Every aspect of us is affected by our environments and our environments reflect every aspect of us. Each of the 9 Environments of You are connected…they touch each other and are woven together.
Skylab CEO, Dean Grey knows all about anchoring a decision. from his humble upbringing living off the grid on a boat in the Florida Keys to traveling around the world tasked with teaching and mentoring tens of thousands of people; Dean deeply understands how to make that monumental change.
It wasn’t long ago when the idea of the Skylab Apps platform would was simply a figment of Dean’s Imagination. He had a big dream, and grand vision, but so do thousands of people every day. The difference is that when Dean made the decision to step in to a new role and start Skylab Apps he dropped the anchor, put his head down and got to work. a couple years later, the vision has become a reality. Ultimately, it was a culmination of Deans 9 environments that led him and Skylab to success.
“Individuals learn better when they are learning in engaging social environments.”
Understanding the 9 Environments and how they work in your daily life will give you a clear understanding of how each elements plays and incredibly important role in your life short and long term.
The Physical Environment: Skylab HQ
The physical environment includes the very tangible aspects of our lives…our home, office, car, furnishings, artwork, toys, boats, and accessories. The physical environment provides visual clues to what is going on in our lives. Clutter, noise, broken equipment can be visual clues to looking deeper to discover our thoughts, energy and behaviors.
The Skylab Apps corporate office is a collaborative and creative working loft. Everything from the music, office space and food is hand selected to make sure you have to best experience to help you thrive in the work place. We have a gym onsite so you can take care of your body and give your mind a mental break.
The Spiritual Environment
The spiritual environment includes our connections to a higher power, to God or Spirit, the invisible connection we feel to others and the universe. It includes methods of connecting to spiritual aspects of life such as meditation, prayer, and places of worship. We wanted to make sure that our workplace was situated in a beautiful place. Lucky for us, we are right next to the ocean with lots of quiet places where you can go and get spiritual.
The Memetic Environment
The memetic environment includes ideas, values, thoughts, beliefs, paradigms, styles and habits that are passed down from generation to generation. The memetic environment also includes information and knowledge (books, websites, magazines, television, and radio)
The Body Environment
The body environment includes the body, hair, skin, nails, health and energy. This environment touches the network environment, as it includes physicians, skin care consultants, massage therapists, hair dressers, physical therapists, dietitians, personal trainers and other professionals who support your physical body and well being.
We understand that it you want top performance out of your body, then you have to treat your body well!
The Self Environment
The self environment includes our strengths, talents, personalities, feelings, emotions, values, passions and skills. The self environment includes the intangible aspects of our beings.
The Nature Environment
The nature environment includes nature, parks, bodies of water, the seasons of the year, pets, plants, the seasons of life, and the outdoors. As humans, we are a part of nature, so access to this environment is crucial for our survival and ultimate well-being. A great place about where we work is that its open, inviting and blended well with the elements
The Relationship Environment
The relationship environment includes those people in our lives who are closest to us and with whom we have an intimate connection. This includes family, close friends, close colleagues, co-workers, mentors and neighbors who are in our lives on a daily basis. It has been said that a team that plays well together works well together. Our professional life is personal, so we make sure to take time to develop relationships with our co-workers and clients in and out side of the office.
The Network Environment
The network environment is an extension of the relationship environment. It includes people with whom you are on a first name basis, yet you may not have a deep and intimate connection. The network environment includes business associates, community organizations, support groups you belong to. The goal of the network environment is usually to provide an exchange of information and to build bridges to people who can support you in enhancing both your business and personal life.
The Financial Environment
The financial environment includes bills, credit cards, money, investments, insurance, stocks and bonds and the people who support your financial well-being (accountants, financial planners, stock brokers). This environment also includes any tools or support services you use to achieve your financial goals files, computer programs, budgets, banks. When exploring the financial environment, it is also important to look closely at the relationship a person has with money and their beliefs around money and prosperity/abundance.
“It is important to take stock of these environmental factors and make sure that they come together to work for our benefit and maximize our productivity towards our individual goals.”
All of the work being done at Skylab Apps is with the environments in mind. When a client is met, they go through a process called ADG, which stands for Appify, Gamify and Design. Skylab doesn’t just build mobile apps, they create worlds for their clients! Each one of these worlds combines the essence of the clients culture and ultimately the 9 elements can be seen through out the flawless design of the native mobile platform.
Users join a community of like-minded people all on a journey to create Optimal Health and Well Being. The Trilogy represents the 3 key areas of optimal health; healthy body, healthy mind and healthy finances. This app along with the support of a certified health coach can help you integrate simple daily actions that can turn into lifelong habits of health. There are 3 levels of the Trilogy Game you can participate : as a fan, as a player or as a coach.
For more information about Skylab Apps, or to see how appify your world, please get in touch with us at Skylabapps.com
Growth Mindset: 10 Principles to Growth: Skylab Apps Case Study
Many people begin to experiment and fail to see the desired results. They’re often missing on the key ingredient: The Growth Mindset. Let’s apply this method to Skylab Apps.
Skylab Apps was founded in 2015 by Dean Grey. He has the vision of growing a global company motivated by the idea that people would adopt the technology built by his company. Skylab Apps makes a white label community building platform that allows the app owner to track, train, grow and monetize their user, customer, clients, follower or fans.
“Company owners want to grow and they have a vague idea of how to get there. But, they lack the key principles to achieve their goals. They lack of a general understanding behind the practice.”
What if you could increase your Growth rate? What if you could finally start to optimize your processes? Growth is the answer to these questions…
This article is about to give you a few principles to help guide you into your quest for Growth. It is a guide that we have lived by here at Skylab Apps, always testing, poking around and customer/client-centric.
The Infographic : You must be busy. So instead of having you read a ton of text, I distilled the main principles in the following infographic:
1. Learning from experience
Growth is all about testing hypothesis. “Testing hypothesis” means running a battery of tests to see what works and what doesn’t.We test a hypothesis because we believe that no one else has the answer to our questions. What may work in another business, will not necessarily work with yours.
When Dean Grey, Founder of Skylab Apps started Zooplr, his vision was to build a state of the art mobile platform that would allow companies and brands to engage, track and train all of the community member. After successfully exiting Zooplr, and Tags, he continued on with the same vision to build Skylab Apps. Except this time, he was going to take it all the way home
When you test something, you can either validate or invalidate your hypothesis. Most people see this through a success / failure lens. There is no such thing as a failure in Growth because you want to learn. Success happens when you learn, failure when you don’t.
It’s that simple. If your experiment failed and you’ve gained a ton of new insights, that’s a success.Learning allows you to make better educated guesses and to launch even more successful experiments.
Don’t expect to have a lot of success at the beginning but the more you understand your product & customers, the more successful your tests will become. In the case of Skylab Apps, learning from experience didn’t necessarily mean failure. In fact, as mentioned before, exiting the two prior companies successfully set Dean up on the correct pat to launch Skylab Apps with all oh the experience and data from his two prior companies.
2. Data-Driven
Running a digital business enables you to measure every step of the way. You can easily track what everyone is doing on your app.You know more about your consumers than anyone else in business. Use these insights! The best Growth people use that to their advantage. You need to use data in every decision you take.
When we speak about data, most people think about analytics tools such as Google Analytics or KISSmetrics. Never forget about other valuable sources of insights that you have available.
Customer interviews are a perfect source of insights, to help you drive Growth & Product Development.
Make sure that you invest into your Analytics stack early on to avoid learning about the wrong things… (Invalidating the wrong hypothesis will have disastrous impact on your business)
3. Innovative Testing
Growth is all about testing innovative and creative ideas. Don’t limit yourself to what your competitors are doing, you have the freedom to do whatever you want. Be innovative and challenge the status-quo: it’s not because you always had a 3-step signup process that it is necessarily the best process.
Look for flaws in your current processes and improve them until you’re satisfied with the results.
Growth is all about being innovative. If you just copy what’s going on in your space, you’ll limit your potential results terribly.
4. Always go further
Growth never stops. Even if you have a conversion rate from Trial to Paid of 95%, there are always things that you can improve.
When you think everything is optimized, take a one-week break. Go back to work and think again: Where are we losing most of our users? Where can we have more impact?
You should never be satisfied by the Growth you’re getting. You can always go further.
5. Process first
Launching experiments in only one part of the story. The process is what actually makes everything possible.
You can’t really sustain your Growth efforts without a process. You’ll start to launch experiments but you’ll soon fail because you’ll lose track of what’s happening.The process is what allows you to create a repeatable, scalable and predictable machine. Without a process, you’ll fail to show results over the long-term. Design your processes early on. They won’t be perfect but iterate and improve them as you move forward.
6. Authentic & Sustainable Growth
As Brian Balfour said,
“All Growth is not equal”. Are you looking for MAU (Monthly Active Users) or are you looking for long-term customers?
You can’t really sustain your Growth efforts without a process. You’ll start to launch experiments but you’ll soon fail because you’ll lose track of what’s happening. The process is what allows you to create a repeatable, scalable and predictable machine. Without a process, you’ll fail to show results over the long-term. Design your processes early on. They won’t be perfect but iterate and improve them as you move forward. Don’t think about Growth as something that can yield enormous result for the short term. It certainly can. However…
Look at Growth as a way to build your business over the long-term. Launch experiments that can have a long-lasting impact on your growth.
7. Start Small – MVT
You generally don’t have to go through 100 hours of development to test your hypothesis.
If you want to launch several tests per week, you’ll need to launch “Minimum Viable Tests”. In other words: What’s the minimum test that you can launch to test an hypothesis? You need to understand that Growth is an iterative process. Starting small will allow you to build up on your success (or lack thereof). If you launch a small test and it fails, you’ll have a greater “Time to Learning” than if you redesigned your entire on-boarding. Starting small may be be counter intuitive. But it’s the only way that you can create a positive impact on your business.
8. Customer-Centric
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If you fail to be customer-centric, you’ll only be able to drive short-term. Your customers will be annoyed and you’ll fail to retain them over the long term.
Increasing your Growth is only one part of the equation. If you squeeze out every dollar of your customer’s wallet without delivering more value, you’ll piss off more than a few people. The best way to be customer-centric is to examine their desired outcome. Are your experiments helping them to achieve their mission, their goals?
9. Ethic
Some people really don’t care about ethics and that’s a mistake in terms of brand image.
The dating sector is a quite good example. They’re basically creating fake profiles and generating discussions with you so that you start your paid membership. A beautiful person of the opposite sex will strike up a conversation and show interest in you. You can only chat back if you start a paid subscription. But, wait! There is no one on the other side… It’s just a bot! Even if this trick is increasing their Growth, are they delivering value? What would people think about that? Having some sense of ethics is imperative if you want to seek Authentic Growth and avoid damaging your long-term brand.
10. Company-wide mission
This is a team sport and everyone should be involved. Everyone should be able to contribute their own ideas to your backlog.Relevant people should also be able to get involved into discussions on specific ideas. You’re designing a new onboarding flow? Talk to the person who designed the last one. If you don’t involve people within your company, you’ll get into political issues and they’ll slow down your efforts.Involving them can only be a good thing. The worse that can happen is that they’ll share valuable insights and help you launch better experiments.
Growth. Growth. Growth.
These principles should help you to get started with Growth. Don’t waste too much time and start experimenting as soon as you can. However… Make sure that you set yourself up for success by creating customer-centric, ethical and long-lasting growth…
Skylabapps.com enables to grow your community thanks to the Gamification Engine which uses Gamified features.
Check out Skylab’s Clients websites & apps. They’ve trusted us for growth.
*Gamification Definition: applying the science and psychology of gaming in a non-game context to motivate and reward your customers to perform certain desired behaviors. It is one of the most proven ways to engage online community members and keep them coming back for more.
Gamification is a buzzword in the business community and a process that is becoming more widely adopted in consumer products and work culture which helps to “spread, solidify, and clarify”. It has also raised important ethical dilemmas: How is this good for us? Are we manipulating people to do things that aren’t in their interest? The video below is a Tedx talk given by Janaki Kumar, who is a Gamification expert and the co-author of Gamification at Work. Janaki addresses the ethical questions above, and explains why making Gamification ethical also makes it more effective.
The bottom line is that Gamification works better when application designers provide more value for those “playing” their Gamified applications. It’s difficult to simply manipulate people using Gamificaiton for two simple reasons:
People want things that are good for them, and they’re smart. They don’t want to do things that are bad for them and are quick to sniff out when they’re acting for someone else’s benefit.
People want valuable rewards. Users won’t complete actions unless the person rewarding them for taking that action is attentive and offering them something valuable.
Skylab’s Gamified solutions allow community leaders and users to set their own value criteria using game architecture. The result is a more interactive and responsive relationship between community members and community leaders where both produce more value for each other.
“Gamification is design that places the most emphasis on the human in the process. In essence it is Human-Focused Design.”
thoughts, energy and behaviors.
Users join a community of like-minded people all on a journey to create Optimal Health and Well Being. The Trilogy represents the 3 key areas of optimal health; healthy body, healthy mind and healthy finances. This app along with the support of a certified health coach can help you integrate simple daily actions that can turn into lifelong habits of health. There are 3 levels of the Trilogy Game you can participate : as a fan, as a player or as a coach.
Running a digital business enables you to measure every step of the way. You can easily track what everyone is doing on your app.You know more about your consumers than anyone else in business. Use these insights! The best Growth people use that to their advantage. You need to use data in every decision you take.
