Founded in 2015, the fully remote team at Zapiet builds outstanding apps and tools for powerful e-commerce platforms, like Shopify, helping thousands of merchants around the world to succeed. Their Store Pickup + Delivery app alone is used by over 10,000+ stores in more than 150 countries, from pop-up stalls to Fortune 500 brands.

The events of 2020 forced many businesses to blindly adapt to a still-unfolding situation and for Zapiet, it was no different. Noticing a dramatic increase in installs for services like curbside pick up, local delivery, etc. by their customers due to lockdown, Zapiet dug into the powers of being remote, acted quickly and scaled their team to manage the overflow.

Born in the UK, Zapiet now has 25 team members distributed across 21 cities. Keep reading to see how their remote-first culture and operations supported their growth and why they think remote work is here to stay.

Company name:Zapiet  

HQ: Lincolnshire United Kingdom. We were born out of the UK but continue to be fully remote. 

How many people are in your organization? 25 incredible teammates 

How many countries or cities do your team span across? We are all over the world from Australia to the Philippines to North America to all over Europe. Our team spans in a total of 21 cities and together we speak 10 different languages.

Since we're fully remote, we don’t have one “start” and “end” time - so essentially, we don’t have core business hours and offer 24/7 support thanks to our global team. Here is what a typical 24 hours looks like at Zapiet from the birds-eye view of Jonathan Roque, Digital Strategist at Zapiet in Sunny California.  

12 am – 5 am Merchant Support Agents in Australia, Asia and across Europe have already been helping Shopify merchants with their stores, offering one on one onboardings and answer live chat questions. 

5 am – 7 am Merchant Support Agents in Canada, parts of Europe and the UK are all online ready to tackle the day. The other agents in Australia, Asia and Europe are off after another smashing successful day.  

7 am – 8 am Marketing and Support Agents in the US and Ecuador are online to catch up on the #watercooler chatter and catch up to start the day.  

8 am – 9 am All hands meeting with almost everyone on our team, to talk about the goals accomplished during the week, questions for our CEO and brief presentations from each of our teams.  

10 am – 4 pm Magic happens here with our team members helping Shopify merchants, answer support requests and make sure businesses are set up for success. This is also where Marketing accomplishes all of their work, interviews merchants and creates their creative designs.  

5 pm – 12 am Merchant Support Agents from Asia and Australia begin to jump online and ensure the workflow keeps going with success and ease. 

Our founder Andy Cargill is a travel addict and you can say one of the original digital nomads before it was the “popular” thing to do. Back when Zapiet was just a one-person team, Andy was traveling around the world and as team members were brought on, remote work was never a second thought and just became part of the culture at Zapiet, a common passion shared by our entire team.
 

Our working remote culture allows our team members to not only work from where they want but be flexible with their schedules. We understand that our team members have goals outside of their work, and providing them with the opportunity to be flexible is a big advantage for keeping the team happier and motivated for their self-development.

Remote has allowed us to bring on the best of the best to our team, not only with skills but with culture, a deep compassion for our merchants and approaching situations from different points of view. Being remote also allowed us to quickly scale to 24/7 support and offer support in multiple languages. This has also opened up our ability to grow our app to other countries. This also brings an automatic connection with our customers in different parts of the world.

 

While Zapiet has grown, we are still a relatively small team that has a small organizational structure. Our CEO & Lead engineer: Andy Cargill, Marketing Manager: Emili Maciel and Head of Customer Support: Sam Ford, are easily accessible across all team members and available for any communications. For big decisions, they often meet in person and enjoy the opportunity to visit somewhere new. We are proud of our team members who have all owned their work, taken initiative for producing the best work and excel in everything they do.


 

2020 was a game-changing year for us that I think everyone at Zapiet will never forget 2020 - we called it “surviving the pickup- ocalypse." For one, our apps enable businesses to add new services such as curbside pickup, local delivery and in-store pickup, to their operations. Our apps saw a huge increase in installs literally overnight as businesses had to shut down all over the world and had to rely on these new services to stay afloat. Thankfully our entire team is remote, but we had to upscale our team members and hire new faces fast (shoutout We Work Remotely)!

Our team members and emphasis on remote work allowed us to hire new team members with the ability to help Shopify merchants in each part of the world and time zone. We shifted our marketing campaigns to helping merchants, our development team worked harder to increase the capabilities of our apps and we all worked hard to ensure each business was fully supported, all while being fully remote. We know that all our effort helped businesses survive, kept jobs, and allowed merchants to keep dreaming about what they have built with so much effort. Technology sometimes does make magic happen, somehow during the height of the pandemic period, certainly was one of them!   
 

We are all always checking in with our team members via chat, ensuring they have everything they need to succeed and do their best, and sharing some cultural insights to cheer our days. Because we scaled our team during COVID, we can’t wait to meet up in different cities and reunite once lockdowns are lifted and once it's safe to travel.
 

Communication is key for remote teams and for us communication helps us ensure each team is moving forward. We have a weekly “all hands call” meeting on Fridays, with everyone in the company, where we talk about the week, goals achieved and a chance for anyone on our team to ask questions. We also have a team member present something fun such as their bucket list or their favorite place where they live, it’s the perfect balance of face time with the whole company. Each team has its own meetings throughout the week as well. 

Our Teams channels are pretty active as well with our #watercooler, #kudos and #fitness channels always keeping us laughing out loud. 😂

 

Our tool stack is very dense once we absolutely love analytics and most of us are obsessed with positive and realistic metrics. Our primary tool is Microsoft teams for internal communications and managing processes.   

 

We trust our employees to do their best work and have top standards from each of our teams. We make sure each department has clear goals and KPI’s. We monitor metrics, campaigns and goals achieved on a regular basis. Apart from metrics, we are always listening to what our merchants and app users are saying not only about the products but on how their experience is with our team members they interact with. 

 

Remote work is definitely not only here to stay but it's becoming a normal part of existing and new business models. We saw the benefits of working remotely as Zapiet began to grow when we started in 2015 and now a silver lining from the pandemic is companies can hopefully see the benefits of remote work. You can attract better talent when you open the pool to more people beyond one area and remote employees are happier when you give them the ability to work from where they want and productivity is so much higher.

Do it! Do it! Do it! Remote is not the future, it’s already here. Not only will attract better talent, but you will also grow invaluable aspects of your company such as scaling a team that connects and resonates with users around the world and open up to other languages. Another advice is to layout all of your company’s mission and values to guide you as you go fully remote and bring on team members.  
 
 

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Connect with Zappiet:

 
Zapiet Social Media: https://www.zapiet.com/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zapiet/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zapiet  

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zapiet.uk/