Remote Work & Ghosting
Murphy’s Law. Remote teams will pull a Houdini on you (if you let them).
Ghosting
There will come a time (at a critical moment) where they will ghost you, be unresponsive for half an hour on a coffee break, or even a day or two late sometimes if the expectations were not made clearly enough.
In an office, getting out of a chair to speak to the guy is easy. Physical presence has a stimulating (and/or regulating) effect.
Remotely, however — people could decide to get off their device and just ghost. I, for example, will go surfing or riding bikes or kites.
In remote work, this is a pervasive problem in many early-stage startups; because work freedom is an easy perk to offer when you, as a founder, are still winning the talent war over to get new hires onboard.
But when it comes to practice, systems need to be in place to ensure the project runs as autonomously as possible.
But it takes time, training and commitment from all parties to develop a smooth & efficient workflow habit (and/or project pipeline).
Project Management (systems enabled)
Until you get effective enough at project management to juggle multiple stacks, your startup most likely cannot scale (unless you somehow convince a skilled startup CEO to run the stack on your behalf).
There are a range of apps that help with project management. My favorite is Todoist, introduced to me at Running Remote Conference in Bali.
From this conference I also met a client who gave me the opportunity to help raise multimillions (in $USD), and do many other cool things.
Culture is a solution (but not the only one)
Culture is sometimes touted as a powerful secret weapon in project management, but nobody has a clear formula (except for you, and you still have to mess around through trial and error to find it while potentially bleeding time, money and effort).
This will test the robustness of your sanity.
Oh, the problems of an entremanure…#entrepreneurialthought
