Clicks and Mortar

A huge thanks to the amazing Denny Casabianca for creating this awesome video of our time together at our Summer Slam Jam. What a week 😎!

🏡 Summer Slam Jam, 2024 - Venimus Vidimus Fracti Sumus. Thank you Cambridge! ☀ Last week we brought our whole team together on the Cam to dig into our product roadmap, tech vision and aspiration. This included changing up our ways of working, resetting our technical north star architecture and breaking down the next 4 weeks of work. With external experts, our key customers, and team in the room - it was intense, it was emotional, we pushed some boundaries, and agreed to a host of outcomes. 🏅 As we do at each company anniversary (founded in June) we recognised the hard work across the team, and had our annual ‘best of’ awards for people who have excelled at innovation, contribution, and growth. 🎉 With the intense work schedule came an equal amount of social activities…from outdoor cinema (who you gonna call?!) and private wine tasting, to learning about the history of Cambridge (which is truly bonkers) by foot and punt. Fair to say everyone on the team had a blast. And was very very tired by the time they got home. We are so grateful 🙏 to have had this face to face time together. It enables us to create great memories, special bonds, unique collaboration opportunities. A massive thanks to everyone on the team for making this a truly great event! Lauren - we salute you, this may have been our best one yet! #ClicksAndMortar #SummerSlamJam #OneTeam

🚨New Joiner Alert🚨 We are thrilled to announce that Cem Gur has joined Clicks and Mortar as a Senior Back-End Engineer. Cem lives in London (originally hailing from Turkey) and has a passion for creating products from scratch, optimising system performance, and ensuring seamless inter-service communication for enhanced overall functionality. In his spare time, Cem is a bit of history buff and enjoys combining his love of road trips and camping adventures with visits to historic landmarks. It has been a great first few weeks Cem, and a big shout out for getting stuck into our team rhythms, tackling challenges head on and already creating efficiencies within our onboarding flow. We are delighted to have you at C&M and looking forward to meeting in-person next week at our Summer Slam Jam…there may even be a few historic landmarks to see! #dreamteam #engineer #hiring

The Championship Dog Show Once again into the breach friends. For the second time this year at C&M, we put ourselves and our products to the test, with a week of ‘dogfooding’ - i.e. the entire team using our product end to end. The Mission: Onboard a new client, and go live with our marketing automation products to drive new revenue for that client. The teams started on Monday, being given a new customer each, and had a half day to plan for how they would approach the week ahead. The Judging: Friday afternoon, 500 possible points, with some snazzy prizes and immortal glory up for grabs, to be crowned the Best in Show. The Success Criteria: • All data and config is fully ‘tenanted’ under that client, completely siloed from other customers. • Campaigns had to use real images and content. • Intelligent activations/executions had to be based on guest data. • The Friday demo had to be in production, live, no pre-recorded demos or power point decks explaining what ‘would’ happen. How did we do? Pretty well! In good news, the product works, and any customer can use the entire feature set with no overlap with other customers! It was also nice to see that our ambition to have the onboarding and campaign set up done in configuration rather than software, works well to allow anyone non-technical to operate the product, and view performance. The Challenges: It was hard. Engineers doing operational config, product managers forced to write SQL queries to understand underlying performance and whether data was being captured as expected at a guest level, everyone out of their comfort zone and scrambling to get up to speed on a new customer that they had first site of at 9am Monday morning. Both teams worked their back sides off, and it was SUPER close. Each team achieved 150 out of the possible 500 points. Everything took longer than we expected, as teams now had to work across all the products, not just the ones they had built, and there was more new feature building required within the week than we had expected. The Result: Both teams won. They onboarded a new customer each, synced custom Audiences to Meta, set up web personalisation campaigns (landing from email, exit intent, consent capture, booking incentives, deal’s on offer), and then abandoned journey and automated email personalisation to drive loyalty sign up and repeat visits. So we double the prize pool and gave everyone the credit they deserved. When its too close to call, everyone can be a winner. So well done you Champion Canines, legends one and all. Your attitude, ambition and action - never seeks to amaze. Congrats on being winners at the world famous, Championship Dog Show! #allwinnershere

It was a real pleasure to chat with Lauren this week, our Business Manager. Between the laughs, we got all serious and deep! Can’t say enough good things about Lauren joining C&M and the contribution she makes personally and professionally! Why I came to C&M 👀 Near the end of 2022 I needed more flexibility due to childcare and family health, which meant I had to make some hard decisions and take some time out of work. Having been an EA to Carey and Aden for years at a previous company, I reached out to see what exciting products they were building together. When I mentioned my situation, Carey and Aden very quickly invited me on board as a Business Manager. It can always feel a bit overwhelming starting a new job but having worked with this lovely team before, and having a very tight alignment with the new companies values and mission, everything clicked into place so quickly. Favourite moment so far ❤️ I feel very lucky to have so many great moments to choose from. I really love our time F2F but I actually think my absolute favourite moment was during one of our weekly remote water cooler chats. We played a game of reverse charades and Simon on our team was given the term “Gingerbread Man”. I have never seen anyone give something so much enthusiasm. It is safe to say we did more laughing than charading (if that is a word?!) but anything that brings true joy is a great moment in my book. What about working here is unique 🤩 I think this has to be autonomy and ownership. We are a small company so we have to wear lots of hats on a day to day basis, but we are given responsibility to manage our own time around how we achieve the things we need to. For me personally, it motivates, empowers and fosters continuous learning as I have to step out of my comfort zone in order to implement and improve our processes, and I’m now covering HR, Finance, Hiring, Onboarding, Business Operations, Away Days, meeting agenda’s and customer status reviews. It is a lot, especially in 3 days a week - but it’s never felt like a chore. My dream for C&M 🚀 My thoughts around this always go to our people rather than the products we are building. My dream is for C&M to be a place that people enjoy working, where they thrive personally and professionally and where they feel they are recognised and valued for their hard work and contribution. And if people are ready for their next adventure, I would love them to leave feeling like they can take invaluable learnings with them, that drive forward their careers. I just want each person to feel valued, succeed, and go on with awesome memories of their time at Clicks and Mortar.

It has been wonderful to chat with David Bacall, one of our Front End Engineers who has made some huge contributions to our products over his first 10 months. It was great to hear David’s thoughts on all things C&M. Here are a few of the key takeaways: Why I came to C&M 👀 I was looking for a small but ambitious company, whose products would be challenging and exciting to work on and have the potential to make a big impact on their industry. I wanted somewhere I would be trusted to make the decisions to help drive the company forwards and I wanted to be surrounded by brilliant and friendly people, who I could learn lots from. From the first interview, C&M seemed to have all these things and has proven to be just what I was looking for over the 10 months since. Favourite moment so far ❤️ Releasing a big overhaul of one of our products in my first couple of weeks, after a year of building a product that was never released, was an amazing moment for me. The pace and appetite to get products into customers hands has not let up since and remains just as exciting! What about working here is unique 🤩 We are empowered to carve out our own path, and define our roles in a way where we can give the most value. It seemed scary at first, but it has ultimately led to teams that are able to go from idea to feature/product in an incredibly effective way. My dream for C&M 🚀 To see the products we have built so far keep getting better and better, provide massive value to lots of clients, and become a household name in hospitality tech.

We are thrilled to announce that Giulia B. has joined the C&M team. Giulia joins us as a Technical BA/Product Operations Manager working to improve our product build, release and go live processes, streamline requirement gathering and bridge the gap between technology and it being used in the wild by our customers. Giulia brings a diverse background and appetite for growth to our dynamic and innovative environment. With a strong foundation in UX design, and plenty of hospitality and tech experience, Giulia has a keen eye for user-centric design, ensuring our solutions are not only functional but also intuitive and engaging, and have support documentation and materials easily available for anyone interacting or using our software. Giulia, we appreciate you getting stuck in to life at C&M and we can already see your passion for continuous learning coming to the fore. We are delighted to have you onboard - welcome to the team! #dreamteam #product #operations #hiring #startup

🚨 We’re hiring 🚨 We are excited to announce we are now hiring for the below roles: ⭐ Senior Back End Engineer (Go) ⭐ Senior Full Stack Engineer (React/PHP) ⭐ Senior Full Stack Product Engineer This is a fantastic chance to join a dynamic and growing company where great ideas thrive, diversity and inclusion are valued, and employees are empowered to achieve their highest potential, driving C&M's growth and success. So, if you're interested in joining our team, go ahead and apply today! https://lnkd.in/evdnB3bF

⚡ Supercharging C&M ⚡ Our Q2 theme is ‘Measurable Impact’ - we want to show the incremental revenue that our products generate for our hospitality customers. To accelerate this approach, we have brought 4 new experts on board. We piloted this approach with great success previously with Geraldine Butler-Wright for our people strategy - we are delighted to continue to have you onboard, G! These experts will be helping us to supercharge C&M capabilities in areas where we’d like additional insights/expertise to execute our growth strategy: Dan Massey is an ex Google/exited leader - a wizz with data analytics and insights. Dan will be delving into our data to create intelligent predictions that our platform can use in executing smart marketing activities Social, on Web and via direct email/text communication to guests. Finian Carey who is a product leader and entrepreneur with years of hospitality tech experience across Europe. Finian is proving Product Strategy and Process support to help craft the roadmap and priorities for what we build and focus on. Jordan Dalladay ex Boston Consulting Group/seasoned founder. Having done everything design related in his career - Jordan will be creating a new product design architecture and framework, and helping to level-up our design practice and thinking. Sam Brown ex Wireless Social/Airship and a living legend in UK hospitality tech, Sam will be crafting our strategy and process for offering our platform to a select group of new customers and levelling up our product marketing and value proposition. Welcome aboard all, we are very excited to have you on this journey and we are ready for lift off 🚀! #expertsassemble #supercharge #liftoff

The Path to Self Service. This year at Clicks & Mortar one of our biggest priorities is to make our product easy to use for our customers, without lots of effort or support required from our internal teams. We want to allow marketing teams to log in to our platform, select or configure creative assets, toggle on campaigns, see performance metrics and results, and utilise the tech we have built in the way that works best for them. But self service is hard. It requires lots of product and tech thinking to create interfaces that are intuitive and easy to use, without the need for a 300 page guide book or technical support on the end of the line. AND, because that didn’t sound hard enough - we have also set out to automate a lot of the set up and configuration - as the last thing a marketing team needs is ANOTHER tool to figure out, configuration to do, settings to adjust manually, and metrics to have to decipher and export to excel in order to make any sense of it. We took our first bite out of this challenge in April, adding 0Auth (use your company email to login to our platform) to our tech stack and adding ‘view’ and ‘approve’ functionality to our customer facing management portal for our Activate (personalise your website for each guest) product. Previous to having this new feature live, our customer’s marketing team would provide C&M with a set of assets, dates for the campaign to run and all of the copy required to give the web visitor the message they wanted to convey - with lots of back and forth in terms of what an Activation would look like, which campaigns were live and daily performance numbers. In this new world, we still have to do most of the initial set up for them, but once live they can login, approve changes/creative, and see the performance in real time for every activation we have running on their websites, set dates, and push campaigns live. Next step, full creative control and set up. After that, as they say, the magic happens! #productupdate #awelloiledmachine #activate