We've had the most success hiring individuals that would do everything in their power to be part of our team. On paper, these individuals probably won't be considered the best candidate, but in practice, they've exceeded all of our expectations.

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We've just hired our 10th member of the WooTeam: Ryan Ray who will be our new Community Manager.

For me, this has been a natural progression of having a community that now exceeds 45k registered users and also reinforces our belief that community and user interaction is of the utmost importance. In comparison with most other online companies of our size (in user base, revenue and the scope of our operations), our 10 member team is relatively small and we've basically just been hiring new members organically and as we really need them.

There's a couple of reasons why this position specifically is so special and much-needed in my opinion:

• Continuous & real-time interaction with a community is a full-time job, especially when your product is not hosted.
• We'd become efficient in dealing with the massive demands placed on our interaction resources - especially e-mail - and the focus had shifted to efficiency and not delivering a WOW! experience. Whilst we've always been trying our best to give users the best-ever experience, it's simply impossible without the appropriate resources.
• Tech is becoming more and more generic in established markets, which means that user loyalty and community interaction is a massive competitive advantage.

So hell yes, I'm excited about Ryan joining the team and look forward to reporting back positively here. :)