How Culture and Innovation are Spurring Startle on for 2018

Among other celebrations, we recruited great new team members in both the US and UK, progressed some exciting new developments, and had success with our first awards!

We put much of this great work down to our great employee culture, which our founder, Adam, set to build from the earliest days of Startle. In November 2017, we were ecstatic to win the award for Best Place to Work at the UK Business Awards - something that our team clubbed together for to collate an entry outlining our most proud employee initiatives to date.

One thing we’re proud of at Startle is that we recruit differently. While talent, skill and experience are all obviously important considerations, our core focus from the beginning has been finding people that are a good culture fit, placing importance on personality, mindset and baking skills. (OK, maybe not that last one.) This has given us a brilliant foundation from which to grow the company, with a team who have genuinely great relationships and embrace our open, collaborative way of working.

Our UK Business Award entry was largely based on the investment Startle employees have in the business - financial, yes, but more importantly, a genuine passion and drive to succeed. Operating as a team who are motivated to make great things happen is what we consider the biggest driver for supporting our customers, who we always put at the centre of our business.

The importance of innovation

Along with a company culture we value highly, our team’s ability to innovate is what set us apart from other businesses in 2017. We recognise the importance of continuously monitoring and improving our products until they’re just right, and keep a constant eye on the needs and desires of the market.

An example of this is when we recently identified that our wide product and service base wasn’t being communicated as well as it should be, and that both we and our customers would benefit from narrowing our focus. This has led to us letting go of some products completely, and investing our resources in enhancing our most successful ones to meet the needs of the market (watch this space!).

We like to say that Startle ‘do things differently’, as we don’t hold onto traditional processes and, instead, build new ones that work for us. This was recognised in another of our exciting UK Business Award wins last year, this time in ‘B2B Innovation’, where the judges commented on our “distinctive style” and “passionate and engaging delivery”.

For Startle, 2018 will be a year of growth and customer-focused developments. We’ve got some big technology advancements to announce, processes to automate, and a bigger, better vision to propel us to the next level of helping businesses achieve truly engaging music and technology experiences in their venues.