What’s new in team building?
Team building and cohesion can be a difficult challenge. Throw in a global pandemic and thousands of teams going remote overnight and the task starts to take on a whole new dimension.
Originally a group of 5 friends based in different corners of the globe, Skyrocket your Team stepped up to provide the market with the solution it was missing.
Meet Skyrocket your Team
Skyrocket your Team is the young startup helping HRs and team leaders organize online team building experiences for distributed teams through educational, fun, online escape rooms and debriefing.
Far beyond the traditional team building experience, the product itself is made up of puzzles and challenges to trigger a set of emotions, feelings and situations that turn into learning outcomes during a debriefing.
Ultimately, team members get to understand each others’ perspective better, to improve their communication and collaboration and come closer together.
Co-founder Jorge Sánchez Hernández says: “It’s a great tool because it doesn’t feel like a ‘training’ since you’re learning a lot about your colleagues and yourself while having a blast”.
It all started with a Sunday Trivia night
It may not come as a surprise that there’s a strong team behind the platform itself. In fact, the team’s actually made up of a group of 5 friends who met 7 years ago in various parts of the world.
Since then, they’ve been working together on different projects for their student association as volunteers in international positions, always collaborating remotely.
When COVID hit, the same student association started organizing some Sunday Trivia nights and they decided to join those as a team to catch up and have a beer together over Skype.
After some of those, they ended up joining an “online group challenge” organized on Google Drive. Having loved the idea, they decided to build on it.
The team say they “wanted to take that concept to new heights and put together [they’re] experiences as adult educators, UX designers, coding and project management, to help remote teams in the things that they need the most: collaboration and communication.”
When they’re not working on that, in their free time you’ll find this multi-talented and diverse team fighting climate change, learning new instruments, and even giving it a go on racing simulators.
The Hackathon that send the team soaring
By chance, that same week they joined #EUvsVirus. It was the biggest hackathon in the world to take place during Covid-19 with more than 21,000 participants. Organized by the European Commission, selected winners got the chance to develop their idea further with the Bridge program “The Leap”.
They signed up for the Efficient Teamwork Challenge and in less than 72 hours they had validated the idea with 100+ HRs, launched a website and created a playing prototype that they tested with some of the hackathon mentors, and got amazing feedback.
It was only a few days later they were told that they’d won the Efficient Team Work challenge and Vodaphone Institute for Society and Communications would award them with 10,000€ to help launch.
Co-founder Jorge says: “It’s now been 5.5 months since we started and it’s definitely been more like a rocket launch to the moon than a rollercoaster!
We’ve been so lucky to have our first client at week 6 since that first hackathon, to have great mentors with us and that our clients can’t wait to come back for our new escape rooms – and that they’re telling everyone about it!”.
Reaching new heights
Amongst others, Jorge highlights the team’s launch on Product Hunt as one of the highlights so far saying that, “In July, Nicolas Grenié from Typeform posted about us on Product Hunt. 48 hours later we had 60+ leads from startups, SMEs, non-profits and corporations from every continent (alright, not Antartica!) that wanted to use our product.”
He also mentions hiring the team’s first extra developer Felipe as another big step explaining that he’s equally as excited to take remote teams to new heights through gamified team building experiences.
A Future that’s out of this World
Perhaps ironically for a group that’s skyrocketed to success, the team’s as down to earth as they get and say they’re both “humbled” and “excited” about how the solution has been perceived.
They’re now moving onto a subscription model, where they’ll be launching at least 1 new escape room per quarter to make things easier for HRs and team leaders and give teams some of that adrenaline rush and bonding time that they crave.
Right now the offer is almost non-existent in terms of scalable team building experiences with learning outcomes and real bonding. Their goal is to revolutionize how online team building is done for distributed teams across the world.
On being a part of Bridge community, the team say they’re happy that they got to participate in Bridge program “The Leap” over the summer to discuss and lay foundations for their startup, saying they enjoyed the high quality of the experience and how it guided them in small steps.
What’s your advice for our readers?
As far as tips go, the team suggests not being afraid to bring out your MVP: “as soon as it’s stable, go ahead and test it in the market! There is nothing more valuable at early stage than feedback from REAL customers (and knowing how to take it and what part is valuable and which one is not)”.
We’re sure we’ll be seeing a lot more from this successful startup in the coming months, congratulations to the whole team on their success so far!
Join Us.
If you didn’t know, we’re on a mission to democratize access to entrepreneurship education. We support early-stage entrepreneurs in developing the businesses our society needs through our 3 month, online program, The Leap.
If, like these founders, you want to develop your project with us and join the purpose-driven movement, click here.
We love sharing your stories. If you’re part of the Bridge community and would like to appear on our blog, you can reach us at phoebe@bridgeforbillions.org
