2020 — Bettermode's Year in Review

Is it possible to showcase “highlights” from a year like 2020? At Tribe, we believe we have a few to share with all.

The year 2020 has transformed the entire world! Looking back, it’s just astounding to imagine the type of paradigm shift a few months can make. As humans, we generally seek control over our progress -- we strive for stable and predictable outcomes.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic eradicated any sense of stability and subjected everyone to unpredictability and confusion. Along with the global pandemic, the whole world had to go through a series of disasters -- from bushfire and volcano eruption to flood and fuel tank explosion.

Even the pristine snow-covered Antarctica is turning red and green because of climate change. And this year, the Black Lives Matter social movement against racial injustice was both highly visible and painful.

In the middle of these unimaginable challenges, we are thankful to our customers and partners for their support. Also, truly blessed to have a team that has lived up to the Tribe values. The ability to own and deliver, tenacity to go beyond the best, and the resolve to offer a WOW experience to our customers has shone through the work of every team member. Read on to explore some of the highlights that we’re proud of:

Transformed Tribe into a remote-first company

At Tribe, like other businesses, we closed our physical office because of the pandemic. We were forced to reconsider the way we collaborate and continue to support our customers without any disruption.

Honestly, we had no clue how long we’d have to work remotely. But, we knew it would be for quite some time. Also, since we’ve always wanted to work with the best people, we opened up to global talent by adopting the remote-work approach.

Now we have people working with us from Canada (our headquarters), the US, Germany, Turkey, the Philippines, India, Russia, and Azerbaijan.

At this point, we have started enjoying this new way of working and established robust processes to communicate and collaborate.These days all we have to do to start working is take a walk from the bedroom to the home office.

Commutes now take 2 minutes, the love for hobbies has rekindled, pets are excited, and the office attire is...well, anything that makes us comfortable.Here is a picture of our team enjoying the end of year celebrations:

Although we are physically separate, we’re socially connected.

Thanks to our community platform, we launched an internal social network to personally connect with our colleagues and learn more from each other.

In May, the total headcount was 10 and now there are 25 Triberians.

We hired some of the best people in their respective fields to scale our engineering, design, product, and sales team. Currently, there are a bunch of open opportunities in Product, Engineering, and Operations. Keep a tab on our careers page for both existing and new openings.

Offered free account to non-profits fighting the pandemic

At Tribe, we wanted to play our part and give back to the community by empowering organizations fighting the pandemic. This was all the more important for us because the core of Tribe is about connecting people, fostering crowd-wisdom, and promoting knowledge-sharing. Our team unanimously decided to open up the platform for free to educational institutions, researchers, and nonprofit organizations without any restrictions on the number of members.

For example, the European Hematology Association (EHA) launched a COVID-19 Hematology Hub (a private community) with Tribe. The members collect research ideas, share and find helpful resources from different organizations and journals, and cope with stress. This community also has a subcommunity for nurses and doctors to connect and facilitate deeper conversations.

Partnered with some of the biggest brands

Tribe powers the online communities of clients from a wide range of companies. We have small businesses, early-stage startups, and Fortune 500 companies building their communities with Tribe.

Similar to the last year, owing to a strong enterprise offering, we started working with the following prominent brands:

• Pipedrive
• IBM
• ASUS
• T-mobile
• Tim Hortons® Foundation Camps
• Xerox
• Prudential
• Kay Jewellers
• Essity
• Hostelworld

We look forward to onboarding several popular brands in 2021.

In December, the total number of communities created with Tribe crossed the 50,000-mark and the number of end-users crossed 3.5 million.

Improved Tribe Platform

The valuable feedback that our customers give often lands in our product roadmap. Looking back, we’re delighted to see the number of improvements made to the community platform.

This. is. so. cool. ????

The updated @TribePlatform and Intercom integration lets users find + discover help center AND community content directly from the messenger. https://t.co/5C1rj6Tp8p— Intercom (@intercom) March 11, 2020

Following are some of the key enhancements:

• Firebase - Native mobile notifications for mobile devices
• Public Zapier integration - Connect your community with 2000+ popular apps
• Improved Intercom integration - Sync data and search the knowledge base as well as community directly from the Intercom Messenger
• Better user authentication - Allow the members to log in with both Tribe login and SSO
• Infrastructure improvement - The Tribe platform is faster, more scalable, and smarter than it has ever been because of significant platform enhancements
• Execution logs - Allows community admins to troubleshoot common background tasks
• SEO-friendly URLs - The permalinks in the community site are optimized for search engines
• Improved moderation panel - A centralized space in the community to moderate content and members
• Slack integration - Stay in sync with your community updates
• Messages app - Enable one-to-one conversations and improve communication efficiency
• reCAPTCHA app - Protect your community from spammers and malicious bots

Alongside improving the Tribe Platform with new features, apps, integrations, and maintenance, our team has been diligently working on the new version of Tribe. This brings us to the next section.

Started working on Tribe v2

Based on our learning from the existing version of Tribe and customer feedback, we have identified simple yet significant approaches for building powerful branded communities.

This required us to make fundamental changes to the platform.It includes our approach towards design and the way activity feeds, notification tools, analytics, moderation, apps, search, groups, authentication system, and permissions work. Hence, we started working on Tribe v2.With a robust foundation, we will be better equipped to deliver a much more compelling value to customers.

This will enable us to build robust features, apps, and release improvements in a scalable manner while maintaining the highest quality standard. Tribe v2 will also be empowered with a Developer Platform.

This will allow third-party developers and our existing customers to easily build apps on top of the Tribe platform. With time, we would enable app developers to sell the apps to our customers via a marketplace.

The private beta of Tribe V2 is slated for release towards the end of January 2021 and the public beta should be available at the beginning of Q2 2021. Drop a note to us if you are interested in getting access to the v2 private beta.

Looking ahead to 2021

We’re thankful to our customers and partners for the continued support — especially during this challenging and unexpected year. With a solid foundation for Tribe v2 and a renewed sense of excitement and optimism, we are more than ready to win 2021!Stay tuned for what's coming up.