7Geese Wins HootSuite as Client and Ryan Holmes as Investor
Vancouver’s 7Geese announced this morning that it is launching the “most innovative, engaging, empowering performance management platform on the market.”
It’s a bold claim. But after a year of working closely with its first customer, HootSuite, there must be something to it.
7Geese is a private social network that empowers employees to better achieve goals, get recognition, and gather feedback to advance their careers. And similar to Canadian success story Rypple—which was acquired by Salesforce and rebranded as Work.com—it also enables organizations to continuously enhance their performance and culture.
“Our relationship with HootSuite started in October 2011 when I pitched 7Geese at Vancouver Enterprise Forum’s event on the Freemium business model, where Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, was a panelist,” recalls Amin Palizban, 7Geese’s CEO. “Ryan liked the vision of 7Geese and it was the right timing as they were in the market for a performance management solution. After a month of negotiation, we signed up HootSuite as our first paying customer and things have really taken off for us ever since.”
According to today’s announcement, HootSuite was in need of a performance management solution that was simple, innovative, and organically adopted by their people. “Our employees prefer policies and processes that are light, intuitive, and preferably anchored in social; therefore, legacy HR processes like performance reviews were not an option for us. We now have over 200 employees across three different offices and growing. The 7Geese platform offers us an exciting approach for our performance management that is engaging, well-adopted, and innovative,” said Ambrosia Humphrey, Director of HR at HootSuite.
“Competitors like Salesforce’s Work.com add a social layer to existing HR processes like performance reviews, but still rely heavily on managers or HR as the main drivers of feedback, coaching, and goal-setting,” says Palizban. “7Geese takes a different approach by decoupleding the different functions of performance reviews and redesigning it from ground-up to be employee-driven and engaging.”
7Geese is betting on the global trend where employees are taking ownership of their careers and the performance of their companies—acting much like entrepreneurs. To retain the best talent and remain agile, modern organizations, HootSuite included, are supporting this trend. In fact, one of HootSuite’s core values is to be entrepreneurial.
HootSuite and 7Geese have maintained a strong relationship. Holmes became 7Geese’s first investor and Humphrey has joined their advisory board. “The 7Geese team are talented and passionate about what they are building. They remind me of our early days at HootSuite and I see a bright future for them,” noted Ryan Holmes.
7Geese has recently opened a San Francisco office in anticipation of its launch and is scaling its team and customer base. And with today’s launch, 7Geese is now available to companies in free and paid plans.
Photo: Kris Krug via Flickr
