Inside Alarmy's 8th Birthday Party
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A birthday party for the people who use Alarmy and the people who make it 🥳
May 24, 2021, marked exactly eight years since Alarmy was born. We prepared a birthday party to celebrate both the Alarmy users who played the biggest role in getting us to our 8th birthday and the Delighters who built the app. We had a fantastic time. Ready to check out the scene?
Part 1. The people who use Alarmy: Hello Larmy!
Alarmy is the morning wellness app loved by 50 million people worldwide since its first launch in 2013! Until now, we've only met our countless users through text—app reviews, emails, and the like. While text was enough to feel the users' love, we wanted to get even closer to them for our 8th anniversary, so we planned two special events.
Event 1. Alarmy user nickname contest 🧐
The first event was a nickname contest for the Alarmy users who have showered us with love over these past eight years. Up until now, we've just vaguely referred to our users as "everyone." To celebrate our 8th anniversary, we decided to ask the users directly for ideas to settle on an affectionate name.
As a result, a whopping 2,000 ideas poured into the nickname contest 🤭!
We gathered and organized the diverse nicknames sent in by Alarmy users from all over the world.
Names that showed love for Alarmy: 'Alaview', 'Alovee'
Names reminding us of the heavy sleepers Alarmy reliably wakes up: 'Sleepyhead', 'Sleepy'
Names that were intuitive and easy to say: 'Larmy', 'Alarming'
Names that captured Alarmy's identity of waking anyone up without fail: 'Wakey', 'Grim Sleeper'
Friendly variations: 'Alarmian', 'Alarminions', 'Alarmate', 'Alarmigo'
Plus, there were plenty of ideas brimming with user wit!
There were so many great ideas, but to pick just one, we held an internal vote among the Delighters who would be calling the Alarmy users by this name the most. And the final user nickname chosen was...!
Larmy
It's Larmy!
It was chosen because it immediately identifies them as Alarmy users, and the pronunciation is easy in both Korean and English, allowing us to affectionately address our global users. If DelightRoom's service Alarmy is A+Larmy, then the countless users using the app become Larmies—meaning we are all one! It carries such a nice message. 🥰
And out of the folks who suggested the idea of Larmy, we randomly selected one person and sent them a premium coffee machine as a token of our gratitude! ☕️
Event 2. Alarmy virtual birthday celebration 🥳
Our second event was a virtual video celebration. We really wanted to invite Alarmy users in person to chat, but due to COVID-19, we had no choice but to receive virtual congratulations via video.
We also considered a live video meeting, but decided on pre-recorded videos since it would be hard for users across various global time zones to join in real-time. We wanted to meet as many Alarmy users as possible.
Since they would be taking the time to record a video featuring their own face or voice, we prepared a 1-year Alarmy Premium subscription as a gift for the first 400 participants. 😉
Even though the event required making and sending a video, an incredible 500 Larmies participated! 🙊 Just seeing our Larmies on video was touching enough, but there was an even more moving point that brought us to tears. Without us ever specifying it as a condition to win, so many people went into great detail about how Alarmy had transformed their mornings! 😭
The only required mission phrases for the video were just two sentences: "Happy 8th birthday, Alarmy! Way to go, Alarmy, for changing my mornings every day!" But despite that, they shared so much about how they first discovered Alarmy, which missions woke them up best, how well they were using the app, and how thankful they were to the people who made it.
One reason we opted for video greetings was wanting to meet Larmies more vividly, but we also hoped it would become a source of motivation for Delighters—helping us find meaning in our work through our users and making the daily grind more enjoyable. So, we carefully watched every single video to select those with the strongest messages and edit them into one compilation. (After watching all 500+ videos, our eyes were completely puffy...)
Looking back at the event, even though it was the first user event we ever hosted at Alarmy, receiving over 2,000 ideas and 500 videos made us realize all over again just how many passionate users we have worldwide. 🥰
Part 2. The people who make Alarmy
Of course, our Delighters who work fiercely day in and day out for Alarmy and our Larmies couldn't be left out of the birthday celebration! We kicked off Alarmy's 8th birthday party on the Friday afternoon of the week the user event ended. 🥳 (Due to COVID-19, we decided to host it right here inside our office.)
The party started, of course, with a delicious meal together!
A catering company set up in a corner of the DelightRoom office worked hard to prepare a warm, diverse, and delicious spread right on time for our meal.
For a while, due to COVID-19, it was a bit of a bummer having to eat the same limited types of delivery food whenever we had an internal event... So, all the Delighters were completely thrilled with the catering setup, which featured everything from assorted appetizers to various main dishes and desserts. 🥰
After filling our bellies, we lit the candles on our custom-made Alarmy 8th birthday cake. 🎂 The Alarmy symbol sitting right in the center with a cute, smiling morning sun was absolutely gorgeous, and it tasted just as good as it looked! 😋
After singing "Happy Birthday" together, we listened to a meaningful message dedicated to the Delighters from Jay, the CEO who first brought DelightRoom into this world.
Today's highlight! Watching the tear-jerking 💦 birthday video
Next up was the highly anticipated highlight of the birthday party, prepared together by the P&C, POM, and Marketing teams! We all watched the birthday celebration video.
Larmies from so many different countries and walks of life—firefighters, police officers, single moms, students, job seekers, and office workers—sent in videos sincerely wishing Alarmy a happy 8th birthday, each sharing their unique stories of how they use the app.
There was a Larmy who avoided oversleeping and lateness to get good grades thanks to Alarmy, a Larmy who never missed their early morning practicums, a Larmy who built a stellar career, and even a die-hard fan who has been using Alarmy for 7 years straight...!
Thanks to the cheerful Larmies, we'd be laughing one second, and the next, you could hear sniffles all around the room from their deeply sincere messages of congratulations and gratitude. At the end of the video, the company included photos of the Delighters along with a thank-you letter addressed to them. The content marketer who made this video, Jelly, had a personal KPI of "make at least 3 Delighters cry" (lol), and she totally crushed it. 💦 (But hilariously, Jelly, Liz, and Lucy, who had already cried multiple times while making the video, ended up crying all over again...😂)
You can check out the full video below! 👇
Want to dive deeper into the meaning behind the video messages sent by over 3,000 Larmies worldwide? 👉 Read "Running a Service That Truly Changes Users' Lives"
It ain't a Party without presents!
After the wave of emotion swept through, it was time to hand out gifts—this was a birthday party, after all! But DelightRoom never gives out gifts without making you work for them... fun elements are a must! We went through a series of true/false trivia questions about DelightRoom, Alarmy, and the Delighters. Amidst the baffled groans (!) at some surprisingly obscure questions and the bursts of cheerful laughter echoing around the room, Chan from the POM team claimed 1st place! Having such a broad perspective and observing everything about the service, the company, and the Delighters so well—amazing job, Chan! 👏
For the prizes, we prepared five options: a 1-night hotel stay voucher, a fine dining voucher for two, a massage voucher for two, premium Hanwoo beef gift cards, and athletic wear gift cards—winners could choose one. Normally, it's decided by a random draw, but we gave our 1st place winner Chan the power to pick his own prize. 😉 (Sushi lover Chan's pick was the fine dining voucher for a high-end omakase! 🍣)
For the final program of the party, we had a profile photo shoot! We booked a photography studio to take one "proper" (!) photo for the Delighter intro page, one personality-filled shot capturing the Delighters having fun, and a big group photo.
At first, everyone seemed a bit tense, but soon enough, the Delighters were striking awesome poses and hunting around for fun props! It seems DelightRoom is truly full of delightful people... If you want to see our hilarious Delighters in photos, please check out the We are Delighters! page. 😘
So far, you've gotten a vivid look at the scene of Alarmy's 8th birthday party. It was a meaningful celebration that showed the Delighters building Alarmy just how much of a positive impact they're having on Larmies' lives, while also letting the company express its deep gratitude to those very Delighters. 🥳
We're looking forward to the day COVID-19 ends so we can set up an opportunity to meet our users in person next time! 🙏
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