Hi, I'm James. 👋
Here at Rooser, my goal is to ensure we delivering the best possible customer experience to all our users. As is often the case at early stage startups, this can mean a lot of things. It involves wearing a lot of hats and working super collaboratively across the business daily. Fortunately, that's the thing I love most!... (perhaps it's something to do with the people 🤔).
Here's what a typical day looks like for me…
0600: I start most days by turning off my alarm just as it’s about to go off, rolling out of bed, and making my way to the bathroom with a zombie walk that even Simon Pegg would be impressed with (#shaunofthedead). Today was no different.
0615: I’m far more likely to exercise if I do it in the morning, so today I’m hopping on Zwift for a ~20km indoor crit cycle race around the wonderful world of Watopia. (If you know, you know 😉). This is where I get the joy of turning my small and overly cluttered home office into a temporary sweat box - fortunately I’m in the office today though so I won’t have to spend the rest of the morning basking in the odour. 💪
0730: Now that I'm decidedly more awake, exercised, showered and dressed, it’s time to head out of the house and on to our London office in Camden. It’s a little over half an hour away but luckily it’s sunny today and there’s a lovely little coffee shop en-route that will give me the morning kick I need.
0815: I’ve made it to the office, laptop open, and first thing I do is hop on Gather to see what’s going on. Our team is split across the UK & France and so we use Gather (an online virtual office environment) to make sure we’re getting face-to-face time like we would if we were all in the same office.
It’s a fun little platform - you can check it out here.
0830: After a bit of a natter, it’s time to get started with the day. I usually jot down a brief to-do list the night before so I know what the most important things are for the day, and then in the morning I aim to tick at least one thing off before checking my inbox or Slack.
0930: With the first task under my belt and emails all read, the first big job of the day is preparing our product marketing comms ready to go out around noon.
Tomorrow we’re launching the latest in a series of improvements we’ve been making to our supplier dispatch page to help us provide certainty for buyers on Rooser. It’s been a key piece of work for our ‘Quality Service’ product team this quarter so it’s getting all the bells and whistles to help maximise uptake upon release.
The launch video and blog post are already created, (in English and French to cover our user base), so all that’s left is to write the email and WhatsApp copy and put the campaign templates together ready to send.
WhatsApp is the mainstay of seafood communication, so we prioritise all our marketing comms for this channel with email as the back up.
1200: As lunchtime rolls around we’ve decided to have an impromptu Customer Success team lunch. One of our Support team members has to stay behind to monitor the inbox and make sure we’re still available to answer any customer calls - the lucky individual sealed their fate with a pitiful run at rock, paper, scissors… The winner, on the other hand, gets to choose where we eat. ✊
We work right beside Camden Market so there’s plenty of options on our doorstep. One of our team has been raving about a place that sells Yorkshire Pudding wrapped sunday roast burritos- sounds a bit strange but turns out it’s incredible!... We don’t want our losing colleague to go without, so we’re bringing her back one too.
1230: We’ve taken our food to the shared space in our office building, known as the Atrium. It’s not long before the food is all gone, and we still have 20 mins left for lunch. We have a team event at Bounce this evening - a ping pong hall with food and drinks - and as luck would have it, the Atrium has a ping pong table too… Time for a quick bit of practice!
1300: Now it’s time to send out the comms created this morning.
The seafood industry is at warp speed during the morning hours, and so we typically send out any comms early in the afternoon, once our users have (hopefully 🤞) had time to draw breath.
Then once that’s done, I write a quick blurb for Linkedin and share a link to our blog post covering the launch. That’s the comms done for the day! 🙌
1400: It’s 2 o’clock and time for our weekly all-hands; a company wide meeting where we run through our mission before each team takes it in turn to share progress of their key deliverables - with one or two fun little activities thrown in for good measure. We all race over to the aptly-named “Captain's Room” (one of our company values is 'Act like a skipper') on Gather and wait to see who forgets to turn their mic off this time and if any gems come out of it. 🤣
1500: Meetings that include crewmates from customer-facing teams are typically scheduled for the afternoon when they’re not busy with our users. Now it’s time for a whiteboard session with our support and onboarding teams to see where we can streamline processes across Zendesk (the suite we use to manage our customer’s journey and communications)... We love an excuse to get the coloured pens and post-its out! 🖍️🟧
1600: Onto the final meeting of the day - a design session with our ‘Right Price’ product team.
They’ve recently launched the first phase of our new Live Market that, along with bringing live order requests onto Rooser, helps suppliers and buyers get to the right price quickly (a daily struggle for both when there’s no price transparency in the market). Today we’re reviewing the page design and copy ready for the upcoming release of our buyer-facing Recent Activity sales feed - this will show buyers the real price of goods sold on Rooser. 🙌
It’s a pretty informal session so we take this one over to the sofas. 🛋️
1700: We’re starting to wrap up for the day. As we have our London team event this evening, there’s some drinks in the office to get us started. I think our Chief Fun Officer (he gave himself that title) thinks if he gets us a bit tipsy he’ll have a better chance of winning… I like to think I’m better at these things after a few drinks so we’ll see. 🤔
1830: We’ve made it to Bounce; about a 15 minute tube ride from our office. Our tables are ready, there’s a bucket full of beer and prosecco, and what I can only describe as shovels of pizza. Game on!
It turns out there’s a very small window between not enough alcohol and too much when it comes to table tennis. Luckily, that window’s much wider with shuffleboard. 😂
2230: Too many beers later and zero wins under my belt (even in beer pong 🙄), it’s time to head home. I’m not looking forward to the 6:00am wake up tomorrow morning, but some of the team start work at 5:30am so I can’t complain. I am getting an Uber home though, because 45 minutes on the tube is not something I fancy dealing with right now. 🥱
If this sounds fun to you (& trust me, it is!), take a look at our open positions here.
