Why effective communication is crucial for startups: Nerd Evolution interview

“I get to choose the kind of work that I do, I get to enjoy it, and I get to shape the projects in my own vision, as well as work the things out with the clients.”

“We were trying to come up with a name that will actually represent us and how we have been growing up. Growing up, all of us have been nerds in our own respective fields, in our own respective way.

I think in this day and age, being called a nerd isn’t bullying — if you’re a nerd, that means you’re passionate about something you love doing. That’s how the idea was first nurtured in our heads. We decided to call ourselves Nerd Evolution in the sense that we are nerds evolving into industry professionals and giving back to society.”

“My tip would be that a team should never have a boss. A team should have a leader.

If you think of yourself as the boss, some of the junior teammates might be a bit reluctant to speak to you. What I have noticed from my experience is that, sometimes, they’re not really open to sharing their problems with their immediate supervisors because they have a very strict professional relationship with them.
So, as the CEO, as a leader of the team, I try to be friendly with the new team members so that they can communicate to me what the problem is. Because, if I don’t understand what the problem is, I cannot come up with a solution.
If I don’t come up with a solution, the same mistake is going to repeat itself.  I don’t want that and no one wants that, really.”

“There are times when we need to be strictly professional and formal, yes.

But then, immediately afterward, I think we might need to be a bit more lenient in terms of interacting with every hierarchy of the employees.”

“It’s very important to have clear and well-maintained communication. Without consistent communication, without going back and forth constantly, it’s really not possible to come up with the best products or the best projects. Communication has definitely played a bigger part than most others, in terms of the success and the kind of work that we are being able to put through.”

“Everyone has their opinions. And finally, whenever we’re making a big decision, we always consider what each team member has to say. Since we’re really a very small company, we do have the privilege to listen to everyone’s words and really take into consideration everyone’s opinion on the matter.

So, mostly this is how we’re running, and that’s how we’re always on the same page.”

“If we make mistakes, that’s fine — we’re humans, we all make mistakes.
But, we should learn from our mistakes and then try to become better people. The competition is not with others — it’s not with other companies, not with the client or the project itself.

The competition is with you, how you are developing as a person. Are you better than you were before? Are we better than we were before? Are we making the same mistakes that we made last month?“

“Maintaining team spirit has been one of the key elements that, I believe, plays a very important role in terms of a team’s productivity level. Since we are still building up and growing, our team members (more often than not) seem to work on multiple projects at the same time. We sometimes even have to juggle different time zones.

Being under such pressure gets a bit too much for everyone.

In such cases, we have ad hoc meetings — just communicating how everything’s going — or a team outing. I like to treat them with burgers, just for the fun of it. Like, ‘All right, calm down, let’s have a burger together, the treat’s on me’.”

“Before starting Nerd Evolution, I was working as a full-time software engineer, so I was familiar with Slack from my workplace. I found it very reliable and very consistent in terms of internal team communication, as well as client communication.
Because of that, from the very start, I realized that we need to have a very good communication structure in order to have this going. At the very least, that communication is the key for us.

But, since Slack gets really expensive for even the basics of needs, it wasn’t really the option for us. We were just starting out and the paid option wasn’t the solution that we were looking for at the time.”

“We made a Google search and we found Pumble, so we decided to give it a try since the UI was really familiar to me and some of my teammates. At that time, Pumble provided enough features for us to get it started. And, I’m very happy to say that Pumble has been constantly putting in new features that made us stick to Pumble and it has been very helpful.”

“Currently, being able to create separate channels has been a huge plus for me.

Replying in a thread is one of the main features we’ve been using, and I’ve been really enjoying it. It helps me keep our conversations really segregated and, at the same time, really organized.”

“Having all of the chat history available at any time, and having the search feature to take out some of the keywords and look for a conversation that had taken place in an earlier time period has been very helpful.”

“Being a startup, we need to share a lot of information that needs to be there for everyone to look up at any time. Even with the search feature, it’s not really convenient for everyone to look for every file just by searching. So, being able to pin to a channel feature has been really helpful, as well.”

“From the very start, I had this idea that without understanding my teammates, I cannot lead a team properly.”