JULY NEWSLETTER
BUSINESS SUCCESS
Company Growth:
According to the data report, we have lost only 16% of the customer base over the last 03 months. This number is reasonable as we have not been able to welcome a new installation until now. And it is an acceptable rate in comparison with the churn rate benchmark of the SaaS industry, thanks to our loyal customers!
In general, we are confident that we are still going in the right path. The contribution of new excellent staff will help to build a strong team that allows all members to show their talents and make an impact on the products and customers.
The good news is we have only 3 months left for the best preparation before starting the growth again through Shopify App Store. And EcomSolid is more ready to lead the game.
Lesson Learned:
Seal Forum: Creating a better workplace where everyone can interact for information that makes your teammate work more effectively. Working together in a forum, when a question is asked, all of your teammates can look after it and support you whenever they have time. This will ensure transparency in the company to make sure everyone knows what questions are being asked and concerned.
Having specific guidelines and standards will make the graphic designer easier to collaborate with. So a creative brief and a work process to clarify the requirements right in Figma is important and more transparent.
If we want to become the top 1, the first thing is to develop the people and make the operation smoother day by day. That's the most important stuff. We need to be a stable team full of enthusiasm and believe in the vision & mission of the company. We believe that we will be one of the most successful products in the company if we are one.
We should improve:
We believe that it takes time to build great things. At SEAL Commerce, we are trying to organize and make things better step by step.
- Working Process: The working process between the Finance team with the BOD and the whole company. Assigned to Vincent.
- The monthly report and sum up with the achievements and results from all team and departments
- We will bring you more information and updates from the company to make sure everything is transparent as much as possible that helps you focus on important stuff and productivity.
- GemPages Forum at forum.gempages.xyz soon will become https://forum.sealcommerce.com
DEPARTMENT UPDATES
All our teams could do extraordinary things to deal with many challenges in order to achieve commendable feats and impressive milestones in the month.
Here we would like to update each team's activities, embrace a team spirit, encourage others to understand the team's difficulties, cheer on and recognize the team’s achievements. Keep watching!
GEMPAGES
Team Updates:
We have formed a stronger product development team with the joining of new enthusiastic people like Ducky, Duc Vu, Minh Hoang and Michael. The core of GemPages development has been restructured, thanks to Horus and the team. This will allow us to release new features faster in the next couple of months.
Difficulties:
We have also been starting to work from home since this month. Rather than developing a team in terms of sprint, we have been working as a functional team. However, we have still not made good progress because of the limitation on professional competence and managerial skills. We’ve been trying to improve this problem by working closely with each member in each item.
Manager’s quote:
“GemPages team is making big efforts to perfect the product and bring value to customers. I appreciate all members’ dedication and determination for achievement in July. In the next several months, I believe that the team's competences will improve. We will become a stronger team to accompany customers on the way to success.” - Shark Thắng, manager of GemPages
ECOMSOLID THEMES & PAGE BUILDER
Team Updates:
We have welcomed 3 new members of the HTML team: Giang, Quan, Jenny. Working with Sandy, the team will take on the task of creating new interfaces in the near future. And we will make a huge contribution to the theme & page template for both Theme & Page Builder platforms. We make sure that when the team comes it should have a full version that is able to impress our first customers, not only just a beta version of the Page Builder.
Difficulties:
We have had to handle barriers about progress, quality of the project when the team had new members and needed time for training. But we’re so lucky when our 3 new members are enthusiastic ones who can learn and adapt very quickly in the training process and the early stage of product development. They have made 3 new theme templates for Theme Builder & 9 page templates for Page Builder, which are expected to be uploaded alongside Ecomsolid Page Builder to Shopify App Store in the next several months.
Manager’s quote:
“Alone we can do so little, but together, we can make EcomSolid Themes & Page Builder ready for Shopify users and bring customers a “WOW” experience on these” - Thành DX, manager of ES Themes & Page Builder.
Team’s targets in Aug:
We have completed basically the features & interface of Theme & Page Builder to be published on Shopify. We still need to fully check & fix the missing places. Next phase our team will work based on user-oriented, opinion-gathering, data-driven. We will increase the number of themes & page templates/add-ons to satisfy the most users.
ECOMSOLID HEADLESS
Team updates:
We are having a plan for job rotation to form up a Super Seal Team 6 including talents who establish the foundation for Ecom Solid Headless. Currently, this plan is being deployed and is really starting to kick off from September with the participation of the core back-end team including: Dac Hai, Nora, Long, Vincent Luân
Difficulties
- Working from home is a big barrier for us to plan and communicate ES Headless to the whole members.
- We’re still in the process of building a GP, an ES team, therefore, we must always focus on both of these products, which may make us easily distracted.
- We continue to follow the company's orientation on developing good products instead of spending a lot of time on the infrastructure. AWS is also a problem for the team when they do not have much practical experience.
- ES Headless is a challenge to the Back-end team as we need to build a server system to develop websites for customers. And if anything goes wrong, customers have to suffer a big loss.
- Back End team has a very little manpower while we have never deployed such high-load projects. If we have 3,000 customers with 1000 traffics into each customer’s website, we have to build a system that can handle up to 3,000,000 requests.
How can 3 projects run parallel?
The 3 projects have different clients:
- GP: Middle and high-end customers on shopify
- ES: New and middle customers on shopify
- Headless: Middle and high-end customers on multiple platforms, possibly targeting markets like Vietnam and Southeast Asia
Full of manpower: We will push recruitment continuously to ensure the available manpower of the ES, GP team.
Reuse research: As 3 products are in the same field, we can reuse all research, and the design team can create the themes shared for all products.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
Team Updates:
This month, we’ve been completing Visions, Missions, Code of Conduct and documents related to career path, Skillsets set for positions in the CS team. Our proposals for Incentive Programs and recruitment plan are also submitted to the HR team to deploy soon.
These activities help our team quickly understand and grasp specific requirements, common standards of customer service, and goals to be achieved at work. Thereby we develop solid foundations to provide customers with top-notch services and excellent, synchronous experiences.
More importantly, the above activities also create motivations to help members not only fulfill their work goals, but also become their better version.
Difficulties:
There are still issues related to 3rd app, conflict themes as well as new pain points correlated with current features of GP and ES. However, following and embracing our customer centric culture, CS Agents & CS Tech are usually working closely with the developer team to give customers solutions quickly in a supportive and cooperative manner.
Despite the shortage of manpower, CS Agent ES always tries their best to fulfill customers’ needs. In fact, when customers raise problems, all ES members will be ready to support even when we have to join late online sessions to discuss and answer them
Team’s targets in Aug:
Our team will focus a lot on culture and people. We would like to convey the message through stories, good examples, and help all members better understand their own values as well as the team’s values. They can be confident and proud to bring to customers positive experiences, beyond expectations.
Manager’s quote: “Building the team cultures, vision and missions were July’s tasks. In August, we will share these achievements to our teammates. I believe that it will bring us to work, play and live for the only common goal, which is to deliver great values to our customers, teams & companies” - James Dinh
PRODUCT DESIGN
Team Updates:
The good thing is the designers are now more engaging with the products, and start making an impact. Dashboard Design, Product Flow, Agency Dashboard is what we have been trying to release.
In this month, we have completed the research and testing process which made a big change in the user flow. We’ve expected to reduce the time users take actions and increase the number of created pages
Difficulties:
We have been restricted when we have not yet built a loyal customer database to get their direct feedback.
Team’s targets in Aug:
We will cooperate with the CS team to finalize the testing methodology for renewing or releasing a new function. We will concentrate on developing the team's framework and guidelines, too
UI/ECOMMERCE DESIGN
Team Mission
With the mission of empowering the Ecommerce UX, we are forming a stronger team step by step. Now we have a group with a combination of young & enthusiastic and experienced designers. We are ready to:
- Conduct in-depth research on E-Commerce UX to improve the buying and selling experience for e-commerce websites around the world.We research and design high converting Themes & Templates for both products GemPages & EcomSolid. We are excited to share it with the company and our customers about what we have found.
- Build a system of graphic design and user interface standards for our company. We are a research and developing UI skill team that is ready to contribute to the product development process whenever a sprint needs us. We are trying to create full stack SEAL designers
Plans to develop team
- We have been building a stronger team with designers who own comprehensive skills
- We plan to standardize the entire graphical system and user interface, supporting the product team
- We also support the marketing team by building a better process to make sure the collaboration between us will be smoother.
- We will consider the urgency of the department's projects and the urgency of our team plans to decide for the top priority.
MARKETING TEAM
Team Updates:
We have just hired 2 talents in content writing. We are looking for 3 new talents including senior traffic acquisition, partnership manager, and product marketing strategist to prepare for the return of GemPages in the next few months. It can be said that Marketing and Communication are becoming more and more important as our products are improved better. Marketing team will need to have strong support from other teams, especially the graphic design team to communicate storytelling to customers. Stay tuned!
Difficulties:
The biggest challenge is to work with many departments at the same time and to find the right timing because there are always changes in plans. Don't get frustrated when there are delays or changes. Being proactive and flexible are the keys.
Team’s targets in Aug:
We are preparing the launch of EcomSolid on the App Store in September.
Manager’s quote:
“Many doubts, many questions in July such as how we organize the new team, how the new team can adapt quickly, how to reorganize the schedule because of ES plan, what is the future of ES & GP for 2022 with headless....August will be the month of EcomSolid. And a real crash-test for the marketing team because the launch of ES will allow us to know our weaknesses and our strengths.”
HR TEAM
Team Updates:
We have activated the remote working mode for the whole company to ensure the safety in the pandemic.
HR department and BOD have formed up the Company Culture with 3 important characteristics which we aim for: Enthusiastic, Empathy and Empowerment (EEE), And 6 core values of Seal Commerce People.
We’re ready to launch the 1st version of Seal Commerce career website to start getting traffic from job sites as well as providing candidates a pool of information about us.
We also have finalized new policies to ensure a better working environment for our members including:12 remote working days/year, 40 working hours/week (Mon - Fri) and have a new insurance payment that is based on 50% of members’ gross salary.
About recruitment: Our dedicated Recruitment team achieved almost 80% of the target of quarter 2 and July. The team is really doing hard work to recruit for the last quarter of the year and preparing for ES Headless launching next year.
Difficulties:
We have to face challenges in recruitment when candidates keep stable in their current job during the pandemic.
In May, June and July, we have the challenges that we have to work from home due to Covid 19. It’s more difficult for us to organize the team building activities and the communications plans to engage between employees. Thanks to the dedication of the HR team, especially the EB team, we've launched the EEE Culture which were the values of SC humans even when we’re working remotely!
Team’s targets in Aug:
We will open publishing sharing sessions in the whole company to update company vision, mission, and new goals in the next few months. We also try to fix pain points of all members in these Talks.
We plan to deploy website phase 2: focusing on UI experience by designing guidelines, fixing code and filling up content on pages to have a better website
We are going to activate Facebook, linkedin and Tiktok with these fist posts to communicate about our culture, products and working process in the next months.
Manager’s quote:
“The HR team is doing hard work and is very dedicated to the company operations during WFH time. We’re trying to launch programs, plans that can engage people to mutual cultural values, to hire the best fit, and to motivate people to achieve their own career goalsI would like to say big thanks to my team for being here and making Seal Commerce stronger.
OPERATION
Team Updates:
This month, we are very happy to welcome Ms. Phuong as our accountant. Ms. Phuong will help our company to:
- Collect, interpret and review financial information Produce financial reports
- Set up and operate the accounting procedures to ensure tax and accounting regulation compliance.
- Coordinate with others to make and control budget operation and future cash flow
Difficulties:
We are a young company without a clear working procedure, so it takes time for us to build an accounting system that matches with accounting & financial standards.
Team’s targets in Aug:
We need to complete the August report, purchasing procedure and continue to track and handle financial risks from previous databases.
TEAM SPOTLIGHT
All members’ commitments and all team efforts are highly appreciated. No matter what your role is, your contributions are valuable & significant to our company! Thank you all for always accompanying Seal Commerce!
In this month, we are thrilled to highlight some members who help us to embrace and spread out the culture values and the achievement. Stick around!
Horus is our outstanding member! Well done Horus!
Horus (Hưng) is the founder of ATOM which is an upgraded version about functions & structure. This version helps the product team to control, fix bugs better. Then, GemPages will be able to go further and faster to empower user experience!
Thanks Horus for putting a lot of his dedication, determination and competence on ATOM!
Neo Tran is our excellent warrior!
Neo (Hieu) is responsible as a main designer in the Agency Dashboard project which has been completed to 90% including desktop and mobile versions.
It’s a poor system and needs to be renewed and upgraded. So it’s really a new challenge to Neo as it is different from his specialization.
At the beginning, it was difficult for Neo to ensure the task and the quality in both UI and UX was low. However, Neo has been very hardworking and patient to gain feedback. He has also demonstrated his ability to learn quickly with a clear change in his approach and his critical thinking.
The quality of work has improved step by step, but not been good yet, and he needs more experience to solve arising cases without any mistakes.
Thomas Bui is our greatest multi-tasking supporter!
Thomas Bui (Tri) is in charge of QA Lead and Operation in our team. His responsibilities include giving team advice for reporting procedures, controlling the working process and making action plans to achieve the team’s goals.
Initially, it was difficult for Thomas to reach and cover the scale of work as he wasn't fully aware of procedure and products. Thanks to his previous managerial experience, Thomas has had a quick adaptability! He has actively researched, given suggestions, and discussed with the team to complete these tasks.
He is very proactive in solving problems, following and fostering customer - centric culture with a can-do and supportive attitude. As a result, he helps our team to complete key projects such as QA test & procedure, skillset JD matrix, CS review, customer issues report,...
We’re proud to have him as an excellent multi-tasking supporter.
Victor Le is our passionate coder!
Victor Le (Vinh), in the role of a front-end developer, he has completed all tasks in EcomSolid, also continuously contributed his ideas to improve the product.
Besides, Victor Le is an excellent coder in the Seal Commerce website project.
Although our team has always lacked the manpower to deploy many projects at a given time, he has overcome the tough time. He tried to balance the timeline among tasks by actively finding a co-coders, smartly spending time on improving products, even working overtime to meet deadlines. Finally, we have our website (phase 1) launching on time, big thanks to our passionate coder Victor! Let’s click here to check out the website!
Ley is our enthusiastic ambassador!
Ley (Le) is our most dedicated member. She is working on building library sections of EcomSolid to fulfill customer needs as much as possible. Ley has also played an important role in developing website help center for the product team. In addition, she has joined in the Seal Commerce website project as well as guided new members in the template designing process.
Ley is very committed to her job. She usually has a quick response, even she calls for her leader to solve urgent problems at midnight
Being our part time designer, Ley’s time is very limited. Though the July task list was over her scope of work, Ley still tried to arrange by working overtime to provide maximum support for our company.
As Ley keeps fighting with a strong energy, a positive and enthusiastic attitude to accomplish the mission, she absolutely represents our team culture!
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The Recruitment Team is really warriors!
Serena & Elle have been reliable, enthusiastic and dedicated recruiters for the company since our first days with only 20-30 members.
It has been an inconvenient period for recruitment during the past months, especially in June and July, as we had to work remotely. Online recruitment faces many difficulties when it comes to finding candidates and coordinating interviews effectively. However, the team still focused on recruiting and arranging the best interview schedule to ensure the goal of delivering the right personnel to all teams. Finally, our recruitment team reached over 80% of the goal.
In addition, Serena and Elle always keep proactive in supporting the team and other managers. They also don’t hesitate to make a commitment to finding the most appropriate candidates in the shortest time.
Moreover, the two "Recruitment Ambassadors" are also active members in supporting activities to strengthen the spirit of everyone in our company.
Finally, we all overcame all obstacles in July! Now, what can be holding you back to achieve new fantastic things in the next month?
