Under pressure (in a good way)
Pros
It's the team. I've been an employee at AWeber for over two years. I've never worked with a more capable, more intelligent, more passionate team than the crew of experts and professionals at AWeber. Being obsessed with your individual craft and driven to achieve mastery seems to be a prerequisite for hiring. It's amazing. When you have that kind of energy and determination in the room, serendipitous events start to unfold. People leave, people join, but the heart and drive of the team continues to strengthen. I'm proud to be a part of that. As an employee with a family, I applaud the company's focus on work/life balance, strong benefits, and sense of community. Benefits are top-notch, better than anything I've had access to, and our frequent family BBQs, get-togethers and extra-curricular events give me an opportunity to share my family with everyone and get to know theirs. Work/life balance becomes more of a healthy work/life blend, which is great. Lots of flexibility with doctor's appointments, car trouble, sick kids, etc. The product we build is used by over 100,000+ small businesses and marketers. 100,000! To be able to work for an internet company in the middle of Bucks County that serves that many people is an opportunity that shouldn't be understated. I read some comments about unethical practices. When you have 100,000 customers sending emails, you will always get people attempting to abuse the system. I've been proud of our ability to monitor and terminate bad actors and spammers. I don't agree with those statements. My experience working with customers who are using our product to make full-time incomes as marketers, and live happy and successful lives is rewarding, and inspiring. There is a lot of autonomy at AWeber. This doesn't mean you always get dictate your pay raises, and promotions, and career path. But you can certainly make a strong case for what projects will best impact the customers and business, get buy-in, and execute. If you do what you love, provide value to the team, the company awards you, and the team recognizes your efforts.
Cons
All that Pro stuff being said, AWeber needs a lot of help, and there's a lot of work to be done. I feel like the team is so creative, competent, inspired, and talented that the full potential often stays bottled up. The reason for this, in my opinion, is lack of clear overall direction and a unified vision for the product and company. Does that mean we have no vision? Of course not. We have one. The vision and direction has evolved over the past few years, as the leadership team continues to refine and reinforce to the team, but I feel like it's still lacking an acuteness that would help us achieve success and take advantage of the talent here. Email marketing as an industry is being disrupted. For a company that is 17+ years old, it's crucial to stay ahead of the curve, and provide the solution of tomorrow's email marketers, not todays. Often times, we're playing catch-up. Luckily, the leadership team is receptive to this type of feedback and I've shared this with them on multiple occasions. We are all driven to succeed, and it shows. We just need to fight past the pressure and unbottle all the capped potential. So, I'll reiterate my point above– we really need help. We need passionate experts and fresh perspectives to help refine the vision and future of AWeber, and also to get more hands on deck to execute our top priority projects.
