First and foremost — Happy New Year!
The Gingersauce Team hopes your 2021 is much less stressful than 2020. We believe that this new year will bring more branding to learn, more projects to work on, and more skills to master. Say, a year of major self-improvement. What do you think about that?
We’ll start the self-improvement saga. Today, we’re sharing major Business Lessons We Learned In 2020. We hope they will help you in your endeavors, and make you view your business from a different angle.
What Business Lessons We Learned in 2020
👊🏻 A good team, lots of dedication, and preparedness for drawbacks are things you need to kickstart a startup.
You must be prepared that things won’t always go the way you’d like them to. This is when you need to regroup and think about how to make the situation better.
To illustrate.
Gingersauce team has been working on a huge, major development update for about a few months already. We want to introduce a new, cooler brand book make, yet we cannot roll out something that has a lot of bugs. We’re not working on making it perfect, we’re making it usable. That’s why the release got postponed a few times. And that’s okay. We know that in the end, our audience will appreciate the abundance of new features and how well they are executed.
👏🏻 To keep the team productive — praise them more.
Acknowledge their victories. 2020 is not the best year to berate somebody’s abilities. It’s depressing times out there, there is enough disbelief in the world. Make sure you let your team know how good they are doing.
🤯 If your employees are burnt out, the project won’t go anywhere.
Recent studies have shown that an unstable working environment and poor management are far more damaging to the employees’ mental health than working long hours. The key is to remain empathetic. Acknowledge the situation in the world and make sure your team won’t suffer even more from simply being a part of your team.
Our advice, from our experience, is to establish a friendly atmosphere. In our meetings, nobody is afraid to speak up, express their opinions. We try our best to make sure that nobody is overwhelmed and there is no additional pressure.
💪🏻 Remote teams can be just as productive, as in-office workers. If not more.
Gingersauce’s team is almost entirely remote. We have our daily meetings, we all know what we are doing, and what direction we are heading towards. And we love what we do! An easy proof that a remote team can be as engaged in the project. A key is a right management.
📑 Not to be a perfectionist.
In order to get stuff done and launch our app in a very short time, we needed to prioritize which tasks are more important than others and to understand that there is no such thing as being perfect. Being able to release a version that we know isn’t perfect is a necessity. When developing a tool no one knows how the audience will react.
👂🏽 Want to be in demand? Listen.
There are enough products that won’t listen to people’s complaints. After we launched the first version of our product, we spent 2 months gathering feedback. We contacted people who subscribed to our emails, asking what they thought — good or bad.
Apart from emails, our founder Josh has interviewed over 20 Gingersauce users privately to ask for opinions. What they like, what they don’t. What they would like to add or change. Then, we analyzed the data and developed a roadmap that still follows our vision and mission, and makes the product a lot more usable for our audience.
After all, we do want to provide a tool that will help people make their lives easier. And who knows the struggle better than our audience?
🔊 The team needs to have a voice.
Anything we’re about to implement is up for discussions. Any idea gets an evaluation. The possibility of being heard and making an impact motivates the team to become better professionals. And, you know, two heads are better than one.
🔮 Flexibility and fast reaction work to the benefit.
What 2020 has definitely taught us good is that startups cannot be stiff in their strategy execution. Events change, and we need to adapt fast.
To illustrate.
Before Gingersauce launched, we planned a lot of offline promotional events. We planned to go to designer hubs and work with universities. Covid 19 ruined all of it. But we managed to quickly readapt and found other ways to spread the word about our product. We settled the workflow to be quick as well. It doesn’t take us days to confirm one idea, and we don’t usually get stuck in feedback loops.
📦 Transparency is not a trend anymore, it’s a necessity.
You know, nowadays you can’t fool anyone. People are just tired of being lied too. Our recommendation is to be honest. Honest both to your team and the audience.
The Gingersauce team knows about all plans and numbers, and this absolute transparency helps to motivate us all to become better. If an ad flops, it flops, we’ll find a better solution.
We approach our audience with the same rule: you can always check out stats in the monthly digest we send out via email. By the way, subscribe, if you haven’t yet.
What 2020 has taught us: Team Members Edition
Gingersauce Founder – Josh.
2020 has taught me that no matter where you are on the globe, we all are encountering the same challenges. Trends are spreading faster and further than before. Whether it is in how brands are being communicated or relationships between us designers and our clients, the world is becoming smaller.
This together with our fast growth of users in Gingersauce has taught me that if you manage to solve a personal problem you are probably solving a problem that many are dealing with.
Gingersauce Co-Founder – Mor.
2020 has taught me that creativity is always at our disposal in overcoming challenges and even striving. Sadly enough, creativity is a tool that most of the time is taken for granted or ignored. We basically forget to press our “creativity button”. Yet we all have this button regardless of which position we hold.
So when facing a challenge and trying to think out of the box (I say, drop the box, to begin with) forget all templated solutions and bring yourself as a clean slate. Only then new solutions can be born!
Gingersauce Marketing manager – Olha.
In 2020, I realized that people are oversaturated with offers — quality is taken for granted and everyone expects more value. Thinking on how to present Gingersauce, we understood that creating a brand book won’t help people if they don’t care about branding on a deeper level.
So, at every point of communication with our community, we are trying to inspire people to go further. We don’t (just) urge people to try our product but also assure them that they can grasp branding, and use the knowledge to become a better professional and transform any company into a brand.
Gingersauce Designer – Natali.
During the last year, I had once again realized that making something passably and making something great require the same amount of energy. This is why it’s better to concentrate and go for something astonishing from the get-go. The results will be beneficial both for you and for your client.
Gingersauce Content Manager – Kate.
In 2020 I realized how important it is to truly be a Team. I always underestimated how being united under one goal, motivated to create something truly helpful can affect the project. If everyone is working only for their benefit and don’t know the true mission of the brand, it’s no good. Especially at times like that. If you’re a brand owner, make sure everyone is encouraged to fight the same battle, and are appreciated for their wins, and supported in their losses.
Gingersauce Targeting Manager – Alex.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from 2020 is that Startup is not an app. Its only goal is to provide a solution to a user’s issue. Businesses focused only on the creation of ‘the best’ app that don’t take into account their User are bound to fail. Gingersauce’s starting point was defining an issue our audience had. Then, we proceeded with testing different solutions, and boom – we’re here. Another thing is to convince people to try new solutions, better, more functional ones. This is a challenge of its own.
Welcome a New, 2021 year, with Gingersauce!
We hope our lessons will be helpful to you. Go celebrate! And when you’re all rested and ready for a new, more exciting year, come back for more branding and design tips.
Also, don’t forget to use Gingersauce to create brand books, and/or use them to present your beautiful visuals.
Gingersauce is a professional tool for creating brand guidelines, that combines smart automation and your creativity. It’s a professional tool – meaning, it won’t do a half-baked job, leaving you with a mediocre result.
