Success Stories From the Baltic HR&ED Tech Accelerator: Lucky Carrot
Baltic HR&ED Tech Acceleratorcontinues the acceleration program for HR-Tech and Ed-Tech talents. Throughout the 8-week program period, we will be sharing the interviews with participating startups that present their concept and share the ambitious plans for the future.
This is the last week of the acceleration program, dedicated to the Investors’ Relations. The previous workshop sessions & 1-on-1 meetings before the huge Demo Day! And this week is highlighted by the interview with Mariam Gyulumyan, the CEO & Co-founder of Lucky Carrot.
Lucky Carrot provides a platform where employees can recognize each other and say “thank you” for their daily, tremendous & small achievements that might be invisible. And we had a great pleasure speaking with Mariam about the idea behind the Lucky Carrot & all the customer-related stories that will warm your heart!
What is Lucky Carrot?
Lucky Carrot solves the problem of the HR world, called employee disengagement. In simpler terms, we have experienced these problems in companies where we were working.
First things first, Who are the engaged employees? Indeed in your current or previous companies, you have seen the smallest number of people willing to go the extra mile for their company and put more effort. Also, their passion and best ideas into work, and always do more than it is expected from them. They are the ones who bring innovation, higher customer satisfaction, and company profitability.
Disengaged employees do what they are told to do, or even less, they flow with the stream or how the Gallup report says: “they are sleepwalking”. Actively disengaged employees are preparing to leave your company. They are coming to work but maybe having an interview with the headhunter of another company.
In this case, Lucky Carrot helps to increase employees’ engagement level by creating, analyzing & explaining the engagement report of the company’s employees. The mentioned reports also show the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s employees’ engagement level, so the HR managers know which parts need the most attention.
Lucky Carrot provides a platform where employees can recognize each other and say “thank you” for their daily, tremendous & small achievements that might be invisible. Also, Lucky Carrot provides analytics about the key players of the company.
Why did you choose the name Lucky Carrot?
There is a carrot & stick principle that is an old & wrong motivational approach in the HR world.
In this case, the carrot is a reward, and the stick — the punishment. It motivates staff by creating actionable goals and desirable rewards for employees who can alter their behavior and performance. But in Lucky Carrot, everything is about rewarding. We just took the carrot and made it Lucky, so it became Lucky Carrot.
How did you come up with this idea?
Most of our team members and co-founders worked in the local tech company where Slack’s communication channel was. With the help of Slack, we have been nominating the employee of the month.
For example, I am nominating someone to become an employee of the month also, I am even mentioning why. Later, the management chooses someone from the selects and then rewards them financially for that.
And what we have seen is that this “employee of the month” does not work. It turns out that employees usually need the recognition 3–4 times a week, so you have one person happy in this case. The rest of them are becoming disengaged.
The creation of the Lucky Carrot started with the hackathon that happened inside the company we worked. We became the winners of the hackathon and later started working as a separate company — Lucky Carrot.
Luckily, Lucky Carrot works with 30 companies, 26 paid clients, and the other four are on the first trial. We are mostly working with tech, digital marketing, and finance companies.
A brief summary of market you work in
Looking from the international perspective, the HR market is way more developed. Here, in Armenia, we need to educate people on employee engagement, so the local HR market is still developing. Here, HR experts are still focusing on the old-school, standard stuff such as giving more and better benefits to the employee.
Although you can give the most relaxed design workplace & the most incredible benefits to the employee, it will not be enough to keep the talented employee in the company with time. HR experts should focus on employee engagement majorly.
Competitive advantages of Lucky Carrot
Our main competitive advantages are analytics & the depth of the analytics we can provide. The analytics reveals the on-going employee engagement & company culture, detects informal leaders & key team players of the company, shows the full & real-time visibility of the employees’ interactions.
Also, at the moment, we are launching something that we call — actionable recommendations. This feature lets us know when something goes very wrong regarding employees, their engagement & interactions. In this case, Lucky Carrot provides necessary advice on how to solve this problem.
Tell us about your team and how did you meet?
The core of the team met in the same company, so we have known each other for a long time. At the moment, we are team of 7 members, including 4 co-founders:
Mariam Gyulumyan (me), CEO & Co-founder of Lucky Carrot.
Sergey Asatryan — Head of Product, co-founder has more than 11 years of experience in product and project management. Has 4 years of entrepreneurial experience as a cofounder in TripPlannera.
Narek Tonoyan — CTO & cofounder. Has more than 6 years of full-stack development. Has worked on 2 successful projects like MyMind and FocusOrtho.
Share the craziest story related to your customers
We definitely have some stories to share, I can mention some of them.
The first one is the story behind this Recognition from TCF Armenia that engineering growth hackers shared the “thank-you” note that not everyone can understand from first sight. In their “mother tongue,” this nice combination of 0s and 1s means “it’s not a bug it’s a feature”, very much like saying in the coding world.” Check the “thank you” note written in the language of code here.
Here is another video made by one of our users who accomplished her dream of paragliding due to Lucky Carrot by exchanging her carrots for a gift card from a local paragliding service called SkyClub.
Simply speaking, what are your future ambitions?
Our ambition is to expand, of course, the mid-term goal in the UAE and Baltics. Becoming leaders in these regions.
Another ambition is dedicated to the analytical part of the Lucky Carrot, in order to notify the HR manager months earlier, when an employee decides to leave the company.
What are your biggest challenges at the moment?
Talking about our future ambitions, it is the expansion of the Lucky Carrot. And when it comes to the development, we need to raise a buzz around Lucky Carrot’s name & brand. So, right now, this is what we are strategizing.
We know some ways of how to achieve this, for example, we are going to be a guest on one of the HR podcasts, also, we want to become a guest in some known HR webinars and make media coverage about our product.
Additionally, our inbound sales & marketing plan, and we are finding partnership opportunities with HR consulting companies.
We have many ideas, but we are creating the right strategy to expand the Lucky Carrot.
