Remote-Working - Why Startups Are Going Remote In 2018

Today’s post is written by John Cunningham, co-founder of Remote Rise, which helps companies big and small go remote and enjoy the benefits of a distributed team. At Product Hunt, we’re big fans of going remote. With 2/3rds of our team outside of San Francisco and spread across 9 different time zones, we rely on tools like Slack and Zoom for communication within our distributed team. Read on to the see the benefit of going remote in 2017. 🌍

We’ve seen big companies like Automattic, Toptal, and GitHub employ large remote workforces, but we’re starting to see smaller companies like GitLab and Zapier start remote, and stay remote.

But why are more startups choosing a distributed model now more than in years past? It comes down to this: more startup founders are going remote because it’s a necessity rather than a luxury.

In an increasingly competitive landscape, both funded and bootstrapped startups are looking for ways to be more productive at lower cost. When growth and efficiency hacks are more highly sought after than ever, remote work presents some pretty enticing upside for startups.

Here are a few reasons why founders are going with a distributed work model:

1. It makes business sense to go remote
   First off, founders are kissing the office overhead goodbye because almost every job at a company can be done remotely. For example:

Ask any developer that commutes to work each day, and they’ll tell you that they probably wouldn’t work from an office if it was not required.

When it comes to hiring salespeople, most salespeople are considered to be “inside sales.” As someone who has sold software (inside sales), from both a traditional and remote office, there’s almost no difference other than swapping out my loud coworkers for mostly quiet dogs.

Customer support? They’re monitoring a dashboard on a piece of cloud based software and responding to issues by chat or other cloud based meeting tools.

In general, companies are contributing to, selling, and servicing a product that’s not usually housed where it’s employees work anyway. The product is almost always cloud based, and the employees do most of their work on other 3rd party cloud based products. It isn’t hard to fathom why an office might not be needed to work effectively.

1. Advances in enterprise software
   Knowing that everyone theoretically could work from home at a startup has always been intriguing, but arguable not possible in the past. Communication technology from even a few years ago was not good enough to support a fully distributed team. New technology and better iterations of old technology have made workflow and communication faster, and in general, much more feasible in a remote work environment.

Remote teams communicate with each other asynchronously for the most part, meaning the time gap between communications can be quite large at times. In the past, remote companies were maybe a bit too asynchronous…possibly to the point of inefficiency.

Today, tools like Slack, Zoom, and Trello are bridging the gap between synchronous and asynchronous communication. They’re re-creating the office experience in a virtual environment. Slack, with all of its channels, GIFs, and sharing features is like a virtual office, and Zoom.us enables teams to meet face to face.

The Product Hunt team found out about their own acquisition by AngelList on a Zoom call
The days of communication inefficiencies on remote teams are gone, and all of the “water cooler moments” at offices can be replicated virtually. In fact, according to this report, remote workers in 2017 perform the same if not better than their onsite counterparts.

1. Access to a global talent pool
   The third, and maybe most important reason that startups are going remote is access the global talent pool.

For software companies, the norm has been to put down roots near a local pool of tech talent. Niche skill-sets are highly sought after within local talent pools, so why limit the company to one local talent pool?

The market for highly skilled workers in San Francisco is so competitive that founders are looking for talent elsewhere. It’s hard to compete with what Facebook and Google are offering.

Now, if a small startup finds an incredible senior engineer in Fargo, North Dakota, then signing up and retaining that person becomes a whole new ballgame. The cost of employment is lower, and companies like Zapier have found that remote employees tend to stick around longer (less attrition).

The same concept goes for finding a cofounder. Non-technical people with dreams of starting a software company are going to be hard pressed to find a CTO in saturated areas. Instead of going head to head with well known software companies, non-technical founders might seek a technical cofounder outside of big tech markets. There are many reasons (family, and others) why a highly skilled person may not be in a position to move to Silicon Valley to join a small team. Remote is a viable solution for many people.

Closing thoughts
I worked for a tech company in the bay area about 3 years ago, and one day I found myself having in depth conversations with my manager over Slack…while he stood across from me at our bank of standup desks.

I remember thinking… Every person in this room could be doing these exact things from their house. Turns out I wasn’t the only person thinking that offices are not completely necessary for startups. People like working from home. According to this report, remote work went up by 115% from 2005–2015 and continues to climb today.

Today, communication tools have gotten to a high enough level and the talent pool is so competitive in certain areas, that it doesn’t make sense to start a company with one physical location. From what I’ve learned working at a few remote software startups, if I were to start a company tomorrow, it would be a no-brainer to go remote.

Winners of the Product Hunt Global Hackathon 2018 🌎

Nearly two months ago we announced the Product Hunt Global Hackathon to bring together makers from around the world. Unlike traditional hackathons, this event took place online through the entire month of November with over $250,000.

Over 4,500 makers from 124 different countries signed up. Teams were challenged to design, build, and ship a working product within the month and evaluated based on the following criteria:

Whether the product solves a true problem
Uniqueness of the solution
Strength of execution
Each team was given access to Ship, a toolkit to help makers build and ship awesome products, sharing updates and gathering feedback along the way.

Last week we and the judges reviewed projects. The results were impressive.

Today we’re excited to share the winning teams across six categories — Blockchain/Crypto, Social Impact, AI/Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Slack, and Google Assistant — in addition to the grand prize winners.

Blockchain/Crypto Category
These past months have been exciting in the blockchain and crypto industry. The Coinbase app hit the #1 spot on the App Store last week, bitcoin has reached all-time highs, and governments are even launching their own cryptocurrencies. While bubbly, we’re beginning to see several creative, useful applications of blockchain technology and promising cryptoassets emerging.

Winner: Supermax is a set of web APIs to access and manage data on the Ethereum blockchain. While current solutions require developers to create internal databases and run expensive nodes and servers to organize and analyze this data, Supermax allows anybody to quickly interact with data stored on the Ethereum blockchain.

Personally, I was impressed by the applicability of their product: decentralized applications built on top of the Ethereum blockchain like CryptoKitties have taken the community by storm, so it’s exciting to see products built to make building easier. Well done, Kuan and Chunxi!

Social Impact Category
Technology has the potential to fundamentally improve the lives of millions. Drones are delivering urgent medicines and blood transfusions to remote hospitals across Africa, and a whole category of apps such as Resistbot are helping constituents reach their representatives in Congress.

It’s encouraging to see the interest in building products for good with over 40% of teams submitting projects in this category, it was by far the most competitive. As a result, we decided to elect two winners for this category.

Winner #1: Donate Your Website is an embeddable plugin that allows websites to donate their web traffic to a good cause. With just a few lines of code, any website owner can quickly funnel attention to causes that deserve the attention.

Sometimes the most effective solutions don’t require a complicated product. Congratulations to Adrianna, Morgan, Jesse, and Jim!

Winner #2: Sempo allows anybody to donate directly to verified individuals who are affected by large-scale disasters. Instead of relying on intermediaries to process, manage, and deliver aid, Sempo allows users to donate directly to people in need.

Built by 19-year-old Tristan and Nick from Australia, the app has already been used to donate funds to victims of the California wildfire and Mount Agung eruption.

AI / Machine Learning Category
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will power the next generation of products for consumers and businesses. These applications typically require vast computing resources to build predictive models, so we partnered with Amazon Web Services to provide the winners of this category $100,000 in AWS credits to power their app through the next stages of development.

Winner: Audify curates, collects, and delivers articles and content from your favorite places on the internet based on how much time you have to listen. Built with an entire suite of Amazon products, this tool creates easily-digestible summaries for all of your favorite content.

This reminds me of Umano, a product I loved but was ultimately shut down shortly after its Dropbox acquisition. Truthfully, I think they were ahead of their time, before the proliferation of Echo and Google Home devices. Great work, Chris and Andrew!

Augmented Reality Category
We’re beginning to see a ton of interesting AR apps hit Product Hunt (this is one is particularly stunning), in part thanks to Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore. While many might be viewed as glorious tech demos, we expect to see more useful and potentially viral Pokemon Go-like experiences in 2018.

Winner: Scavengar is a worldwide, augmented reality scavenger hunt. Explore your city and find gems tied to real-world locations to win points in the game, all through your camera’s lens.

Well done, Stefan and Arthur. Excited to try this out when it’s public!

Slack Category
Over the past few years Slack’s developer platform has matured, introducing a wave of bots and apps for teams to play with. As remote working and distributed teams rise in prominence Slack and its app ecosystem becomes increasingly important. Although, not every app needs to be about productivity. 😉

Winner: Klue is an text based interactive Slack game, allowing employees to work together to solve the mystery of who sold your company’s secret to your competitor.

This is delightfully nostalgic, reminiscent of early text-based adventure games. Love it, Ghyslain and Jérémy!

Google Assistant Category
It’s early days for voice-based apps as more of consumer’s behavior shifts from traditional tap tap computing to voice-based input thanks to platforms like Google Assistant. As a long-time owner of a Google Home device, I was particularly excited to see what makers built in this category.

Winner: Autometa is an open-sourced IoT platform for your car’s health, giving owners an opportunity to literally talk to their car via Google Assistant to read the car’s gas level, location, and health.

Built by two student makers in Australia, both the judges and team were impressed by the execution and unique of this project. Congratulations on the win, Arjun and Alex! 👏

Overall Winners
Now for the overall Hackathon winners!

insert drum roll
Third Place Overall
Machine learning models can be terribly difficult to implement or apply to datasets, especially for beginners. Provisioning infrastructure and tuning these models can be overwhelming.

Winner: Kenza is a plug and play application for data scientists and developers to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. Track the effectiveness and progress of your various models in one place.

The entire judging team was impressed by how easy this service is to use compared to current solutions. Thanks to our partners, the Kenza team will receive $15,000 in AWS credits, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas. Congratulations to Pavlos, Alex, Thelxi, and Joakim!

Second Place Overall
This one’s wild. Our second place prize goes to two high school students for people that love sweets.

Winner: SweetBud is a magical coffee cup lid that makes any coffee taste sweet using electrical currents to stimulate your tongue. Compatible with almost every coffee cups, you can use the connected mobile application to adjust and track the sweetness of your coffee instantly.

The entire team was impressed by the uniqueness of this solution and the amount of progress made in just a month. Sierra and Simon will receive $25,000 in AWS credits, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas.

As someone that avoids sugar, I’m excited to see where this goes. ☕

First Place Overall
The recent interest in blockchain technologies has created a new generation of bitcoin, ethereum, and crypto-millionaires. Unfortunately, the tax law surrounding this entire industry is confusing and unclear, especially for individuals not accustomed to reporting their own capital gains taxes.

Winner: Token Tax files all of your cryptocurrency taxes for you, integrating directly with Coinbase’s API to import all of your investments and export a single PDF that you can submit directly to the IRS for review.

Huge congratulations to our top winners, David and Alex. They’ll receive a $100,000 in AWS credits to pursue Token Tax (or any other project you’d like), a fully-inclusive trip to TechCrunch Disrupt, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas. 🎉

Honorable Mentions
With hundreds of submissions from around the world, we wanted to recognize other notable products that caught our eye. In no particular order:

🛍️ TinyMerch, an all-in-one ecommerce and manufacturing store.
👔 Leveled, a tool to discover and rate work cultures.
🛠️ Publicly, a platform to help makers build in public.
🌎 OneRelief, an app to democratize philanthropy and giving.
📊 Spreadshare, a spreadsheet database on the blockchain.
🎙️ Broadcast, a social podcast app to find the best episodes.
🔗 ProveIt, a tool to prove ownership of assets on the blockchain.
📑 MuchCloser, an AI-powered CRM for your personal life.
💸 Munt, which is like Stripe but for cryptocurrencies.
📸 Autolocus, a tool to find the best Kodak moments using ML.
🎁 Papeye, an easy way to buy and gift cryptocurrencies.
💰 Cryptoradar, a tool to find the cheapest bitcoin anywhere.
💍 MoodRing, a beautiful mood-tracker for your life.
🍳Kitchen Assistant, a voice-powered soús chef.
📈 Million People Homepage, a viral donation engine for charity.
🕵️‍♂️ cQuoi, an AI-powered search engine for art and style.
🤖 Mongobot, a Slackbot that can run MongoDB queries.
💬 Franky, an IoT platform built on top of Slack.
🛫 YARN, a new way for travelers to explore cities.

Thanks to our friends and partners
Of course, thanks again to our judges for taking the time out of their busy schedules to review projects. This included Michael Seibel (CEO, Y Combinator), Alexis Ohanian (Cofounder Reddit + Initialized Capital), Sophia Mahfooz (COO at Girls in Tech, Inc.), Morgan Beller (Corporate Development, Facebook), Startup L. Jackson (Social Media F*cking Master), Sarah Tavel (General Partner, Benchmark), Matt Sandler (Startup BD, Amazon/AWS; EIR, Techstars Music), Alexia Bonatsos (Writer), Hiten Shah (Founder), Anil Dash(CEO, Fog Creek Software), Justin Kan (CEO of Atrium LTS, Founder of Twitch), Michael Lopp (VP Engineering, Slack), Cyan Banister (Partner, Founders Fund), and Sarah Buhr (Writer, TechCrunch).

Also huge high five to our partners for spreading the word and supporting makers.

AWS
Amazon Web Services provides startups with low cost, easy to use infrastructure needed to scale — from the spark of an idea, to your first customer, to IPO and beyond. Constantly innovating in cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence services, and developer tools, AWS is trusted by the largest enterprises and hottest startups alike.

Dribbble
Dribbble is on a mission to build the world’s best platform for designers to gain inspiration, feedback, education, community, and job opportunities. They serve as the go-to resource for discovering and connecting with designers around the globe.

Girls in Tech
Girls in Tech is a global non-profit focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of girls and women who are passionate about technology. With over 100,000 members, we exist to provide women with a platform for growth, but we operate with the spirit of the girl within all of us — fearless, lively and determined.

The Google Assistant
The Google Assistant allows you to have a natural conversation between you and Google. It’s one Assistant that’s ready to help you throughout your day and is accessible on more than 100M devices including Android and iPhones, Google Home and voice-activated speakers, Android TV, smart home and wearables.

Glitch
Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. With working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment — anybody can build a web app on Glitch for free. Here’re some starter apps to help get you up and hacking quickly.

Indie Hackers
Indie Hackers is a community where the makers behind profitable businesses and side projects come to share their stories (and revenue numbers) transparently, and where other entrepreneurs can learn from those examples, discuss their own ideas and projects, and give each other feedback and support.

Slack
Slack takes the hardest part of all our jobs — communication — and makes it simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. Whether you’re collaborating, brainstorming, striking deals, approving expenses, standing up with your team or sitting down with a new client, you can do that all in Slack. Today, more than 9 million people around the world — from Fortune 100 companies to thriving neighborhood restaurants — rely on Slack to bring their teams together, make sense of their work, and drive their businesses forward.

Stripe Atlas
Starting a company can be needlessly complicated — lengthy paperwork, bank visits, legal complexity, numerous fees, and non-obvious decisions about what services to use. Stripe Atlas to make this easy: a tool to handle everything involved in establishing business. Within minutes, Stripe Atlas allows entrepreneurs to incorporate as a Delaware C Corporation, get a signed certificate of incorporation, bylaws, and board consent; IRS Employer Identification Number (EIN); access to your business bank account, a Stripe account and access to the full Stripe product suite; and special offers on startup services. Product Hunt Hackathon participants can skip the line and get instant access to Stripe Atlas here.

TechCrunch Disrupt
TechCrunch Disrupt is coming back to San Francisco in a big way in 2018. As the preeminent global startup event for learning, innovation and networking, you’ll discover hundreds of early stage founders and emerging technologies making their debut! Sign up to be the first to hear about their exciting announcements to come in the weeks ahead at TechCrunch.com/DisruptSF.

Lastly, big thanks to everyone that participated. We’re looking forward to hosting another global hackathon in the new year. 😊