🌎 Shopify’s remote work playbook
Podup | Best 3 Business Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇
GM, this is Podup #16. Discover the best 3 business podcasts of the week (save 2 hours 47 mins listening in the process).
What you need to know
🌎 Shopify’s remote work playbook
❌ Why avoid big product launches
💍 Choosing the right co-founder
Take a leaf out of Shopify’s book
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🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 49 mins listening)
Shopify have nailed remote working. They've built apps and processes to help teams book off-sites on a whim. It's so good they could probably spin out their own corporate travel business worth $1B+. Brandon Chu, VP of Product at Shopify, sits down with Lenny to reveal their secrets to remote working.
What they say
What is a burst?
In person still matters. That doesn’t mean we’re rolling back that we’re remote only. What we’ve done is institute something we call bursts.
Bursts at Shopify are the ability for your team to come together once a quarter to do really high velocity, creative work and to hang out together.
We have in-house web and mobile apps that allow teams to one click say ‘We want to do a burst in Laguna beach with 20 people.’
You click the button and then flights and hotels get booked, food is taken care of, and there’s no expenses that go back and forth.
We have experiences in France and Ireland. I’ll leave a bit to the imagination, but it’s really cool.
Now teams are doing it all the time. You choose what type of thing you’re trying to do, whether it’s a pure work thing or you wanna have a little bit of activity and social aspects to it.
We also have a policy that says for 90 days a year you can work from any country that you want.
Brandon Chu
What I say
Why it matters: Shopify’s HR budget is significantly larger than most. But, that shouldn’t deter you from adopting some of these best practices. Working from abroad? That’s easy. You can enact this policy tomorrow with little effort and huge upside for hiring and retention.
Launching bursts? That’s a bit more challenging. It requires budget and coordination to make it work well. You don’t necessarily need to follow a quarterly cadence. Try an annual offsite first. Learn from what works, what doesn’t work, and what can be improved. Then optimise for next time.
Between the lines: If Shopify doesn’t pull the AWS card and launch their own corporate travel company, then there’s a real opportunity for a Podup reader to build this instead. At Medicspot, we have a similar setup to Shopify, except we’re in the office 1 day a week and we don’t have a fancy in-house app to book off-sites with a single click.
We book and organise our quarterly leadership off-sites internally. I’d love to outsource everything. We can then focus on the things that make our beer taste great. Similar to AirBnb’s new design where you search by category (think castles, caves, and treehouses) you could design corporate travel packages based on experiences:
🌳 Woodland retreats
🏄♀️ Team building activities
🏙 Central off-sites in the city
🌮 Fun food tours
I have a bunch of ideas on this so let me know if you intend to build this!
Thanks to Ben for recommending this episode. Reply with your favorite episode for a chance to have this featured next week.
Ship small and quickly
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🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 1 min listening)
You know you’ve made it when your house looks like this. Chris Oliver has achieved every Indiehacker’s dream. Financial freedom, full flexibility, a f*#%ing huge mansion. It took him years to get Go Rails to $1M+ annual revenue. He shares his startup journey and advice on product launches on the Indiehackers podcast.
🔥 Finally moved in this weekend!
Now I've got to setup the new @GoRails HQ in my office. Mirrors, landscaping, and a bunch of other things left to do, but it's nice to finally be done with the hard part.
What they say
Don’t rely on launches to succeed
I don’t like the idea of working super hard on something, keeping it hidden, then having this one pivotal moment where it has to work.
You’re sweating balls the whole time wondering if it’s going to go well. I’ve never done anything with Indiehackers that way.
For the forum, the product directory, and the podcast, [my plan was to] put it out quietly, keep working on it and keep iterating on it. What you can do is launch things later.
The Indiehackers forum existed for a year and a half before I put it on Product Hunt. By the time I put it on Product Hunt, it was already really big, I had iterated all of the kinks out, and I felt confident about the launch. Even if the launch was a dud, I knew the forum was doing really well regardless.
Courtland Allen
Beta launch > Big launch
That is what I just did for a course. I haven’t officially launched it yet either.
I had a fake launch two months ago. It was an early access. You still pay for the course but if you want to review it and give me feedback, I will go and take your feedback and improve the course and then answer questions that you have in the course.
It was a way for me to get students more involved who were really excited about it. Once it’s pretty polished and reviewed by actual people, then I can do an official launch.
It was nice to charge for the pre-release version of it and do extra work for you personally while its in this beta period.
Chris Oliver
What I say
Why it matters: This reminds me of Reid Hoffman’s famous quote:
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”
Of course there are nuances. This doesn’t apply to the likes of Apple or Microsoft. You expect the best quality whenever they launch a new product. The advice is more useful for indiehackers and solopreneurs. If you don’t already have millions of users and a brand to maintain, then ship small, ship quickly, and iterate before any kind of launch.
Between the lines: I try my best to dogfood the advice I give. Jakob Greenfeld summaries this perfectly:
99% of the things I write are really just things I need to hear myself.
This is another one of those times. I purposely avoided spending time on a big launch for the new Podup platform. Instead, I moved 80% of the pre-launch checklist to a post-launch checklist. My focus was on shipping before July 1st (which I did) and talking to readers to confirm this solves the problem I set out to address.
The feedback so far has been invaluable. The shit list of things to fix or change is as long as my arm. That’s a good thing. It means Podup will be co-designed by the community. I want to thank one reader in particular - Rob from North Carolina. He sent a PowerPoint with 12 slides on what he likes and what to improve. It has made the world of difference.
The second most important decision you’ll make
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🥇 First place (4 min read vs 57 mins listening)
Choosing your spouse is the most important decision you’ll ever make. They’ll be your partner throughout life and the mother or father to your children. Choosing your co-founder is arguably the second most important decision you’ll make. They’ll significantly impact the success or failure of your business.
What they say
Sam’s co-founder dating questions
I’m working on this new business and I have 6 figures in cash in the bank. It’s an exclusive private paid community.
I’m starting it with my friend Joe. We did something interesting the other day. When I started companies in the past I partnered with the wrong people. Not every time but some times.
The mistake that I’m trying to not make this time is making sure I partner with the right folks.
It’s very similar to a marriage. We said separately write down:
-> What does success look like to you in 10 years?
-> What are you willing to give up in order to achieve that?
-> In your day to day, what do you value and how do you want to get there?
We each wrote down [our answers] and came together and said ‘Here’s all the things that are important to me, let’s look at what’s important to you.’
There’s another thing. Let’s say you’re Lance Armstrong. It’s 1999. You know that everyone’s cheating. You have to cheat if you want to win. What’re you gonna do?
There’s no right or wrong answer but let’s see how our values align in different scenarios.
We’re trying to figure out why won’t this partnership work. Let’s get all of this out of the way first. It has been awesome. More people should do this.
In a way, a business partnership is more of a commitment than a marriage because with a marriage you can end it and be over. With a business, screwing up your cap table, it’s kind of an irreversible decision. The only way to reverse it is by spending a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money.
Sam Parr
What I say
Why it matters: This advice isn’t applicable to most people. Few of us are looking for co-founders right now. What it can do is give you ideas for a similar workshop when hiring future leaders.
I’ve seen firsthand how a bad hire at the executive level can cause 10X more damage than good. To prevent this, you need to take more than a couple of interviews before pulling the trigger on a hire.
Try tweaking this exercise for your own values and company. Get to know future leaders on a deeper level, see how you align from a values perspective, and commit yourself to saying no if you detect a red flag.
Between the lines: Oli Brooks and Dr Zubair Ahmed are co-founders of Medicspot. We’ve been going for 5+ years so the marriage between them is pretty strong. They weren’t college roommates or childhood friends - they started the company together as strangers. Oli refers to this period of time as founder dating. He was an engineer looking to start a new business following a recent exit of his previous startup. Here’s what he has to say about that time:
“Think of it like speed dating. You go for coffees, lunches or drinks with potential co-founders. You don’t have long to get to know them. But the importance of the decision cannot be downplayed.
You’ve got to very quickly see if there’s a connection. Is this someone I want to work with day in, day out, for the next 5 years? I knew Zubair was the right fit when he said one line ‘Healthcare is broken. A GP should be able to have 6 consultations an hour. I’m going to fix that.’ At that point, I knew I wanted to work on Medicspot."
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.