An archive of Motivii · 2015 to 2020
Smart weekly feedback and management tools that people leaders loved.
Two minutes on how Motivii worked.
Used to save time and boost performance at
Motivii's Weekly Update encouraged employees to manage themselves better and give important feedback to their manager. It helped managers understand and motivate their team, in about two minutes a week.
"Motivii's Weekly Update saves me 3½ hours per week gathering feedback from my team."
James Patterson, VP, Cable Entertainment Technology, NBCUniversal
Motivii helped managers know how their teams were doing, what they were working on, and which conversations they should be having. Reviews turned a year of weekly updates into an honest, evidence-based conversation.
"Sharing the Motivii summary across the team is a great way of connecting with where everyone is."
Joe Voeckler, Head of Executive Recruitment, GSK
Managers and people leaders viewed rich insight on how their teams felt over time, so they could make quick and meaningful changes. The Motivii Score turned a quarter of honest weekly answers into one number, across six dimensions.
"I can think of several times this year that Motivii has made me a better manager."
Henry Matthews, Head of Conversion Marketing, Lloyds Bank
The update ran on a phone or in the browser. A handful of short questions each week: your highlights, what you were working on, what got in the way, and how likely you were to recommend your company as a place to work.
Every question carried a "why am I being asked this?" link, because people answer honestly when they know what the answer is for.
Proof
Motivii helped employees across many different kinds of business.
Case study
London and Edinburgh, 2017, reaching the bank's Chief Administrative Officer. Barely anyone was trained. Teams asked to be added after hearing about it from colleagues.
89.7%
of employees wanted to carry on using Motivii
How much things improved
Measured across the six months of the pilot. Three in four people saw their own motivation score rise.
58%
weekly usage across sixteen weeks in global recruitment
83%
would recommend it, after six months in London
Enerplus
90%
of a 500-person company, within two months, launched remotely
Voices
"I can think of several times this year that Motivii has made me a better manager."
"I doubt we will carry on with annual staff surveys. This gives us the same thing every week, instead of taking the temperature of the business once a year."
"A lot of the time things go unsaid, not because you would not say them, but because you never get the opportunity."
Clients at Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and REaD Group, describing Motivii in their own words.
The pitch
I love pitching live, on a stage. In April 2017 Google ran its first Demo Day outside the United States, at their new King's Cross campus in London. Ten European startups were chosen from more than a hundred applications. Motivii was one of them.
Judged by Saul Klein of LocalGlobe, Fred Destin, then at Accel, and Aurore Belfrage of EQT Ventures.
"Employees leave their manager, not their organisation. Nobody wants to be that manager."
The journey
2015
I had seen the same problem from three perspectives. As an employee I never got enough time with my manager, and I struggled to reflect on how I was feeling over time. As a manager it was hard to make room for proper reflective reviews outside the day to day. As a leader I wanted to know how my people actually felt, and the annual survey was not the answer. Nothing on the market solved it, so I took the risk and built something that did. Within six months we were generating revenue and had closed our first seed round.
2016
We punched above our weight and signed some big names. Lloyds Bank, Criteo and Ensighten early, then GSK, NBCUniversal, RBS, PwC, Sage and Société Générale. We won them by pitching in person. We went through PwC's Accelerator along the way, and politely turned down a place on Techstars.
2017
In April we pitched at Google's first Demo Day outside the United States. More clients signed, a few of them landing in the United States and Canada.
2018
We ran an outstanding pilot with RBS and still could not turn it into a wider rollout. At the same time our Series A fell away from us with days to close. A bridge would have meant a down round, so we flipped the business. I let the whole team go and brought some back part-time. Hardest thing I have done in business. It made us profitable overnight and gave us back control.
2019
By now it was a one-person company. Profitable, plenty of clients, and good fun, but the big growth dream was over. The focus moved to an exit.
2020
Covid showed just how much Motivii mattered. Enerplus in Canada told us that without the platform they would have had no idea how their people were feeling.
Dec 2020
We sold the business to Front Foot Capital. I was the only full-time person by then, so there was no team to transfer, just product, patents and clients. A few months of handover, then I walked away. Not a unicorn, but plenty of learning and something to be proud of.
Hi, I'm Eamon. Motivii was my company. Five years, from the first line of code to more than 5,000 people using it every week at some of the biggest companies in the country.
After the sale it wound down, and the motivii.com domain lapsed. Today it points at something with nothing to do with what we built, which keeps prompting odd questions from people looking back at the work.
So this is a tribute to what we built, using the copy, artwork and design of the site as it stood in 2019.
