Another year has flown by. We saw a lot of growth in 2020 in spite of the barriers that the pandemic restrictions presented to both ourselves and our clients. This year went down very differently to how we thought it would, and as always we’d like to share our ups and downs — and our learnings! — with you.
Our Chief Appreciation Officer, Gary, left the day-to-day of Hi5 in 2020 to help other startups like Indieschoolers and later GoDaddy Mobile Ventures whilst retaining the position of Chairman at Hi5. Although this move seemed counterintuitive at a critical time of our startup journey (we had just reached profitability), we saw record financial growth by mid-2021 🥳 This was a landmark achievement for us as a team, considering that we decided to put our heads down and remain bootstrapped.
“I realised I don’t need to be at the helm every day. With our values at the core of this decision, I empowered the team to continue building without me.” — Gary Willmott, Chairman at Hi5
Read more about our startup journey so far and what’s next in Gary’s most recent blog.
We added a few new features to our arsenal in the first half of the year, such as:
The second half of the year we dedicated to completely reimagining and rebuilding Hi5 ⚒️ We brought in Greg from Humanise to remap our UX, while our dev team reworked our code and rebuilt Hi5 — along with all the security and server updates needed to transition smoothly.
Our customers will meet a brand new Hi5 in Q1:2022!
We’re also happy to mention that Greg fell in love with Hi5 and is now one of our shareholders!
We soft-launched Hi5 Games early in 2021 and started out with 4 games to help co-workers get to know each other and learn about their company’s values. We saw a really quick uptake (over 30K clicks) and soon added 2 more games (70K+ clicks). Our latest game, Super Cards 🦸, has a special story behind it:
With inspo from the series High Score, our team pulled together and drew up the plan and scenarios for the Super Cards game based on a mashup between trump cards and personality quizzes like those on Buzzfeed.
With trial and error, and drawing on personality archetypes from some of the most trusted surveys in the world, we built Super Cards in a complete team effort — to help other teams learn about each others’ strengths (“super powers”) and have a good laugh while they’re at it!
This year felt like a long 2020, and we know a lot of our customers and companies around the world were feeling it, too. It was pretty damn hard.
Where most companies were battening down the hatches and trying to survive financially (and keep their employees in the face of the “Great Resignation”), we decided to give more away…
We helped 70+ startups and small companies by giving Hi5 Awesome for free for up to 20 users 🙌 This was done in an effort to help startups like ourselves cope with the strain of sudden remote work (a potential lack of team cohesion and a decrease in team morale) through providing a free platform for staying connected with the company and sharing team wins.
We welcomed 3 new team members in 2021: Jesse (Software Development intern), Kyla (Hi5 Hero) & Ofek (Customer Success & Sales). We’re super stoked to have more team mates added and trained in the ways of Hi5 🙌 However, we saw more shifts in the team nearing the end of the year.
Earlier in the year, a few of our team mates joined up for an IRL fun day filled with taking photos, walking on the beach, enjoying a meal, putt putt… oh, and rain! 🌦️
Another exciting event that took place in 2021 is that our company turned 5 years old! 👶 We ran a little comp in collaboration with our friends at Red & Yellow Creative School of Business to give away prizes for the most original GIF!
On the Support front, we reduced our number of new tickets by 1100 and improved our response time by 3mins. Go Team!
Want to intern with us? We’re looking for junior developers >
In 2021, we were featured in a bunch of categories on software review sites.
We were featured on Capterra’s Shortlist in two categories: Established Player in 360 Feedback Software as well as Top Performer in Employee Recognition Software.
We were awarded Trusted Vendor: High Market Presence by Crozdesk, and nominated again by Goodfirms as a Top Employee Engagement Software.
Hi5 was a Top Trending Product on TheWebAppMarket, and named as a Frontrunner in Employee Engagement Software on Software Advice.
We published 112 blogs in 2021 (28% more than last year) and saw 4X more views of our blog content! We collaborated on content with people from great organisations like Harvard Business School, Truth Coffee, Kwaba, Hoorah Digital, Outsourced CFO, Truevo, FantasyGo & CubixLabs.
Interesting insight 💡 Our most popular blogs of 2020 covered topics around managing remote teams, whereas it seems our readers’ interests shifted more towards startups and job searches in 2021.
This coincides with what has been called “The Great Resignation”, as more and more folks are moving away from jobs they don’t like and creating their own startups or learning new skills.
In 2021, we gained more than 1000 new followers on our social media, and started a Tiktok account 😋
We collated the data from last year’s Culture at Work survey and published the results:
We saw average customer churn, most often citing COVID and other managerial issues as their reasons for downgrading. However, we gained more international customers and are seeing an upsurge of small companies and startups signing up on our platform!
Average customer employee engagement on Hi5 increased by 15% since January 2021.
✨ Brand new Hi5 Rebuild
🕹️ More Hi5 Games
🏆 Rewards platform integration
⚡ Zapier automation integration
& more!
We’d like to take a moment to thank all our co-workers, readers, subscribers, partners, customers and investors for your support + feedback during 2021. May you have a blessed time with your family, friends & pets this Holiday season!
Our offices will be closed for the holidays between 24 Dec 2021–3 Jan 2022. We want our team to have focused family time, so there will be no Support staff on duty. If you need some help over the holidays, simply chat to our in-app Support bot, search our Knowledge Base or send us a mail at help@get5.io & we’ll get back to you in the first week of Jan!
See you in 2022 💥
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