No Email. No IM. Why You Should Have a Snapchat-Only Day

A few weeks ago, our VP of Product, Amanda, sent this email around to the HotelTonight team:

HT Nation,

Inspired by this story and in an effort to be on top of all mobile trends, Wednesday August 5 has been declared HT Snapchat Day! This means all intracompany communication will be on Snapchat on August 5. No email, no texting, no HipChat. All Snapchat, all the time.

Yep, for an entire day, the entire company was to communicate entirely by Snapchat.

We did this because, as a company laser-focused on a mobile-only product, we need to challenge ourselves to be as innovative as possible, and be inspired by other innovative companies. I’ve been a big fan of Snapchat since its early days – they reimagined communication for the mobile era, and are run by a team whose first computer was an iPhone. They see the world with a completely different lens, and I want to make sure our team does this too. Plus a Snapchat Day was quirky and fun, and helped our rapidly-growing team (spread out among six offices on three continents) get to know each other on a personal, authentic level.

A lot of our team is in their mid-20s and already use Snapchat as one of their main forms of communication. They helped the rest of the team (aka the non-Millennials) learn Snapchat and not embarrass ourselves too much. Throughout the day, people shared snaps of their commutes, their lunches and what they were working on. I announced that I was having a spontaneous AMA (ask me anything) in our kitchen/lounge area. We got feature requests, gave away donuts and green juices to those quick to respond to challenges and questions, and even had our first Snapchat promotion announcement (yes, we screenshotted it)!

Obviously, there were some logistical complications. As Greg Galant writes in the article that inspired us, it’s difficult (but not impossible!) to file bugs or support tickets or get answers from multiple stakeholders via Snapchat. But we made it work and enjoyed the challenge. Our dev team got creative with this quick response board:

Part of the beauty of Snapchat is its simplicity, which is something we’ve always focused on at HotelTonight, too. Seeing which features people found useful, perplexing or just plain cool was inspiring, and gave us fresh perspective as we go about making HotelTonight better and better. For example, a lot of people remarked on the animations and other clever little touches built into the Snapchat app, which got us excited to continue to add similarly delightful touches (and some new Easter eggs!) into our app.

While we won’t be switching to solely Snapchat-based communication anytime soon, we learned a lot through this experiment – about our product and about each other. We realized that our default is often to send an email or instant message, when a live video chat would go a long way in helping the people involved feel connected and on the same page. It’s also much easier (and quicker) to add context with a picture than with purely written words! And seeing the team get to know each other better and interact in meaningful (and sometimes goofy) ways was really amazing for me as a leader. I’m excited to watch the team continue to grow, bond and build amazing things, via Snapchat and beyond.

PS: You can follow HotelTonight on Snapchat. We’ve been doing some fun things on there lately, like exclusive promo codes and behind-the-scenes stuff. Just follow our username - HotelTonight - we’ll snap ya back!