Running a 20 People Business from the Beach

http://blog.mobilejazz.com/running-a-20-people-business-from-the-beach/

by franrull • 11 years ago

59 57 11 years ago

blog.mobilejazz.com

boothead2• 11 years ago

I'd be interested to know how you go about getting new business, if you wouldn't mind sharing?

znq7• 11 years ago

Hey, I'm one of the co-founders of Mobile Jazz.

Initially most of the work came through our personal networks. Myself I grew up in Germany and lived in San Francisco for some time. My co-founder had a strong network in Barcelona through his previous job at Deloitte. Today we still get requests through our personal network, however, most of our new incoming work is simply referral based. We don't even have a single sales person. So we try our best possible to do quality work, but also are actively involved with our clients and partners and help them improve their own businesses. This is not just an extra effort on our side, but also makes the whole "work" thing way more exciting and interesting for ourselves, rather than just being a sweatshop that churns out code.

We mostly work with startups, some of them as clients and some as partners. But we also have been recommended and introduced to some big corporations in various industries. And while we don't like the bureaucratic hassle that comes with it, it does give us quite some stability. For example, a big medical company just switched to use as their main supplier for web development, which immediately gave us 30 new long-term projects.

Overall we always try to give a lot, be involved and pro-active and help where we can. In the end you always get something in return. This has been my personal philosophy since ever and always and we've also established this as one of the cornerstones in our company culture.

boothead2• 11 years ago

Thanks Stefan :-)

I guess the takeaway here is that repeat business from the same client is rather nice!

joeyspn3• 11 years ago

Hi Stefan... your company culture sounds amazing. I see you're currently hiring (via API... lol). I'd like to know what can a candidate expect regarding salary. Do you have a reference/range?

toddmorey• 11 years ago

I wonder if this is being upvoted for the idea of running a company from the beach, or for the particular technology suggestions (everything Google + Hipchat, Asana, Trello, and Harvest).

I've been remote for a long time, and have had better results with a different suite of products.

aleixventa3• 11 years ago

What tools do you use?

I'm really interested in remote working and how to improve the day to day to work and communication.

anonnomad• 11 years ago

Skype has bad quality from e.g. Thailand. Google Hangouts none of my clients (including myself) understand or can use. Still looking for a reliable and proper internet audio/video solution. I wonder if there's better solutions.

kelvin04• 11 years ago

I can't believe they entrust all their family jewels in Google services. My experience is that even when we used the paid Google services their customer support is at best atrocious ... try not having access to your company's most important collaborative documents for a few days ... never again for us.

bmcgee843• 11 years ago

I've been using Google paid services for almost 4 years now, I've yet to experience any issues. That being said I'm not saying I never will experience such problems, but on balance I would argue the risk/benefit for a small business is much more in it's favour.

kelvin04• 11 years ago

I was the one who had pushed to use Google, but I've been burned after some of our files became unaccessible. I wish you well ...

justinsb• 11 years ago

What alternative would you recommend / do you use now?

kelvin04• 11 years ago

We simply host the critical bits ourselves, instead of relying on a third party cloud/host/storage.

joeyspn3• 11 years ago

I also use some google products but if you're worried about the big prying G eyes and looking for a self-hosted replacement I guess sovereign is a good (and easy to deploy) starting point ....

https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

VLM• 11 years ago

"try not having access to your company's most important collaborative documents"

How? I did volunteer work for a charity and if a collaborative doc was important, on every mobile device we had "keep offline" so even in an area without internet coverage (in a warehouse or got a call while out in the wilderness or something) we had our data.

We had budgets, inventories, checklists, all that kind of stuff.

I guess its a design issue if a tool makes it possible to self sabotage, however much effort it requires, but its not much of a practical issue.

There are parts of it that do suck like other people assuming we had fully featured excel and they do really weird things with the strangest darkest never before seen corners of excel, but overall on average it simply wasn't an issue.

kelvin04• 11 years ago

I went in to add an entry to an excel sheet, then a error message appeared as I was editing it (100 rows of 10 columns). After that no one from the company could access the document at all, even from different accounts ... took Google more than a week to get back to us to say we needed the document`s URL in order for them to retrieve the document.

kauffj• 11 years ago

I run a ~10 person completely remote SaaS company and that matches our tools exactly, even down to the way we set up our HipChat rooms* .

For MobileJazz or others that operate completely remotely, how often do you meet face-to-face? We assemble the team twice a year. It's definitely possible to run a company completely remotely, but I've still seen no remote substitute for the interpersonal bonding that happens in meatspace.

* We don't invoice, so no Harvest.

philbarr• 11 years ago

I work for a company that is completely remote, and we have an all-hands meeting 2-4 times a year. As an employee I find I need these meetings just to put faces to names, at the very least.

It also means you get a broader view of what everyone else is doing. It's easy to have a very narrow view of just the project you're working on, so you lose some of the cross-pollination of ideas between projects.

mcdougle2• 11 years ago

I work for an overly-corporate company and we have those all-hands meetings 2-4 times a week.

jgimenez5• 11 years ago

At Mobile Jazz we have a weekly meeting with everyone. We share what we have been working on and especially the learning experiences of that week, regardless if they are related to work or not. This helped us know each other a bit better and also speak about things unrelated to work.

Also we pair people from different projects to work together for a couple of hours per week, two different people every week. This helped a lot in learning from other team members but also in general helping each other more often, because we now know better who to ask when a certain question appears.

normloman• 11 years ago

Do you absolutely need interpersonal bonding? I work in an office, and I don't feel any sort of bond with my coworkers. Work still gets done.

shalmanese• 11 years ago

People talk about work as if it's all the same thing and then wonder why there's vehement disagreements all the time.

From my experience, an all remote team works especially well if either:

1. The employees are also the customers. This means you can trust everyone's judgement about decisions to a large extent and you can afford to skimp on user research and not have it overly impact the product. If you're making a SAAS tool for developers, then a lot of hard design stuff becomes easy.

2. The metrics for success are very clear. If everyone has agreed on a common goal and it's easy to evaluate yourself based on that goal, then everyone can work productively with a minimum of discussion. Backend services tend to work this way. Once the API is defined, you're judged on performance, uptime, usage and other fairly objective metrics.

3. The business can be split into fairly modular components with strong contracts between each component. If you only need to communicate at the boundary, then you have enough bandwidth to do it remotely. A lot of ad tech is this way where certain business functions become easy to abstract away from others. If you're building a consumer facing product though, the line between sales and marketing say, is never rigidly defined and there's fluid, complicated feedback loops between the two and ideally they should be co-located so they can collaborate in unpredictable ways.

Where interpersonal bonding becomes the most important is building consensus over risky decisions. If Bill proposes a wild and crazy idea that needs everyone's buy-in but nobody thinks will work, if you don't trust Bill, then you're going to push back because you think it'll be harmful for the company/team. However, if you've spent a lot of time with Bill and understand the way he thinks and believe he might be crazy like a fox, then you might jump on board even if you don't think it'll work because Bill is awesome.

znq7• 11 years ago

At Mobile Jazz we do have an office in Barcelona, Dubai and Munich. And most people actually enjoy working from the office and go there quite often.

But additionally we do things together, like going a month to Thailand, going for a skiing trip to Austria, then hiking in the Pyrenees and soon we'll go for a kitesurfing trip to Mauritius. So the meatspace bonding is actually very, very strong in our team.

kamilszybalski• 11 years ago

Just wait until they try Slack..

jgimenez5• 11 years ago

Ha! We tried it! But so far we're happy with HipChat.

One thing that makes Slack better for a company like us is the possibility to be in several teams at the same time. This is something HipChat should definitely look into!

nodata• 11 years ago

Business on a beach? I want to relax on a beach, not squint at a screen and work :)

CrunchyJams• 11 years ago

Agreed. There's something to be said about maximizing productivity and relaxation time. Also, it's nice that they have a business model that works from a remote location, but personal interactions with clients go a long way for most companies.

mcdougle2• 11 years ago

While I would rather not work while on the beach, I can definitely see the value of being able to work while at the beach.

What I mean is that, instead of having 2 weeks of vacation per year, having to schedule it, and when I get to the location I'm out of work mode entirely -- maybe I can up and leave my hometown at will, spend a week at the beach or in the mountains or wherever whenever I wish, and still be connected and able to get my work done.

So, for example, I could get up in the morning and get some stuff done. Around 2 or so I pop out to the beach for a few hours. Then I come inside to finish up with work in the evening.

jeffasinger• 11 years ago

I work remotely. This past winter I traveled to visit some family in a warm place. I spent the nicer days off, and enjoying my locale, and the not so nice days working as usual.

It's a nice way to only take 2 days off from work but actually get some relaxing time in a different setting.

user_0001• 11 years ago

These kind of posts sound like "sat on a deckchair on a beach with laptop in one head and a rum coconut in the other"

But I imagine they are more like "sat in a room in a house near the beach"

Same as a normal office, just a better view.

Well that is how it is for me living by the beach in the tropics. I can see the surfing point, I can see the parachutes pulled by speedboats, just a distraction and increases the desire to be "there" and not staring at a screen trying to fix bugs. Sometimes, I just move the table to face the wall.

And don't get me started about trying to work in a bar / cafe / restaurant near the beach. Mosquitos, noise, disturbance, tuts from staff that you are sitting there too long not buying enough.

Each to their own though. I suppose I am jealous of the posts that imply you can work 4 hours on tropical island, earn a western wage and live like a King. Which is far from the case in my experience. Even if I know these posts are trying to sell something based on this dream, or convince themselves they are doing the right thing (despite what they may hear from friends and family)

I dear say some contractor with fantastic contacts and get a great paying contract with a couple of phone calls. Most people don't have this.

crdoconnor• 11 years ago

I tried working on a beach for a few weeks in Thailand once. With the mosquitoes, bright glare on the screen, sunburn, and the lack of anywhere to get a decent cup of coffee, I found it to be not nearly as pleasant as I'd imagined it to be.

It sure is a nice dream to have during rainy winters when you're stuck in a cold office though.

throwaway12309• 11 years ago

If you work with a good remote team, they usually don't make you work on 9-5 kind of schedule. Sure they ask for some overlap, but it does allow you to take a Tuesday morning and go surfing/skating/just relax and then make up for it in the evening. I do. Yesterday I took my kid to a waterpark in the morning and then just worked until late to make up for it. No issue from my team whatsoever.

It also helps if all the team is senior and can work well together and understands the business. I can't see this working as well when you have juniors that need mentoring, or seniors that have zero clue about the business side of things so they need constant questioning.

Other companies see remote work mostly as a way to pay less for a developer, but want to treat him like he is in the office (heard stories of some companies wanting to have a constant video link to the office to make sure you aren't goofing off).

jgimenez5• 11 years ago

Hi user_0001, I'm the author of the article.

My point here was not about working the beach vs. somewhere else. It was about the possibility of working from wherever you want, but it has to be an appropriate place for what you're doing, of course.

For example this article I wrote in a terrace next to the beach. But that's because I love the sea and I found a good place to concentrate. Maybe your place is a quiet space next to the forest, or a lake, or... whatever! Just wanted to share that it's possible!

znq7• 11 years ago

You might wanna have a look at our post about moving our office for a month to an island in Thailand http://blog.mobilejazz.com/working-remotely-from-a-tropical-... which gives you a bit more insights on how "running a business on the beach" actually looks in reality.

agopaul• 11 years ago

I presume that you have to work with crappy internet connections in exotic places, how do you deal with it? It's interesting because, at Redokun, we switched away from Hipchat and migrated to Slack only because it worked much better on our slow/crappy connection.

znq7• 11 years ago

Actually in many places in the world (e.g. Middle East, Asia and Africa) you've crappy landline Internet connection, but if you use your phone you get 4G/LTE with high-speed and relatively low latency.

stephenr• 11 years ago

Depends where you are.

In Thailand you can get anything from 7/1 to 1000/100 mbit down/up, using a variety of adsl, docsis and fibre.

Add to that good 3G coverage and reasonable 4G coverage in popular areas.

I moved from Australia and have more options here (in a province capital but not Bangkok) than I did in suburban Melbourne.

balls187• 11 years ago

I got a toast notification saying that one of their developers is in the top 3% in the world (according to stackoverflow).

Interesting.

fmsf• 11 years ago

Top 3% in stackoverflow doesn't mean much. SO says I am top 2% and doesn't make me feel special. I just answered a couple of questions through the years.

joeyspn3• 11 years ago

Agree. I wonder if it's top 3% overall, or top 3% on a given period... During the end of 2014 I was in the top 0,06% and don't even consider myself a good dev. In fact I'm better at design...

msandford2• 11 years ago

Is it just me, or does keeping up with the 30 or so web tools they've outlined sound exhausting?

Being able to work remotely sounds great. But I can't help but wonder if the time saved not commuting all gets eaten up by project management overhead and just logging in to all the services every morning.

insulanian• 11 years ago

Exactly my thought! Many of these tools seem overlapping, and to keep these overlapping areas in sync doesn't sound like fun. Also, as you mentioned, logging into multiple places all the time is sub-optimal.

franrull• 11 years ago

Hi there, I work at Mobile Jazz and it actually takes me less than 1 minute to log in to every service (that's when I have to log in, cause most of the times I'm already logged in). In terms of Syncing, Asana does a nice job integrating several services via some extensions (like Harvest for example to start your timer directly from a task), also, most of the time we have a central document per project where we keep all the different links and references that are relevant to it. I work half of the time at the office, some days from my apartment in Barcelona and at least once a year I travel to Mexico and keep working from there while I spend some time with my family. Over the time I have get used to the remote working mindset and I must say that I find it very efficient.

bmcgee843• 11 years ago

30 is a bit of an exaggeration don't you think? I counted 13 tools, 9 of which share (or can share) a common login (Google). This is far from as onerous as you're making it out to be.

msandford2• 11 years ago

Yes, it was an exaggeration. But they also talked about having a bunch of different hipchat rooms and things like that. They also talked about having everyone log all their time in harvest.

I get that consultancies have to log hours, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag for the people who work there. And every hipchat room that you have to keep up with is additional overhead.

So you're right that 30 is an exaggeration. But that doesn't mean that they don't have overhead (in terms of time) from using these online tools.

pitchups• 11 years ago

The biggest challenge we found in working with a globally dispersed team, is the time difference - between say, India/Thailand and the US. When it is working hours in one zone, it is bedtime in the other. How do you deal with that?

jgimenez5• 11 years ago

Hey pitchups. You're right, this is a complex thing.

We try to have a minimum amount of overlap where we all work together every day. If you realize our offices are only in one half of the globe approximately, so this is usually possible. The trip to Thailand was a special case, for example, where we had to shift a bit the regular working hours in order to make it work. But the important part is that we could make it work :)

Also we try to have a lot of communication asynchronously via Asana tasks or Google groups for things that don't need urgent attention.

antidaily• 11 years ago

Mobile Jazz? Is that like radio on the internet?

Running a 20 People Business from the Beach

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