People by their nature and their environment are scattered.

Physically, we are scattered across the continents. Culturally, socially, intellectually and philosophically we have many differences. Our knowledge, experience, dreams, and goals are scattered too. For good or bad, we are all VERY different from one another.

The Zesteam is no exception to this rule. Our team includes members from 5 different timezones and multiple generations. The good in this is that we bring together a grand mix of ideas and points of view. But, as you might expect, the bad is that we don’t always agree on everything. I’m okay with that. I tell the team, “it is okay to disagree, even to passionately disagree as long as we have understanding.”

We must understand each other’s points of view. That is how we will reap the most benefit from our differences.

So how do we do it?

First, we defined the organizational culture with the existing core team and said (as a team) that whoever embraces this culture is eligible to join us. We are Sunrisers. I described exactly what that means in a post last year, Harnessing company culture to achieve stellar growth. Defining our organizational culture also helped each of us to define, distill and identify who we are as professionals, providing us with a guide for the professional choices we make.

Second, we realized that even as professionals, we are still first individuals. We don’t check our human strengths and weaknesses at the office door. People are sometimes happy and sometimes upset. As a team, we must be aware of our teammates as individual human beings.

For instance, Idan Yalovich (my co-founder and CTO) and I share an office in the WeWork space in Tel Aviv. If I arrive at work in the morning exhausted, Idan knows what set of music to play (right after the high-five and the hug he gives me each morning.) “I see you need a lot of sugar in your coffee today,” is a sentence that reflects everything.

But, as I mentioned before, the rest of our team is spread around the world. So, how to high-five someone who is sitting in their own workspace, alone every day all day?

Stay connected IRL and virtually

We encourage everyone, including ourselves, to work in different Wework spaces or to get out and see people throughout their week. A question I sometimes ask Karolis at our weekly kickoff meetings is “How many people have you seen this week?”

Now, we don’t always succeed in getting everyone to go out and about. But I’m planning to use this article to keep myself accountable. I will continue to remind myself and the Zesteam to look outside their workspace and see who they can meet.

To stay connected across the miles, we defined every Thursday as a Zoom day. Our entire team shares a Zoom channel where we work with our webcams on. We can see each other, talk, argue, push ideas and projects and just share a smile.

Making time for one on one communications

The Zesteam is small and all of us wear many hats. Due to this fact, we often need to call on one another for help. We make a superhuman effort to ensure that everyone is communicating their needs clearly. Every Sunday Idan and I do a long kickoff meeting (about two hours). During this face-to-face hang out, we set the scene for the rest of the week/month/quarter.

Then, every Monday I meet one-on-one (via Zoom) with each Zesteam member and we go over an agenda that they prepared in advance. This process helps me to see that we are all squeezing the right lemons into the right buckets. By checking in each week, we make sure that we understand our goals and our plans are aligned. Plus, it gives us a great opportunity to connect professionally and discuss those ‘human being’ issues that might be on our minds.

Idan also meets with everyone on Mondays, but his meetings are much shorter than mine. (I am a man of many words.) And, individual team members meet with each other for short half-hour meetings at the beginning of each week as well.

All-hands check-in and communications check

Getting everyone on a remote team together can be a challenge, especially when there are multiple time zones involved. But we make it happen. At the beginning of each month, we all meet for an online conversation. One team member is assigned as the moderator and sets the agenda for this call. The moderator also assumes the important duty of telling me my time is up when I talk too much. We even built a template to use for this gathering, maybe later I’ll share it with you.

Currently, our monthly call has become a weekly one as we prepare for our biggest product launch yet for Zest Enlight (see more info at the bottom of this post). During crucial times for our organization, maintaining active communications is even more important.

In the moment communications

With our lean structure, not everything we do at Zest can be scheduled around weekly or monthly meetings. Sometimes we have to move faster. So, in addition to scheduled conversations, we also conduct flash meetings whenever a project manager believes that a task is falling behind and requires the teams’ focused attention.

When this happens, the project manager sets up a quick video meeting of all those involved. These conferences can take up to two hours but are intended to get the project up to speed and prepare the team for a sprint to the finish.

One of the other ways we manage an all-hands task is with a Slackstorm. This is a brainstorming session conducted via — you guessed it — Slack. Team members usually get a day’s notice when a Slackstorm is coming and the person who calls it sets the agenda. These Slackstorms are multi-participant discussions that revolve around a creative and/or niche subject-matter, such as our recent Slackstorm to refine the Zest Enlight LP.

Keeping track of our projects

To help our project managers create a unified plan for each project that is professional, polished and thought-provoking, Katarina has built a really simple and clear project brief template. Project managers are responsible for filling out the relevant portions of this brief before they call on team members to do their part. That way, each of us can look to this central, standardized document to find the who, what, and why of a project. The template includes assigned tasks, KPIs and timelines to help us all stay on track.

Not everybody was a fan of the briefing process when we first introduced it to them. From the project manager’s perspective, writing everything out in advance can seem like it is slowing the project down. But investing this extra time is worth it. It forces the project manager to evaluate the entire project, distilling each step and identifying any bottlenecks or extraordinary needs.

This is a copy of the template. You’ll see that it uses some Zesty jargon such as Lemons and Tangors (Project leads and team members). Text in purple represents examples of language we might use for a specific project.

My advice to you is that you use this template as an inspiration while you build one of your own.

Making sure your remote team culture doesn’t get lost in the hustle

My last bit of advice about effectively working with a remote team is probably the most important: You have to actively work to make it happen. This means assigning someone to maintain and monitor your remote culture. Making sure meetings are scheduled, documents are shared and everyone’s questions or problems are addressed doesn’t happen on its own. For Zest, we owe the success of our systems to the amazing Katarina. In addition to creating our wonderful project brief template, she keeps our meetings running smoothly and our teams in the loop.

— -

I mentioned Zest Enlight as one of the reasons our remote team has been seeing more of each other lately. It really is a big deal for all of us here at Zest.

Here’s more about what it is and how it’s going to shake up the EdTech world.

Zest Enlight is the mobile and pro version of Zest with deeper tech and premium features.

Its technology unifies Zest’s community curation with a sophisticated AI matching system to deliver the knowledge-building content you need.

It’s like a super-cool AI teacher who knows you well and works with you to build a micro-learning path that will blow your talent sky high without wasting your time with content you don’t need to consume.

Soon, we’ll launch Zest Enlight in a closed beta and the beta helpers who join the closed beta will receive Zest Enlight free forever.

There are several hundred beta helpers already registered and the registration will close once we get between 2K-3K users.

Yes, it’s the biggest thing we’ve ever done.

Zest Enlight and this closed beta isn’t just for marketers, either. Professionals from the ed tech, product development, and HR industries are welcome, too.

Feel free to comment here or email me at yam@zest.is if you want me to add you to the yellow list of Beta Helpers.

🧠💡
 — -

To the lemons and beyond ❤

Remote Zesteam management: Methodologies we have developed + template was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the past three weeks Zest has been all-hands on deck crafting two critical documents: the Zest extreme-growth strategy game plan and the Zest lean and clean business plan.

These documents incorporated ideas, goals and intelligence collected from all corners of the Zest universe and will guide us as we continue this magnificent journey.

Zest’s marketing knowledge platform is designed for the professional marketing community. So, naturally, its growth will be driven by serving that community.

Our community-focused Strategy and Business plans are ambitious, dynamic, and well-vetted. They were designed with precision yet flexibility. We had created a clear roadmap. But still, despite the plans’ details, a crucial element was still missing.

You see, ideas need execution to grow. And strategies are executed by living, breathing human beings. Our strategy, your strategy, any organization’s strategy is only as powerful as the team that supports it. And teams are at their most powerful when they share a unified set of goals and ideals — their culture.

Of course, as we wrote our Strategy and Business plans, we kept our company culture always in mind. But as Zest grows, as we seek new members of the tribe and as they evaluate us, those thoughts must be put in writing. That was the missing element. Zest needed to define who we are as a community. We needed to define our culture.

This statement by Carter Cleveland, the founder and CEO of Artsy, in his article Why Define Company Values, perfectly explains why even the best plans — including Zest’s plans — are incomplete without a defined company culture.

Cleveland writes, “When a company is small, the high degree of interaction between team members allows people to make decisions efficiently and consistently without having values defined. But as a company starts to grow, communication overhead and reaching alignment around decision-making and hiring becomes increasingly challenging.”

So, as the last — but definitely not least — component of our 18-month plans, we set about to define the Zest company culture.

Zest’s Sunrisers culture: working together, powering growth

Who are the Zest implementers? What is the Zest culture? The answer to these questions lies in the people who work every day to make Zest better. And I’m not talking just about the core team. No, the Zesteam is only a part of the super lemony system that is building itself.

The people responsible for keeping this giant lemon running are found in our micro tribes. The are Zest Chiefs, Content Distillers, and Scouters. Our investors, and the member advisory board are part of this amazing community, too. They are all so involved with the way we are structuring our roadmap, writing these articles, beta testing new product features and distillation process. They all are Sunrisers.

This is who Sunrisers are

1. Sunrisers will not sit and wait for the sun to rise but will proactively bring about our own new day.

2. Sunrisers prioritize performing tasks in a systematic way; organization comes before execution.

3. Sunrisers are not growth hackers, they are scalers; they don’t need to use more resources in order to trigger a significant increase in any parameter.

4. Sunrisers are KPIs oriented, data-driven and make decisions based on measurable factors.

5. Sunrisers are not fighters but a new generation of strategists who master their crafts and excel in execution methodologies.

6. Sunrisers have an ‘always question everything’ mindset.

7. Sunrisers know that there is a time to say no and push back to avoid exceeding their optimum capacity.

8. Sunrisers are mindful about keeping our work atmosphere hyper-fun and supportive.

9. Sunrisers are community oriented, making decisions based on the needs of and with input from the tribes they lead.

Culture is the driving force for Zest’s journey to the top

With this last piece in place, we have identified our roadmap for success and who should join us on our journey.

Zest is growing and the Sunrisers culture is driving that growth.

Are you a Sunriser?

Then you should join us in the Zest tribe! Together we can take marketing knowledge to the next level and fight information overload together.

Email me at yam@zest.is to be part of the Zest movement.

— — —

Bringing thoughts together and taking ideas to the ground are tough (really tough) jobs. This post would have probably remained in our Slack channel and Google Docs’ Strategy folder if Tonya Parker hadn’t pro-actively brought the sunrise to it.
Thanks for that, my lemonsista ❤

Harnessing company culture to achieve stellar growth was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Each day when I arrive at “work” I’m challenged to meet our next goal, keep pushing, keep growing. The excitement, the challenge, the constant movement and the beautiful feedback from our peers and members — it’s the fuel that feeds the entrepreneurial spirit.

The first half of 2018 has been a high-fuel adventure for my Zest co-founder and me.

Over these past several months we’ve achieved many milestones, some major and some minor. We have pushed ahead from one achievement to another, always with our eyes fixed on the next summit.

• We launched an additional delivery method for our members to access Zest’s content Stream.
• We started a seed funding round
• We grew our Zest team with a few more members and said goodbye to another whom we really loved

And, we added new features, tested new business models, clarified our core values, and more.

But what we didn’t do was stop to take a breath. We didn’t pause to evaluate just what we had achieved. Each milestone was treated as just another agenda item. Check the box, mark it done, next!

Because when you are in a sustainable growth mode there is always a next mountain to be climbed. There is always a next thing to do, a next problem to be solved, a next task that requires your attention.

Which is why, a few weeks ago a friend of ours gave my co-founder and me a figurative (and nearly literal) slap in the face and said “Are you guys nuts? You do not understand what you’ve achieved?!?!? You have worked on these goals for three consecutive months and you’re talking about building your strategy forward without even absorbing your achievement?”

And she was right. Because we had been so busy putting one foot in front of the other, we had never stopped to look back over the terrain we had covered. We hadn’t taken the time to review where we’d been.

Maybe you are thinking, “So what? Onward and upward, why look back?”

Not quite.
Actually, NO!

Reflecting on the past is essential to improving upon the future. More than one famous person has said words to the effect that you can’t know where you are going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Or, as Design for the Mind author Victor Yocco explains in his article for Smashing Magazine, Dwelling on the Past: The Importance of Self Reflection (Part 2):

“We won’t grow from our experiences if we don’t understand them and make changes based on what we’ve learned.” (Yocco also recommends using an amazing model called the Reflective Cycle created by Graham Gibbs that walks you through the entire process.)

Besides, even though we entrepreneurs may thrive under the pressure of continual action, research tells us that consciously stopping to take in the moment can lead to breakthroughs in creativity. Mindfulness, in particular, “facilitates what creative experts refer to as the incubation and insights stage of the creative process,” write Ellen Keithline Byrne and Tojo Thatchenkery in the Harvard Business Review article, How to Use Mindfulness to Increase Your Team’s Creativity.

Get the point? Taking a moment to reflect isn’t a waste of time. It’s the key to your business’s future!

So, we decided it was time to put the rush on pause and take a moment to review our work, refresh our minds, and consider our past as we prepared for our next step.

We took some time to stop and touch the desert.

Idan and I made a decision on a Wednesday that we would wake at dawn the next day, pack our laptops and keyboards, our notes, and some essential supplies (Breezers, snacks, and a portable soap bubble machine — you know, just the important stuff) and head to a small, isolated farm in the desert of South Israel for the weekend.

When Idan and I decided to embark on our trip to the desert, we knew that we wanted to celebrate Zest’s achievements — but, not like you celebrate a victory. I see a victory as an external celebration with trumpets, pats on the back, hugs and the whole shebang. And, the word victory has a military-war connotation — to have conquered.

When we celebrate our achievements as if we have conquered a foe, it changes the way we look at those achievements. We look at them in one dimension, as a win instead of a loss. This point of view can keep us from seeing both the gains and losses of that achievement. It can keep us from seeing what we need to do better next time, what new directions we need to take, and how we can move forward to our next achievement.

For this trip, we wanted something deeper than a victory celebration. We wanted to connect with one another as founders and to connect Zest’s past with its future. Our trip was the perfect time and place to do this.

Here’s what we discovered while we rested and reflected under the desert sky.

First, the desert at night is beautiful. On the first night we hiked to the top of a rocky hill. Moonlight transformed the terrain around us into a surreal white landscape. We look out at the desert and said farewell to the past. We acknowledge our appreciation for what the past two years had given us and taught us, then we said “ciao and gracia para todo.”

We knew that we had been changed.

This is what it means. This is why they call it the startup journey. Because you will move forward. You will be changed by each step along the way.

And, then we fired up the bubble machine.

On the second day, Idan and I hunkered down in our room. The desert is hot! We had everything we needed, food, drinks, good company and a sense of calm. We talked strategy, remembered all we had been through, laughed at ourselves a little. Then we wrote out Zest’s values. We set goals, and talked about our changing roles in the company we had built. We thought about where we might see ourselves in a year as our Zesteam grows.

That second night, serendipity! We discovered that it was not only Tu B’Av (a Jewish holiday celebrating love) but also the night of a rare Blood Moon eclipse. Our desert retreat was the perfect viewing location for this magical event. Positive vibes all around!

Soon, though, it was time to come home. Driving along the dusty road, unplugged from our laptops and messages, we summed up our weekend — the purpose and clarity we had found. And, of course, being entrepreneurs, we began making plans to climb that next mountain.

American poet Maya Angelou once said, “I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you have come from, you don’t know where you are going. I have respect for the past, but I am a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centered at then place I am at, the I go forward to the next place.”

Our weekend centered us. We were able to examine our past achievements, bring closure to that chapter of our lives, and leave energized to face the future.

I have never felt so clear on where I have come from or where I have been. I now understand how the past two years has shaped Zest and what we must do to continue moving forward.

Our time in the desert has left Idan and me empowered, completed, and more lemonized than ever before. And, now, onward! Bring on the rush.

Achievements, not victories was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is it real? Is it finally happening?

Today is the day we are launching the mobile-friendly Distilled Content Stream.

But what does that even mean?

It means that now you can access the content that is being distilled by the Zest tribe not only through a Chrome new tab extension, but also via your browser on both your mobile and desktop devices.

And this is just the kick-off of the Zest tribe’s mission of making professional knowledge more accessible, baby!

*The sound of lemons rolling in the background 🍋🍋🍋*

Why?

Because it only makes sense that the knowledge that gets distilled on Zest and helps 17k professional marketers cut through the information overload should be as accessible as possible.

The Zest’s User Advisory Board and the Zesteam realized that the time invested by the members of our community to bring the best content to the table and the time spent distilling that content through our multilevel moderation process made it too valuable not to help as many marketers as possible get to it.

After all, sharing the best content and making it accessible however you want to read it aligns perfectly with our initial goal of helping professionals fight Content Shock, right?

We still love our Zest Chrome extension

Don’t get us wrong — the Zest Chrome new tab extension will continue to live and grow. We love it so much and it will always hold a special place in our lemon hearts.

The extension was an excellent place for us to begin to find our way to you, our core community. And it was a brilliant destination for us to build the process of content distillation before we moved forward.

By making a destination that was so handy, it shortened our time to achieve our product market fit, improve our performance, and add required basic features.

Our home on Chrome served as the foundation for us to develop a much much bigger thing.

And for some, the extension is the perfect way to get that daily dose of professional knowledge (yay for the force of habit).

But we realized that we might need more room to grow

However, the Chrome new tab extension had also had its limitations.

What brought us one step closer to making this decision was mainly you, the community.

We received dozens of emails, LinkedIn and Facebook messages from members who really liked what the new tab extension did, but said they would love to see it as a separate entity they could choose when to visit.

So, for the last month and a half we’ve been building another destination through which marketers like you and us can access the content distilled by Zest community.

Today, we reveal that way — the Zest mobile-friendly Content Stream.

The mobile friendly Content Stream will help our product team better understand how pro marketers are consuming the distilled content on mobile and as a result the way to develop a fully native mobile app will be shorter, faster and more accurate.

Even giants (who won’t adapt) die?

It wasn’t just user feedback that made us decide to expand Zest’s points of contact.

Recent events in the industry really made us put our thinking caps on and reconsider how we all access information and interact as a community of professionals.

I’m talking about the fall of Inbound.org and StumbleUpon.

After all, almost all of us here at Zest grew as marketers through Inbound.org.

So what was it that a giant like Inbound.org could have missed? How did a resource we all relied upon become obsolete? And what could our community of marketers at Zest do to avoid the same fate?

We were learning from someone else’s mistakes and putting that knowledge directly into practice, big time. Nichole explains it nicely here.

As for StumbleUpon, Julia Alexander of Polygon describes it the best:

“It’s more challenging to find time to waste on the internet as we become older. If you’re in media, it’s difficult to waste time on the internet and not think of ways to turn that into a story. Its death isn’t just saying goodbye to what feels like a bygone era of internet exploration, but bidding a final farewell to a time when curation didn’t dominate our online day-to-day”.

I have to agree. While StumbleUpon used to be an amazing way for me to discover random internet jewels and procrastinate during my college days, it didn’t actually provide any kind of long-term value. I am still a master procrastinator, but it’s been years since I last used it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Our overall conclusion was that there’s definitely a change in the way the content is being consumed today, and that change involves building a system that cannot easily be gamed or manipulated. Professionals expect a place where they can acquire new, valuable knowledge, not be presented by any information someone else wants to throw at them.

Too many people allowed to game a system makes that system too much of a waste of time.

To avoid the same fate as these early content leaders, we realized the time was ripe for us to grow.

Laying the foundation for taking Zest to the next level

Every other quarter, we run a SWOT analysis for Zest. The fact that it’s a not a one time thing, but a regular routine, helps us track our zoomed-out goals, vision, and progress.

Our last SWOT meeting was at the end of April when Idan and I met with another sharp-minded strategist in Idan’s apartment in Yaffo (the city that is right on the southern border of Tel Aviv).

What started as a couple of shy sticky notes here and there ended up being a full blown sticky notes party at the end of the meeting.

Quite quickly, some things became more clear.

Our analysis helped us understand that the new tab extension, as a single destination had as many advantages as it did disadvantages.

We understood that we needed to create more destinations for the sake of Zest’s growth, mission, and vision.

And, as we mentioned previously, it seemed pretty clear that the Zest members felt the same.

Hack that! Matthew Zammit even created a 41-slide presentation, explaining us why it’s better to have a mobile version of Zest and how we should do it.

Once we set the ground for the new project, we knew what was coming next, implementing our plan.

A family meeting: Bringing the Zesteam together

We needed to leverage our collective lemon power in order to make this project happen.

So, what we did was schedule a Zesteam meeting where we:

• Discussed the project particulars
• Voted on the ideal subdomain for our brand new lemon destination
• Introduced our new task-based method of communication

And that one hour discussion proved to be more fruitful than we initially thought.

Communication truly is the key, especially within a remote team

When it comes to small teams and large projects, there seem to be two things you should always keep in mind: clever distribution of the tasks and proper communication.

And it seems like we particularly nailed the communication part this time.

At this point you probably noticed we have a thing for lemonizing our terms (see what I did there) and using metaphors.

So we introduced a Lemon-Tangor methodology that proved to be of massive help when it comes to staying on top of our stuff.

(Wonder what a tangor is? Here’s some help.)

Each task was assigned to a Lemon (the head of the task), and to 1–3 Tangors (team members the lemon would follow up with and who would provide constructive feedback).

We achieved two things with this process:

• Everyone could easily stay in loop about the tasks they were involved in completing, and
• Each Zesteam member always had someone to ask for feedback to make sure they were on the right track

Teamwork in its purest form, right? Which is funny, because Teamwork.com (the app) ended up being the project management tool we eventually opted for.

Yes. You read that right. Until this latest project was underway, we had not used a project management tool. We had been totally old school, relying on spreadsheets! Choosing an app that could help us keep everyone on track became on of our first tasks as we prepared for this launch.

Finding the project management tool for us

We Zesteam members have one huge addiction: We love tracking everything and we are raging fans of neat documentation. So our initial project looked something like this:

While nifty, these types of docs do take a hell of a lot of time to create and manage. And not just that, even the most hyper-organized Google spreadsheet won’t solve the communication aspect. It ain’t easy to let everyone know where a certain task stands in the timeline and whether or not the Lemons and Tangors are on top of their sh#t.

And since we’re all about optimizing our procedures, we had been on the lookout for just the right tool for a while.

But we weren’t exactly sure of what we were looking for until Nichole had a look at the Lemon-Tangor method during our Zest family meeting.

That’s when she suggested switching to Teamwork, as it supported the same system we wanted to acquire, with Lemons being assigned the tasks, and Tangors following them. It also solved the communication issue as each team member could track the progress of a given task and be notified on others actions.

Yeah, okay, but were all those project management bells and whistles necessary?

Did all of Teamwork’s features look a bit overwhelming at first? Yes. Okay, okay, that spreadsheet probably doesn’t look real user friendly to some of you either. Perhaps we were comparing lemons and oranges.

Has the app proven entirely useful after all? Absolutely.

We only realized the importance of our newly adopted project management method during our “Snakes and Ladders incident.”

Snakes and Ladders? Playing children’s games in the midst of a rapid product launch?

No. No games. That’s just what we nicknamed the event.

Here’s what happened.

First, it wasn’t exactly a full-scale incident. No one threw lemons at each other. But it was a situation that helped us realize the importance of Tangors and having an extra pair of eyes on the task.

When we were initially announcing the new Content Stream on social media, Karolis the Lemon and his Tangors, Nichole and I, had already pretty much polished all the copy when our CTO Idan jumped in with a comment telling us that our tone of voice was completely off.

He wrote:

“We are not just another tech company, we are a wild-yellow-hairy-lemon which is building a movement and starting a revolution. We don’t announce like Apple, we announce like rebels with yellow bandanas, face masks and unharmful juicy lemons for grenades.”

His feedback at that point was priceless. He was a fresh pair of eyes and showed us what we had been missing out on the entire time.

We had to start again and rewrite everything from scratch!

Idan had sent us sliding right down the chute, all the way back to the starting point. And that’s why we call it the “Snakes and Ladders incident.”

Since then, everyone wants Idan to be their Tangor as such crucial constructive feedback is exactly what our task managers want.

So that was it. We took a bit of extra time to align our tone of voice, polished the copy and made our move!

Making important decisions, together

Now I’m going to take you back again to our Zesteam kick-off meeting. We had made it pretty far.

• Project tasks were defined,
• Possible management tools considered,
• A communication method had been identified.

We lacked one thing before we could call the project official: We needed to vote on a subdomain.

So, we let our creative juices flow and came up with several possible solutions. Our first dilemma was whether we should use a default word like “feed” or “content” or stick to the lemony terms that we have already made our own and define our new destination as a distilled stream.

After our discussion, we took a vote. This is what our results looked like.

As you can see, there was a minor lemon-food-fight between the two distill variants. But the votes clearly tipped in favor of distilled once Karolis pointed out that, after all, we are rolling out the new distilled content stream.

And this voting was just the beginning. Our next task was enormous. We had to modify the homepage to fit both the old and the new Zest product.

Our goal wasn’t only freshening up the existing copy. Considering that we would now have two destinations and there would be a way to access Zest from mobile, we needed to develop all new sections and make them especially zesty.

To begin, we created a document where we dissected the existing home page into sections, analyzed the copy, and had each lemon member submit their suggestions and/or decide on their favorites.

Once we distilled our ideas we referred our best stuff to you and asked your opinion. That was an eye opener for some things!

Eventually, we summed up all of the feedback and created a team-wide voting sheet that sparked a lot of nerdy excitement.

This is how we decided on our new Hero CTA:

The building of the new lemony onboarding

At one point during this campaign, someone mentioned this was the first time we were launching a new product since the Chrome extension. Naturally, that sparked an extra dose of excitement among the team.

We already had a set of developed features and the very supportive community, but now there are were devices to conquer, and we found that challenge delightful.

One of the signature things we had created with the extension was the Zest onboarding system. We’ve probably got dozens of emails and countless mentions on product, UX, and micro copy Facebook Groups from members who loved the Boomshakalaka moment and the smooth intro to the platform.

So we knew we mustn’t disappoint them on mobile devices. The pressure was on!

Now, let me give you a very first look at our mobile onboarding process:

Product + beta + deadlines = Sweet, yet lemony-tart, challenge

In one of our conversations at the beginning of this project, Katarina told me that I said something that stuck to her like glue.

“Do you know what is the most common reason projects like this fail? Deadlines.”

Considering that our goal was to make this launch happen in less than 45 days and that most of us here are only part-time Lemons, you can imagine the impact missing a single deadline could have on us.

Now imagine the delight we felt when we realized that we were not only on time but could open the beta to our members one day AHEAD of schedule.

A friggin’ miracle, right?

No, just the magnificent project management skills that crowned our closed beta (Zesteam only) which was probably the smoothest and most detailed closed beta most of us have ever seen.

With two of us on the road, and one being super busy moving to a new apartment, we managed to perform 900 tests on 2 desktop and 2 mobile operating systems, 3 major browsers, and 4 mobile devices. And we did it all in one day.

The best part? 860 of those tests got a green light.

So once the open beta was scheduled ahead of its projected date, we couldn’t wait to see the reactions of our beta lemons. Tal did a wonderful job of showing how it went a couple of days ago.

For us personally, the highlight was the fact that a whooping 80.5% of the testers had actually already recommended Zest to other people. Wow! That, my lemons, is something definitely worth working for. 💛

And the overall NPS from the beta members was 54 ❤️❤️❤️

Time to show some Zest-tee-love

This is a very exciting time for our growing lemon tree. Not only are we rolling out a new destination for our members, we are also finalizing our Seed round and getting ready for even more amazing things to happen.

And these amazing things are happening only because there’s a growing community of amazing people making it all possible by supporting us and sending us lots of love and positive vibes.

So this feels like a pretty good time to give some of that love back.

And what says love better than a t-shirt?

While we would gladly ship out 17,000 t-shirts if we could and send it to each and every member, we had to make a slightly more modest selection and ship the first hundred to some of our most devoted Zesters.

If you completed our beta testers survey, you also are going to get one!

Matthew Curtis on Twitter

Returned home from a conference to find my very own @ZestisApp shirt! Thanks for your awesome product and even more outstanding community engagement. + @YamRe

[Got a Zestee already? tag Zest on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook]

Now, I’ve been staring at the screen for half an hour now trying to come up with a concluding paragraph that is not too emotional or too sappy.

But it’s not all that easy with all the support and enthusiasm we’ve been showered lately.

And we are super grateful for each and every supportive lemon.

Feel free to explore the new Content Stream and shower us with feedback. We’re all ears.

To the lemons and beyond ❤️

Yam and the Zesteam

P.S. You may ask what’s the deal with Marcos Valle and why we did this homage to him?

This massive song of his was played in the background of the new Content Stream project throughout this whole month and a half.

And now the part where I almost fainted:

P.P.S. Thank you SO MUCH Katarina and Tonya for helping bring this massively exciting article to life.

Amazing that you found the time to work on it with all the madness that we call last month.

Love you both.

6 weeks later: Why and how the Zesteam strategized, built and launched the new Content Stream was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Up until now, we’ve been barraged with questions: “When will Zest be available on mobile?”, “When will we see Zest on Firefox?”.

We completely understand that accessibility is our handicap. But hey, we wish everything could turn to perfection if one throws a lemon at it.

In any case, you are right. Marketing knowledge should be accessible everywhere!

But, it was us all the time, you know:

At first, we focused on building the distillery and making sure that the multilevel human-based, content moderation process works properly.

Then we were all over performance, making sure that the new tab extension loads as fast as a cheetah 🐆

After that we launched Zest Content Boost, so many clients started coming in.

And then it was all about the Seed round which we are now finalizing.

Well, our dear lemons, we want to inform you — THE DAY WHEN ZEST WILL BE AVAILABLE ON WEB AND MOBILE IS COMING UP QUICKLY :)

We’re launching a brand new, super fancy-ay mobile friendly website for Zest’s distilled content stream you all so love! 📱🍋💻

We’re still keeping the new-tab extension, but the website will allow you to reach that sweet, zesty content stream from A N Y W H E R E you go.

Hello?
Yep, we said so 🖖🏼

We would like to invite YOU to be one of the 1.7k community members who’ll help us ensure that everything works and looks smooooooth.

Want to join this lemon house party?
Drop a line for Nichole@zest.is or yam@zest.is 😎 We’ll get you covered.

Can’t wait to see you there, and there, and there…uhh — pretty much everywhere. 👊

Yellow lovin’,
Zesteam 💛

We have started our Pre-seed fundraising round two weeks ago. But the way we are undertaking this fundraising round is somewhat different.

Since we launched Zest.is ✌️one year ago, we have been able to create a professional and influential content arena driven by 16k weekly active members operating around the world as a cohesive and coordinated elite unit.

After such a crazy period, with no external funding and with the support from hundreds of amazing volunteers, we decided to start raising money to support the platform’s substantial growth in a cross vertical manner and meet the demands of both our community and potential clients.

Raising funds with a twist of lemon

In contrast to the standard format used in the start-up world, we decided to share intimate information in order to reach the right eyes and to open a new channel that is transparent and authentic, while documenting the growth process and receiving ongoing feedback.

Beyond data and demographics, in our Investor Dashboard, you will also find our Investor Deck and the Onepager. Open to the general public.

Our tagline for this round is: “Open for All”.

Not in the crowdfunding aspect of it but as a part of our sharing and openness mindset.

We will keep updating the Investor Dashboard and we promise to update you good lemons with any kind of development and progress ❤

The Zesteam

Starting Zest’s Pre-seed fundraising round with a twist of lemon 🍋 was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We let our fast-growing community of professionals take control of our platform.

Now we are turning all this madness into a movement that is going to change how professionals discover and consume knowledge in the era of information-overload and content-shock.

— — —

Takeaways first

Bottom-lines from our first year as a startup

Stats

• We will cross the 16,000 Weekly Active Users mark in a few weeks from now
• We launched one revenue channel pilot last month. By the end of this month it will generate $7,500 MRR

Thoughts

1. Who would have thought that two founders and a team of seven volunteer workers could pick up such an initiative? Without any funding.
2. Such initiative that it’s making the biggest companies in the fields of EdTech, Content, Media, and Product reach out to us to understand “how we do it”.
3. Such initiative that causes a large number of angels and funds to proactively contact us and explore funding opportunities.
   We’ll talk about investments and strategic partnerships more in my next post.

— — —

Let’s try something different this time, alright?

Instead of writing an article in a storytelling style, I’ll just write down what’s going on here in bullet-points.

That will help me convey the messages in a more sharp and interesting manner.

Shall we? Let’s go!

— — —

Chapter One

Huge mistake: Putting people in the center of your startup’s technology.

Not a huge mistake: Putting people ahead of your startup technology.

• There is no reliable and effective solution for professionals to discover and consume content that provides added value.
• Reliability is dimmed as there is more reliance on algorithms to provide us with the content they “think” is relevant to us.
• Algorithms in centralized platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) are serving us with content we want, NOT the content we need.
• The most important part of the content we consume is not how relevant this content is to us (that’s a given), it’s whether or not it holds an added value for us as professionals who consume it
• OK, so algorithms which serve us content are a great idea to discover and consume content for amateurs (it’s fun to see a cat playing a piano, no?)
• But when it comes to a professional who wants to consume professional content, it can be hazardous.
• The big platforms that help us discover and consume content are just adding fuel to the fire. They use relevancy instead of added value to show you their “Recommended for you” content. They put the publishers they work with before the end users who actually want to consume content and that’s a broken mindset.

— — —

Chapter Two

Decision paralysis, content shock and tribes of lemons

When I was CMO at Webydo and met Idan Yalovich, we were both managing large teams of professionals and we both felt that as professionals and managers we sometimes experienced decision paralysis, where due to the surplus of information, you no longer know what is right for you and for your team.

• But every time someone sent us an article to read, we would read it.
• It meant that if a person “approved” the content, then it was worth our time.
• We then discovered two theories: One of of them beautifully described the problem we had, and the other described the solution we chose to solve this problem.
• The problem was described in Mark Schaefer’s Content Shock theory: The amount of content produced increases exponentially as it becomes cheaper and more accessible to produce it. But our ability to consume content reaches a certain limit.

• The pain of this reality is clearly demonstrated on Fred Wilson’s (Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures) recent artilce: Prioritizing Content Consumption:

• But the inspiration for the solution came from Seth Godin‘s Tribes theory:

“It turns out that it’s tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people … What we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is finding something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea that spread the idea. And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves. It takes a movement. “- Seth Godin, TED,” The Tribes we Lead “

— — —

Chapter Three

Display window, distilleries and a product which is based on the Network Effect but with a twist of lemon

• What you see as Zest.is is “only” the display window of the real product. It is in fact the final product of human refining, backed up by machine learning that studies consumers, content, and use of the product.
• The final product is “individualized professional knowledge”. On the one hand, the distillery is filled with content and information overload, and on the other hand, professional knowledge is presented in a tailored and individualized form to each user.
• The distillery itself is a super-machine (Idan is now writing a mega cool article about it, from the technical PoV) in which hundreds of volunteers go over the content that has been submitted by the rest of the community.
• The distillery is built in a hierarchical way and the distilling space is like a digital collaborative Wework, where everyone is content contentious, holding discussions about whether “this article is Zest-worthy or not,” commenting on each other’s decision making and offer immediate improvements.
• The more distillers (members) there are, the better the refining process is.
• The more distillers there are, the better machine learning process will be, and we will be able to serve added value content in an individualized way to the end users.
• To sum up this chapter: Zest is a Multilevel Network Effect product (See NFX’s blog for more Network Effects gems).There may be another two or three products in this style that solve other problems: like Waze and Wikipedia.

— — —

Ok, let’s stop here and leave Chapters 4 and 5 for the next article.

— — —

And for the yellow Zesteam: Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, Katarina Andrejević, Tal Atzmon, Karolis Vanagas, Omer Buzo:

Without you, I’m sure that this lemon would not have been that juicy. Hack that, I’m quite sure that it would have not even been yellow at all. ;)

— — —

But above all, there is our highly engaged and oh-so helpful members who just keep pushing us to the moon and beyond.

We are so thankful to have you with us.

How we turned our user-based growth engine into a revolutionary movement 💥 was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our 2017 was…

NO!

STOP RIGHT THERE!!

Pleaseeeeeeeee show some mercy and don’t post another kind of “our 2017 was amazing with double-digit growth, tons of MRR, everything is shiny and everyone on our team is freaking so happy” kind of post.

You won’t see that kind of post here.

I mean, we will share stats, BUT they are not the center of this post.

They are also not in the center of our past year.

We asked ourselves what caused our stats and data to happen.

The answer is clear and straightforward:

IT IS YOU!!

By you, we mean all of our members that sent us amazing emails, LinkedIn messages, Facebook messages, Medium comments, tagged us on Twitter, mentioned us in your articles, and told your colleagues about us.

You are what keeps us driven.

Not the shiny stats and all the growth figures.

Why?

Because in order to change the way professionals are discovering and consuming content, we need the masses.

In order to fight centralized platforms with their biased algos whose goal is to hijack our attention, we need the enthusiastic members on our side.

In order to distil information overload into professional knowledge and filter out all the infolution (info-pollution), we need professionals by our side, not machines.

This is why YOU are central to this post.

Pour yourself a hot cup of tea and read the messages YOU sent us in the GIF attached to this post.

— — -

And for the data geeks, here is your lemon pie:

Weekly Active Members Growth
Q1: 2,294
Q2: 3,768
Q3: 7,425
Q4: 13,562

Demographic — Job Titles
Founders & CEOs: 31.5%
CMOs & VPs: 24.1%
Directors & Mangers: 30.6%

Demographic — GEOs
N. America: 53.2%
EU: 28.7%
Asia: 10.8%
S. America: 4.3%
AUS + NZ: 3%

Demographic — Age Groups
18–24: 16.3%
25–34: 55%
35–44: 20.6%
45+: 8.1%

Demographic — Gender
Male: 68.83%
Female: 29.85%

Revenue
Nov: $1,200
Dec: $2,400
Jan (Pipeline): $5,400

Zesteam
Israel: 4 lemonheads
Serbia: 1 lemonhead
UK: 1 lemonhead
US: 1 lemonhead

Love you all and million tons of thank you for all your support ❤

The Zesteam

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, Katarina Andrejević, Tal Atzmon, Karolis Vanagas, Omer Buzo, Yam Regev & Idan Yalovich

It’s you, it’s not us — Zest is bye byeing 2017 👋 was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re stoked to announce the release of Zest’s first revenue channel, Content Boost.

Our community was an integral part of the whole process. Some 67 members alpha & beta tested it, hundreds were involved in the layout and design processes, and now we’re ready to share it with the world.

The model was built in a way that benefits both our 12,000 weekly active members and the tier-1 marketing brands who’d like to give a lot of extra exposure to their [still manually-approved] content on Zest.

Brand trust, ARPU, and tons of added value — How we came up with our biz model

It was a week after we launched Zest with a full out Product Hunt campaign when Sumo.com reached out to us, asking if there were any sponsorship opportunities on Zest.

Although my reply was something along the lines of “Of course we have :)”, Idan and I felt that this was a turning point for Zest.

I mean, the question was, what should we charge clients for? And who should be our paying clients? After all, we have full control over the execution of these two strategic questions.

“No banners!!”

“No way we are adding banners to the full-of-added-value marketing content feed we built on Zest”. I vividly remember how Idan shouted it from his desk.

It’s not just that he was so on-point, more than that, our feed is not really, well… Ours. It belongs to our Tribe (community) and the work of the multi-level, human-based content moderation process we built with our Tribe.

It was clear to us that the business model we choose must provide the same added value we are currently generating, only this time, it should also generate added value (or in this case — benefits), to our potential clients.

Now that we agreed on that, we asked ourselves: “Who are our paying members?”.

As a premium product with a cool growth pace and super high-profile members, we understood that our paying clients must be tier-1 marketing brands.

Tier-1 brands have many advantages:

• They understand the high-engagement, high-conversion funnel that Marketing Content generates
• They appreciate our demographics (69% are CEOs, CMOs, VPs of marketing)
• They appreciate our premium solution and product
• They are more open to trying new stuff
• They have significant budgets

But something was still missing — what will actually be our revenue model? And should we have only one revenue channel?

A couple of beers later, a SaaS pricing expert sent us this Brian Balfour video “Get Out of the ARPU-CAC Danger Zone with Channel Model Fit”. And this screenshot caused us to stop for a second as it felt SO right:

It shows how LinkedIn has structured their revenue channels based on their members’ ARPU.

Why did we identify with it? Because we also cater to a professional audience.

And just like LinkedIn, we have members with different potential ARPUs.

We then Zestified it:

Introducing Zest Content Boost

At Zest, we use a hyper-multi-touch validation process when it comes to new features and products we release.

We have Alpha testers, Beta testers, professional advisers, a Member Advisory Board, and a couple of other good people from various digital professions who stop us from making dumb mistakes.

All in all, dozens of professionals were involved in this validation process, some of them as actual paying clients.

What is Content Boost

Content Boost gives extra exposure to approved, featured content. This extra exposure will generate 10x times more clicks compared to regular organic content that was approved and published on Zest.

Make no mistake: We are still approving only ~1% of the suggested content on Zest and the same goes with Content Boost articles.

This extra exposure generates cool lookin’ peeks of traffic on your GA, like shown in this mighty GIF:

BUT our main points of pride are the conversion ratios created by the traffic generated through Zest, and the potential of our high-profile community members.

Because our secret ingredient is generating traffic that converts better, we are more focused on the potential of those who clicked and the way they engage with the content we are sending them to

So what does our Tribe’s demographics look like? Glad you asked. :)

CMOs, VPs, and marketing managers compose 92% of the Zest community

All these nice words and assumptions wouldn’t make it here without backing it all up with data:

We ran several campaigns with the super cool guys at AdEspresso (Massimo Chieruzzi and Tim Chard, I’m talking about you guys 🙏). They were kind enough to share with us some stats about their eBook Content Boost campaign on Zest

And Massimo sent us this testimonial:

One of the smartest, most prominent blogs in our marketing-sphere is Smart Insights. I literally grew on their data-backed articles and remember that they never failed to provide me with relevant professional knowledge, no matter the stage of my career.

One day, I saw that Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights’ founder, suggested an article on Zest. I was shocked.

A few emails later, he wrote to me that the whole marketing team at Smart Insights is using Zest.

After I pulled myself together, I asked them for some data about our generated traffic. Carolanne Mangles, Smart Insights’ Digital Marketing Executive, immediately replied with a screenshot that I can’t share with you, but some of the stats that were shown in it, I sure can:

• Avg, Time on Site: 83.33% higher with visitors from Zest than overall site average
• Bounce Rate: 24.49% lower with visitors from Zest than overall site average

Cool, right?

— —

By the way, Content Boost articles will carry a ribbon that will clearly state that this is a featured piece of content. It looks like this:

Why we’re waitlisting Content Boost

You don’t want all the articles on the Zest feed to be featured.

Neither do the brands who will boost their content.

Neither do we.

To keep it as clean as possible, we developed an algorithm that will keep us from featuring more than one piece of content at a time.

Another step we took was setting our MRR goals to understand how many Content Boost campaigns we need each month in order to keep growing so fast.

Combining the prevention algorithm with our business goals, we concluded that we can feature only 4 partners each week and not more than that.

We already have a pipeline of 11 mega brands who are waiting for their Content Boost campaigns to be approved and launched and we are definitely not heading in a self-serve direction. Hence, we need to control the brands’ flow and continue handpicking our partners.

The Content Boost page is not a pricing page, but a landing page of this massive new feature we call “Content Boost”. It means that you will not see any Pricing plans on it as we need to have more data from each potential paying client before sending them pricing options.

It means that we will be hand-tailoring the plans and prices according to the characteristic and requirements of each potential paying client.

“We are just starting” isn’t reflecting even 2% of what’s going to happen next

Wrapping up, I want you to share with us your opinion on the Content Boost landing page. Share it here on Medium or send me an email at yam@zest.is.

Next up in our Revenue Model journey

Members with the lowest ARPU (end-users)

Imagine seeing stats on your suggested articles. Imagine getting audio summaries of your must-read articles. Imagine takeaways and action item taken right from an article you read to your Zest account. Imagine Zest on steroids.

We will introduce Premium Features like these by Q2 2018.

Members with the highest ARPU (enterprises)

Imagine Zest as an internal content discovery and sharing platform for huge organizations. With the same Tribe hierarchy model.

Imagine whitelabeling Zest for another vertical. Finance? Cryptocurrency? Gaming? We already have two potential firms who want to whitelabel Zest for their own verticals.

This model is still in closed beta but fully functioning.

To the lemons and beyond,

Yam & the Zesteam

3.3x Your conversion rates with Zest Content Boost was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In order to not only maintain but to scale Zest, we need to hit the $20K MRR mark in three months from now. No biggie.. right?

**So, it’s just about time to take our pricing model public**

Up until now, potential advertisers have reached out to us and we’ve been lucky enough to be in a position where we can hand pick them. While this intimate process will continue to exist, we want to broaden our funnel.

For some reason we are terrified of the idea that everyone will be able to see how we charge users. We don’t know why, but it is probably part of this whole startup maturity process.

It could also be because all of our growth and Tribe demographic data will be on the pricing page. Yep, that’s definitely it…

To reduce anxiety and take a little pressure off of the big unveil, we thought that we’d tackle this new hurdle just like everything else we’ve done up until now — by taking it to our users. They’ve been instrumental in every other big move we’ve made, so they were a natural outlet to turn to regarding this core milestone.

I’ll expand: before launching a product, you onboard Alpha users, then Beta users followed by a soft launch. After that, you typically start the whole marketing shebang.

We are going to do the same.

In two weeks, we will launch an early invite pricing page.

“Say what!!?!!”

Yes people, an early invite pricing page. A waiting list kinda thing if you will.

Why? We want to create a pipeline of potential advertisers and to get back to them once we launch the pricing model. Not to mention that this will enable a more gradual launch that’s as smooth as possible where we can manage both our brand and user experience.

In the meantime, our “Alpha” & “Beta” users (our unofficial User Advisory Board composed of influencers and marketing execs from top brands) will review the suggested model and give us feedback… and keep on giving us feedback until we nail the damn thing; layout, graphics, micro-copy, messaging, tone of voice — the whole kit and kaboodle..

Two important notes: 1) we are going to keep the number of advertisers limited to 5 a week as we want to keep the feed as “clean” as possible and 2) prices will most likely be relatively high as our users are quality individuals in senior marketing positions which means that we aren’t just going to throw any old brand or article their way. Exclusive stuff indeed.

If any of you are interested in helping with this feedback process — ping us.

If any of you are interested in hearing more about the pricing model itself or to feature your (manually-approved) content on Zest — ping us.

If any of you are interested in anything other than that, we’re here (you get it) — ping us.

yam@zest.is

Alright, good people of Medium, time to cross fingers for us.

Yam & Idan

Why we’re launching our pricing model like we launch a product 🌠 was originally published in Zest.is on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.