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I Done This Support

How Love With Food Found its Working Rhythm

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Love With Food is a subscription service that delivers a specially curated box of organic and all-natural snacks every month. For every box that’s sent, the company donates a meal to feed a hungry child.

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Founder Aihui Ong embarked on Love With Food after seeing a friend forced to shutter her stir-fry sauce business because she was unable to secure wider distribution. Aihui (pronounced “I-we”) not only saw the need for alternative channels of distribution and marketing connecting food entrepreneurs to consumers but also an opportunity to help the one in five children in America at risk of hunger.

From a company of one in late 2011, Love With Food has grown to twelve employees. While growing any startup is challenging, Aihui notes that LWF’s mission helps her hire:  “In the last eighteen months, we’ve donated more than 100,000 meals, and that also draws the right talent to our company. People who want to join us really value that we’re giving back and doing something innovative to disrupt the food industry.”

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Making Others Happy: The Best of the Internet

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Burger Chair with PugPugs know best…including the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:

5 Tips to Make the Most of Your Company Retreat.

Why would you move to downtown Vegas to run your business?

How do positive emotions increase longterm conversions?

A beautiful slideshow on building culture on a remote team.

Recognize how everyone around you does good things.

Relentless questioning improves self-awareness.

The art & science of teambuilding.

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5 Tips to Make the Most of Your Company Retreat

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iDoneThis company retreat

If you’ve ever had to suffer through trust fall exercises or offsites that try to make over ugly corporate morale in one go, you probably dismiss company retreats as a waste of time and money.

Yet the company retreat remains one concrete strategy that startups employ to fuel their success. When you work for a startup, where every day is basically a trust fall, a company retreat is not just a superficial motivational exercise in decreeing “let’s do better” but an opportunity to take a step back and realign, rethink, and break down how to do better.

In July, I Done This went on a week-long team trip to downtown Las Vegas to do just that. While we’d visited before to connect with Zappos and the Downtown Project, this year things are a bit different:  our CEO Walter lives in Vegas and we’re proud to be in the Vegas Tech Fund portfolio alongside exciting companies like Zirtual, LaunchBit, and Skillshare.

We had a fantastic time connecting with the Vegas startup and Downtown Project community, working out some of our own company kinks, and of course, having fun. We thought we’d share some tips on what made our all-hands trip effective to consider for your own company retreats, offsites, or meetups!

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Make Recurring Revenue and More! The Best of the Internet

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Pugtastic! Onto the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:

How iDoneThis got to $1,000 in recurring revenue — besides nerves & anxiety.

Why Teams with Contrasting Time Management Styles Are Stronger.

Transparency is the competitive advantage that keeps on giving — and that includes your hires.

Writing things down can help us see.

The distributed company advantage has two sides.

Beyond Funnel Vision — choosing people over leads.

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How we got to $1,000 in recurring revenue

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When we launched a paid version of iDoneThis, we held our breath — we didn’t know if a single person would sign up.

The waiting, the sweat, the nerves.

Finally, the whoosh of a collective sigh of relief. One trailblazer of a person signed up for iDoneThis and put their credit card down.

Amidst all that “will they pay?” jitters though, we figured that if just one person signed up, there had to be at least 1,000 more people out there who hadn’t yet heard of us that would be willing to do the same. And that first month, we got $1,000 recurring revenue signups for our service.

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Attain a Flexible Mind: The Best of the Internet

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Kepp Your Head UpYo ho ho and onto the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week!

GitHub + I Done This: Bring in your commits!

We also teamed up with Draft to make it super simple to track your writing progress and share it with your team.

Why does Jeff Bezos give a hiring anti-pitch?

Self-promotion is part of your job.

You have to stretch, little by little, to attain a flexible mind.

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GitHub + iDoneThis: Bring Your Commits Into iDoneThis

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Note: we have disabled the integration described below. It is to be replaced with an improved version. 

GitHub + iDoneThis Integration

Hellooo Octocat! We’re so excited to announce our new integration with GitHub that makes it a cinch to gain motivation and momentum from seeing your progress and sharing those steps forward with your whole team.

(Ready to go? Start by setting up the integration.)

Why GitHub?

When you’re coding all day, it’s easy to forget to take stock of the great work you and your team are getting done. We use GitHub here at iDonethis and realized that our commits are a rich exhibit of our work that often goes unrecognized. So even if you get a ton of stuff done every day, you can’t fully appreciate all your progress and accomplishments.

The content of commit messages provide pretty accurate reflections of what you get done during the workday — and it’s annoying to have to re-enter that information into iDoneThis. What happens when you don’t record those dones, though, is that you miss out on acknowledging and getting that higher level view of all your awesome work. When you fail to celebrate your amazing coding progress, you’re not fully using your potential motivation and planning power.

Plus, developer communication with other team members is a perpetual challenge and always seems to require a disruptive step out of your existing workflow. This integration streamlines that process. Now your coworkers not only get a better idea of what you’re up to, they’ll stop interrupting you with the inevitable “What are you working on?” and you can work in peace. Everyone wins!

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Jeff Bezos’s Hiring Anti-Pitch

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Today, the competition for top tech talent is as fierce as it’s ever been, and without a high-performing team, it’s tough to survive. It makes sense that such intense competitive pressure drives startup founders to pitch their company to prospective hires in ever more grandiose terms, exaggerate how well their company is “crushing it,” and make their company culture sound like the happiest place on earth.

How else can you stand out to a top candidate who’s considering offers from all of the hottest companies?

It’s counterintuitive, but Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to Amazon hiring: he gives prospects a hiring anti-pitch.

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Draft + iDoneThis: Celebrate your writing progress

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We’ve joined forces with Draft to make it incredibly easy to track your writing progress and share it with your team. When you’ve written up an awesome piece in Draft, record your accomplishment as a done in iDoneThis with a single click inside of Draft.

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Why?

We do a lot of writing here at iDoneThis for our content marketing efforts, so we’re always in search of better writing tools.

We used to use Google Docs for collaborating on writing pieces, but it’s not great at dealing with versions and merging individual edits. I used to use WriteRoom for distraction-free writing, but it’s designed for single-player writing, not for collaboration.

We found the solution in Draft, distraction-free version control for writing.

We use it every day at iDoneThis, and we found that we were always sharing our drafts in our company iDoneThis. We found that it was an awesome way to keep the whole team in the loop on the marketing and messaging efforts that were happening, especially for team members not part of the direct draft-edit workflow.  Also, it was a great way for the content marketing folks to show, not just tell, what they were getting done.

Draft to iDoneThis

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Effective Communication: The Best of the Internet

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REMINDER!  We’re giving away some awesome prizes for subscribers who sign up for the newsletter by Sunday, August 18, 11:59 pm EST.  How Dan Pink Invested in iDoneThis — it started with a to-do item that sat and sat undone for weeks. Getting to Better Than Optimal is even more important in this increasingly automated, techie world. … Read more