✨ How to Build a Killer Remote Startup...
3 fundamental elements for building a successful remote startup: Ensure team alignment on vision, empower autonomy, and foster trust in asynchronous work. Learn how to implement these core principles to optimize productivity and cohesion in your distributed team.
You got your idea, a few key individuals lined up and you’re ready to go. And like most startups, you don’t have a dedicated building space, but what if your team is scattered all over the country or province?
Yes, you can build an entire company full-on remotely. It’s said that the best startup newsletter in the known universe is 100% remote. And it’s exactly as easy AND as hard as you imagine.
But there are 3 core elements you need to nail from Day 1 (because it’s too hard to change afterwards), namely:
- Alignment
- Autonomy
- Trust
Here’s how
1. Get the team aligned on the vision
Whether it takes vision workshops, scenario planning, goal-setting sessions, freaking role-playing or a mix of them all, do it. Ensure everyone is aligned on what you’re doing and where you’re going before you make anything official.
2. Autonomy is king
People need to be and feel 100% empowered to execute, call to question, interrogate and even stop production if necessary, when they feel something is not working towards company goals.
Likewise, they need to have full control over their time and contributions. For this, it helps if your roles and responsibilities are super clear – possibly even having domain specialists as a team.
3. Adapt to asynchronous work
The biggest hurdle for most companies is saying goodbye to the 9 to 5. When you’re remote, people can’t and shouldn’t always align calendars. Everyone’s rhythms differ, and you frankly get the best quality work when you let people work when and how they want. This means designing a way of working without meetings and using tools to fill the gaps.
4. Meetings with a purpose
Speaking of meetings, cut them down to the absolute bare minimum your company needs to survive and they must have a specific purpose, agenda and action points.
We at The Open Letter have only 2 super-short video meets per week – a quick review the night before you get your newsletter. But they’re entirely optional (we’ve rarely had any with everyone present), because our system of work negates the need for real meets.
5. Have a central truth centre
If you have information and strategies that change all the time, keep a central “truth centre” where the new direction is constantly and centrally updated so everyone can see it.
We chop and change all the time, so we use Notion to keep track of our current truth. But you could have a Miro board, Trello or whatever collab app you choose.
6. Project management & accountability
When you have co-founders and team members, you need absolute transparency and accountability around tasks and progress. No worries, your truth centre takes care of that, too.
Got a remote startup hack? Hit reply and let us know how your team optimises…