To be honest, there certainly might be more than 3 (it's hard to keep track of 700 companies!). The Zapier guys write a lot of great stuff on remote working on their blog.
- Rainforest QA (for which I work for)
- Heroku
- Librato
- CircleCI
- Zappier
And there's probably a lot more than that.
What are the 3 companies you had in mind?
the anecdotes, research and techniques that kevin used and drew upon were impressive. had to try very hard not to feel dishearted about how clever you need to be to succeed.
In my start-up, currently I'm just doing the technical part of writing the code, etc. to get the product to work well, but a little before or after going live with a version 1.0 I will need to consider your ideas and likely use several of them.
Your ideas, and experience, on managing a team, including people working from home, was terrific, by far some of the best team management ideas and experience I've heard.
Some of what you are suggesting is close to at least three ideas in E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, e.g., that important qualities are caring, respect, and responsiveness.
A fourth Fromm idea is knowledge, that is, for a couple to "give knowledge of themselves to each other". Since the relationship between a business and a user/customer is not really like a romantic couple, Fromm's idea does not fully carry over to a business relationship, but maybe some of it does: The company should try to get the customer/user to give the company, or at least the company's customer support, knowledge of how they think/feel about the product/service. Also, your idea of giving a user a list of product enhancements "since you were gone" (nice wording, suggestive of the caring, longing, pathos in the old movie Since You Were Away) can be viewed as the company giving knowledge of themselves to the user/customer. Nice.
Some of your descriptions of your UX seem to want to give the company a personality, and I can't help but think of the guest post
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/guest-post-how-to-social.htm...
by Fakegrimlock, robot dinosaur.
A few weeks ago, Fred Wilson, of AVC.com, posted that post again and said that it was the most popular post on AVC.com or some such.
Have you seen that post? Do you see some similar or different views?
http://www.particletree.com/features/on-asking-users-for-the...
Nice lecture!
https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/24-quotes-from-kev...
1. Really try create amazing first moments in your product
2. There are many first moments in your product, every feature of your product has a first moment
3. The little things that tell your users who is behind the company are VERY IMPORTANT, ROARRR tooltip, a little poem in sign up forms. It's the little things
4. Deeply implement Support Driven Development in your company culture
5. Let your users know what happened since they have been gone. --> set up a drip campaign, which reminds users who haven't logged in for a while
6. Send handwritten thank you cards to your BEST customers is very valuable
What is your opinion on using platforms such as oDesk.com for tracking remote workers?
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