Distributed startup founder here. We love Figma, keep in touch with Gather.town, and have been very happy with Flat.app for keeping us from Asana/Slack hell.
Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
41–50 of 290 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#42One thing I've found useful is to have deliberate google meet calls when having planning discussions or firming up decisions. I set up the recording and transcription and then up front we define the problem and what we want the outcome to be. Afterwards I give the transcription to ChatGPT and get it to summarise the content, decisions, etc and add that to our documentation with a link to the recording. This helps you…
Gemini is actually good for audio transcriptions, I tried other AI tools that were much worse.
I didn’t find another good use of Gemini, but the audio transcription combined with the summaries were great. Best I’ve seen.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
ALL work is transactional. I solve your problems, you pay me money. I have family and friends for "social interaction" and "meaning". I do not seek that from a job, nor do I want a job that claims to provide it. Any recruiter that tells me "our company is like a family" gets a reply that says "so i can cry on your shoulder in case of a bad breakup, and you'll help me move furniture?" and then gets blocked.
This is such a simplistic take. There is a huge gulf between "We are a family" saccharine corporate BS and "I am a cog in the machine. I am forced to make conversation. Hello Coworker How Do You Do" robo-employee mnemonic. Personally I prefer to work with people who have a sense of humor, self-awareness about the importance (or lack of) of our work, have some interesting things to talk about it, can be surprising, et…
100%
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#44Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
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Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#45Slack / IM often
Use video chat for meetings (encourage camera on but don't require it - management should lead by example)
Be kind. Reach out using other forms of communication (like snail mail) if you want to encourage each other with thank you notes, etc.
Use some kind of shared wiki for long term 'shared ownership' documentation. Don't be afraid to lead by example. Don't be obtuse. Give visual examples of processes, technical components, etc.
Lean into visual examples everywhere you can (screenshots, mock-ups, diagrams, etc).
In video chat, screen share and encourage use of annotations when discussing things. (Zoom has this feature and it's awesome)
Use an agile cadence. Encourage people to share questions / concerns at story grooming sessions (which should be regular). Also encourage feedback at retrospectives (which should also happen regularly). Managers should lead by example in blameless retrospectives and lean into positive feedback.
If you're a team of all dudes (or any one thing), you have a blindspot with perspective. You should rectify that.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#46A few things help me:
Get used to the idea that someone isn’t necessarily there when you message. Try to predict when you’ll need to talk to someone and send the message with the info you need.
Document. Everything. Confluence needs to become your best friend. You and your colleagues rely on this information to keep up on things they might miss.
When you’re planning work, especially with lots of uncertainty, optimise to be inefficient. It’s better to start with 20-person calls at the start of a big project and cut them down later than to have 3-person calls and realise you missed critical people 2 weeks before your target date.
On the flip side, once you know what you’re doing, keep your status checks lean. Invite only the leads you need and write down the outcomes to share with the wider team.
Be willing to change your communication habits as you grow. A weekly all-hands is fine for a 10-person startup. It’s a monumental waste of time when you have 200 people across 5 departments.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#47Try to reduce the number of required sync meetings in favor of async alternatives. For the required sync meetings, make sure there is a rock solid agenda and EVERYONE knows what is expected from them going in. Make sure the meetings cover meaningful material and helpful to all attendees. Encourage everyone to speak up and contribute. If you find certain individuals not contributing or not prepared, proactively have a conversation with them outside the meeting to reset expectations.
For async communication, it can still be helpful to set specific windows of time for things to get discussed. Example, Mondays 9am-Noon ET we review/discuss sprint goals. I like to record short videos with Loom to kick off discussions like this. Make sure to center these types of communication around specific tools, e.g. JIRA, Confluence, Google Docs, etc. Make sure the discussions convert to traceable decisions in your tooling.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#48Distributed startup founder here. We love Figma, keep in touch with Gather.town, and have been very happy with Flat.app for keeping us from Asana/Slack hell.
+1 for Gather.town we've been using it for years
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#491. gather.town 2. Zulip (nuances of design much better than other chat systems for remote work specifically) 3. the 'latent energy' is going to be lower when people aren't eating lunch together and rubbing shoulders. you have to bring the energy to an empty room all the time when working remote. this also has to be exemplified by founders. doesn't mean loudness but instilling a sense of urgency etc.
We have been using Zulip as well now for a few years. Especially enforcing topics is a big win.
Re: Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?
#50One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer. A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat a…
> This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.
Emphasis mine.
This difference of what people consider genuine or not, some people even including the medium itself in their definition of "genuine", sounds like another possible cultural difference that must be kept in mind when communicating with others.