A couple weeks ago our CEO, Bubs, was featured in a Fast Company piece with a few tips on working remotely. You see, being based out of Waimea, HI, he works reaaaally remotely. And the rest of the team? The other 10 members of Creative Market are scattered across the United States, spanning 6 different time zones.
Our other two co-founders are based on opposite coasts, with Chris in Portland, OR and Aaron in New York City. The remaining team members are sprinkled somewhere in between.
“When you’re all in the same office, you can peek over and see where somebody is at with something. When you’re across the world, you either need to bug them with messages or ask them to update you every step along the way. Trust becomes very important.â€
In the article, Bubs covers things like picking up the phone, investing in company face time, and buying a good alarm clock (his days start at 6am to catch the east coasters). In fact, this week our entire development team is in NYC together, getting to know each other and cranking to get ready for our launch.
As a company, we use tools like HipChat, UberConference, and Skype to keep communication simple, and tools like Dropbox, Asana, and Google Drive to make collaboration easy.
Although we may not share the same physical space each day, it never feels like we’re any less of a team. We have weekly team conference calls. We hang out in various chat rooms all day — sharing our work, sharing our hobbies, and sharing the occasional cute kitten photo. As you can see from our tweets, we get along quite well (and we’re also just a little excited about what we’re working on).
Working remotely for a startup takes hard work, flexibility for potentially odd hours, and a little extra effort to keep up the communication long distance. It’s totally worth it to have the opportunity to work from where we’re most comfortable, and still be a part of something awesome.
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Tinkerer. Maker of quirky fonts with a sprouty disposition.
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