Hi Shruti!
I wish it didn’t sound crazy, because caring for people should be a priority above all else. There were many moments where it was less about defending the decision, and more using it as a basis to make better decisions. An example is when our product Beanstalk plateaued in 2012. We felt lost, so we started tweaking and experimenting because it’s what other SaaS companies were doing. We didn’t drive with our purpose of being people-first. We focused instead on what we thought the business needed. When we turned that around and asked ourselves “why”, we realized that we were going about it all wrong.
Instead of thinking about how to grow Beanstalk, we focused on making the people at Wildbit happy and fulfilled. That led to us putting more energy into Postmark, which was a tiny baby at the time. We were excited about growing things, not about competing on features or going upmarket. Beanstalk needed us to growth hack. But the people wanted to enjoy their work. That’s probably one of the most important decisions we’ve ever made. Not only did we end up growing Postmark to significantly surpass Beanstalk, but we did it while building a powerful team that loves what they do.
We absolutely questioned ourselves in the early days about choosing to work 4-day/32-hour weeks. But the beautiful thing about being private is that there’s not a lot of risk in these experiments. Maybe we’re naive, but we’ve been doing this long enough to know that being late to the market with a feature release would never be make or break for a product. It just doesn’t matter that much. By that logic, if the biggest risk of 4-day weeks is shipping late, it’s actually not that big of a risk. When we reflected a year later, we actually shipped more that year than in most previous years. So we knew we were on to something.
There are days even now that I question the 32-hour work week. Mostly because I’m not sure that work, in general, should be so rigid. There are some weeks that I work less than 32 hours, and some weeks where I probably work 40 hours. I am curious about defining a work environment that prioritizes what “enough” is, instead of prioritizing a set number of working hours.
But, if I project a bit on your question, we have never felt that working 4-day weeks would be a competitive disadvantage. And given the growth we’ve seen in our products over the last few years, it feels like an advantage now. (Especially as I welcome a lot of new customers from our biggest competitors daily :).