Can you believe we released MouseHunt 2 years ago.

It has been such a journey for us here at HitGrab. We opened the game to all of facebook 2 years ago with what people thought was a silly idea. The first year was such an incredible journey, our team slept very little as we dealt with all the challenges that came with keeping the servers running and adding content.

2 years later we have almost 500 000 people joining us every month with around 175 000 coming back each day. We are blessed to be doing this still and I am blown away by how fast time flies when you are having fun. We here at HitGrab have been lucky in that you, our audience has actively engaged with us and helped us build this game.

We are extremely grateful for your support and will do our best to build the best games and community on facebook. Thanks for playing and being part of our journey.

Happy Birthday MouseHunt!

We're looking for talented Flash/Flex/Actionscript 3 developers to join our growing games company. We're not normal. We let you work on stuff you love. We make sure you're respected. Great pay. Great benefits. Fun environment.

Send your resume to team [at] hitgrab [dot] com.

J.

Today, my business partner and I informed our employees that we'd be going R.O.W.E. (Results Only Workplace Environment) for 3 months. The idea was inspired by Daniel Pink's New York Times bestseller Drive (Which I recently devoured in a single sitting on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver). Dan has already mentioned to me that he's keenly interested and will follow our progress.

The concept, in a very small nutshell, is employee autonomy over strict structure in an attempt to breed trust, accountability, and employee ownership of their contributions. Here's how we've tackled it in our iteration:

1. Employees can come and go as they please. No time constraints.

2. Every Friday belongs to individuals to work on internal solutions to problems, enhancements of current products, or new ideas entirely.

3. FedEx day, stolen directly from the book, is one 30 hour period every month where we attempt to deliver new products overnight. We're using the third Wednesday of every month. Hackathon-ing. Thai food. Redbull. Rockband. Arkanoid. New products. :)

4. The teams set project targets together. These are targets that everyone on the project teams set together. Team members will hold each other accountable to reaching the targets.

5. Monthly peer reviews between team members.

I highly recommend reading Drive. Daniel Pink has at the very least, built a solid case for participating in the new revolution of autonomy. I'll be completely honest in that I'm not sure how this will turn out, but like I told our team, "I'd rather be scared, than bored". Stick with us. My goal is to blog every week about it and have some of our employees do the same.

Joel.