarely spent in vain. Resource allocation & management is what our team is incredible at. Each month, our team gets together for a few hours and each function forcibly challenges our thesis — I am happy to say that our core thesis remains unchanged, though we have been able to produce value-creating products from these meetings:

• ship-from-store product enabling enterprise retailers with multiple stores to fulfill from store
• eCommerce plugins that enable DTC brands to natively embed Swyft with other popular shipping / branding applications, completing an on-brand experience
• sorting applications that improved daily throughput of cross-docks
• routing applications that increased density of couriers’ routes, thereby, increasing their margins

Building an enduring business that outlasts each one of us

While we are grateful to how the market has responded to what we are building, there is a lot ahead of us. In order to help realize our vision of enabling every merchant with fast, affordable, scalable eCommerce delivery we’ve made the decision to expand our team. If you’re interested in learning more about Swyft or see a role where you can make an impact, my team and I would be delighted to speak to you. You can find open roles here (link) and over the next few weeks you’ll find a lot more posted! (P.S. we’re hiring for 40+ roles spanning product, engineering, sales, business development, finance and operations).