Culture is always a major factor in a startup!
By: Maria Martin
Tags: Work, Startup, Bangalore, Work Culture

First day at new office is always apprehensive and full of nervousness. Usually there are mixed feelings like the excitement to see new people and take up new work and at the same time feel anxious about the adjustments or the new learning. However, the most important aspect that concerns every new employee is the culture fit. This is where the apprehensions are at peak.

People@Instamojo

My first day at Instamojo was somewhat on the same lines — apprehension, excitement, and nervousness. One round of introduction and I felt that I found ‘my kind’ of folks. It is amazing to feel that in the first introduction itself. Of course my prior experience in Pricebaba, which is a startup, had instilled confidence in me. It did not take me long to gel well with people. I was already in love with the cool office. The white and charcoal black was nothing short of gorgeous place to work in. Check these pictures and don’t just take me by my words.

Work@Instamojo

Liking people and the ambience of workplace is fine but what about work culture? At Instamojo, people are true startup hustlers. In the working hours, work is of utmost importance. You will find sales people talking over the phone and getting more clients to use Instamojo. Count me here! It is just madness when you have an entire floor talking to multiple merchants — getting requirements, negotiating rates, promising features, selling existing features, establishing lasting and fruitful relationships — all in one call. I call it magic!

Our tech team is quite colorful. We have the programmers who talk to the computers and some who let the computers talk to them; and breaking this beautiful relation is like a sin for any other person. It is beautiful to see how one can be so engrossed in the task that it often leaves me wondering how do they know they are hungry. I am sure they write bots which remind them to eat. Jokes apart, technical team is building something revolutionary here. Enhancing user experience by not just putting aesthetically pleasing user interface but by actually optimizing a lot of stuff in the back-end so that the buyer or the seller never has to have nail-biting moment. Something new and exciting is always getting built here.

We have our compliance team, data analytics team, admin team, support team, and of course our very own, caretakers Sadanand bhaiya and Bablu bhaiya. He spends most of his day making coffee for us coffee-lovers and noodles for those who can’t stop eating and working at the same time. I may not be able to cover what our support and compliance team has been doing in this article, they deserve an entire article. I hope to do that soon.

Product@Instamojo

I remember asking my colleague, how often does Instamojo’s product change? How long does it take to implement changes? Part of the reason behind this question was to understand the speed of execution of tasks in the pipeline and the other part was to gauge the learning curve that I will have here. I got best of both. Instamojo has a really fast changing product. It might not seem so on a daily basis, but you will not believe when I say this that every week we ship something very substantial and potentially huge. I remember attending a client’s call and listening to him say as he remarked on the new look of our seller dashboard,

“You guys have had a paradigm shift here.” His comment really portrayed the ability of what Instamojo could do.

Our brainstorming sessions go on for hours. At times, core team decides and at other, entire team screams out new feature requests.

So does Instamojo have all good things? Not at all. At times the communication fails. There are certain processes which are yet to be streamlined. I remember pestering our product manager for small and perhaps, insignificant things. He then instilled the behavior of adding such requests to Trello. I am sure he gets some peaceful moments during the day now.

Me@Instamojo

It has been 8 months since I joined Instamojo. I have learnt a lot and yet I have some revelations every day about some of the obvious things in our product. It does feel like a jump in the ocean at times. But the most beautiful thing is that every person is willing to help every other person. People keep their attitudes at the door when they enter office. That is the culture.

For me culture is a fusion of enjoying work, communicating flawlessly within the team, sharing knowledge, playing sports, going out for parties, celebrating birthdays, and much more.

In my opinion, culture is a constantly changing factor. What is there today will definitely not be there tomorrow. Such should be the way of working. It will be safe to say that a company has a great culture when one starts feeling like they belong to that company.

That would be the ultimate achievement for a startup like Instamojo which is always creating something new.