Am I someone who shares delight?
Last spring, when our first-ever branding task force was formed since the company's founding, the very first thing we did was establish a name for all our members and define what it meant. We had to weave together the surface meaning of 'Delighter', the name chosen through a vote, and the essence of our business. I'm sure there were some members in our engineering-centric company who naturally harbored doubts about this inevitably unfamiliar task.
The Alarmy team's new name, 'Delighter', announced in the Medium post 'Small Habits That Joyfully Change Lives (The Birth of the Delighter)', encapsulates the positive energy brought by the changed lives of each and every user. The reason we introduced our new external slogans, 'The alarm that changes me' and 'A guaranteed successful habit every morning that changes me', is also because of the endless stream of testimonials pouring in from our users. People who shout every single day, 'I've changed this much!'—people who share delight. They are exactly our 2 million Daily Active Users.
Small Habits That Joyfully Change Lives (The Birth of the Delighter)
Seeing users who, instead of letting their overflowing delight slip away, leave messages by editing their reviews as if counting anniversaries, makes me reflect: Am I someone who shares delight? The story of Allie (a pseudonym for privacy) introduced in the Medium post creates the illusion of peering into a letter from an unknown pen pal I might have had during my girlhood.
One morning, Allie achieved the small success of waking up right on time for the first time. That led to getting her very first day job, and as those small successes compounded, she got a promotion, replaced her rusty 26-year-old car, and finally moved out of a poor environment into a safe neighborhood. In her new workplace, she made great friends and even met her life partner, and adopted the greyhound she always wanted. Throughout this entire process, there was Alarmy, built by our Delighters. And she didn't just bury that amazing news on the other side of the globe; she sent it to us Delighters with love and gratitude—along with some cute product improvement ideas.
Walking through this story step by step, I was able to redefine what a Delighter is.
Delight + er : Someone who gives delight...? (X)
Delight + er : Someone who gives users 'the delight of a changed life'! (O)
Giving users 'the delight of a changed life', and deriving delight from that. That is our mission and our daily work. Because Delighters are people who provide opportunities for someone to cherish their precious life even more, we cannot take our respective responsibilities lightly. A service can organically evolve by mutually complementing its users, and I believe that the people building the service can grow through that process as well.
Anyone who thinks, 'An alarm app is just a utility. What more is there to do or what upside is left?' can never be a Delighter, and they'd be highly disappointed even if they joined. Currently, we support 33 languages and are often simultaneously featured in 142 countries on the Play Store, but there is still a mountain of work to do. Not only do we need to sequentially implement detailed localization for each culture and users' affectionate (and mountainous) feature requests into the product, but we also have the homework of advancing our recently globally expanded subscription model. We are pushing these forward because there is a sufficient market pie and potential upside. Since we are a 'company' that must sustain its business before giving delight, it's a matter of course in a way.
However, if the 'making a living' part of our day—which we dedicate half our day to—is about changing someone's life rather than making someone sick, we can at least rack up some positive karma miles to spend on our own lives later, even if it's not full-blown love for humanity.
Work aside, lately I've been thinking a lot that I should make it a habit to share and circulate the feelings of delight I get from somewhere in my daily life. So that a great restaurant, a hair salon, or a service doesn't disappear, or so that they can define themselves and grow.
If you're curious about the Alarmy team, the Delighters who manage 4 million MAU and 2 million DAU with an elite team of just 12 members, please check the link below. :)