
Running a 20 People Business from the Beach - franrull
http://blog.mobilejazz.com/running-a-20-people-business-from-the-beach/
======
msandford
Is it just me, or does keeping up with the 30 or so web tools they've outlined
sound exhausting?

Being able to work remotely sounds great. But I can't help but wonder if the
time saved not commuting all gets eaten up by project management overhead and
just logging in to all the services every morning.

~~~
insulanian
Exactly my thought! Many of these tools seem overlapping, and to keep these
overlapping areas in sync doesn't sound like fun. Also, as you mentioned,
logging into multiple places all the time is sub-optimal.

~~~
franrull
Hi there, I work at Mobile Jazz and it actually takes me less than 1 minute to
log in to every service (that's when I have to log in, cause most of the times
I'm already logged in). In terms of Syncing, Asana does a nice job integrating
several services via some extensions (like Harvest for example to start your
timer directly from a task), also, most of the time we have a central document
per project where we keep all the different links and references that are
relevant to it. I work half of the time at the office, some days from my
apartment in Barcelona and at least once a year I travel to Mexico and keep
working from there while I spend some time with my family. Over the time I
have get used to the remote working mindset and I must say that I find it very
efficient.

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nodata
Business on a beach? I want to relax on a beach, not squint at a screen and
work :)

~~~
user_0001
These kind of posts sound like "sat on a deckchair on a beach with laptop in
one head and a rum coconut in the other"

But I imagine they are more like "sat in a room in a house near the beach"

Same as a normal office, just a better view.

Well that is how it is for me living by the beach in the tropics. I can see
the surfing point, I can see the parachutes pulled by speedboats, just a
distraction and increases the desire to be "there" and not staring at a screen
trying to fix bugs. Sometimes, I just move the table to face the wall.

And don't get me started about trying to work in a bar / cafe / restaurant
near the beach. Mosquitos, noise, disturbance, tuts from staff that you are
sitting there too long not buying enough.

Each to their own though. I suppose I am jealous of the posts that _imply_ you
can work 4 hours on tropical island, earn a western wage and live like a King.
Which is far from the case in my experience. Even if I know these posts are
trying to sell something based on this dream, or convince themselves they are
doing the right thing (despite what they may hear from friends and family)

I dear say some contractor with fantastic contacts and get a great paying
contract with a couple of phone calls. Most people don't have this.

~~~
crdoconnor
I tried working on a beach for a few weeks in Thailand once. With the
mosquitoes, bright glare on the screen, sunburn, and the lack of anywhere to
get a decent cup of coffee, I found it to be not nearly as pleasant as I'd
imagined it to be.

It sure is a nice dream to have during rainy winters when you're stuck in a
cold office though.

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kelvin0
I can't believe they entrust all their family jewels in Google services. My
experience is that even when we used the paid Google services their customer
support is at best atrocious ... try not having access to your company's most
important collaborative documents for a few days ... never again for us.

~~~
justinsb
What alternative would you recommend / do you use now?

~~~
joeyspn
I also use some google products but if you're worried about the _big prying G
eyes_ and looking for a self-hosted replacement I guess sovereign is a good
(and easy to deploy) starting point ....

[https://github.com/al3x/sovereign](https://github.com/al3x/sovereign)

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toddmorey
I wonder if this is being upvoted for the idea of running a company from the
beach, or for the particular technology suggestions (everything Google +
Hipchat, Asana, Trello, and Harvest).

I've been remote for a long time, and have had better results with a different
suite of products.

~~~
aleixventa
What tools do you use?

I'm really interested in remote working and how to improve the day to day to
work and communication.

~~~
anonnomad
Skype has bad quality from e.g. Thailand. Google Hangouts none of my clients
(including myself) understand or can use. Still looking for a reliable and
proper internet audio/video solution. I wonder if there's better solutions.

~~~
pmontra
One of my customers (maybe two of them) use WebEx. They're paying for it but
WebEx has a free plan to make a call with up to 3 people. The web client
requires Java but a native client was preinstalled into the Samsung tablet I
bought 6 months ago. Quality is good. Screen sharing seems to be better than
with Skype and Hangout.

By the way, I had too many problems with Hangout so I can't recommend it, even
if today I had a four people conversation (audio only) and it was perfectly
fine.

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boothead
I'd be interested to know how you go about getting new business, if you
wouldn't mind sharing?

~~~
znq
Hey, I'm one of the co-founders of Mobile Jazz.

Initially most of the work came through our personal networks. Myself I grew
up in Germany and lived in San Francisco for some time. My co-founder had a
strong network in Barcelona through his previous job at Deloitte. Today we
still get requests through our personal network, however, most of our new
incoming work is simply referral based. We don't even have a single sales
person. So we try our best possible to do quality work, but also are actively
involved with our clients and partners and help them improve their own
businesses. This is not just an extra effort on our side, but also makes the
whole "work" thing way more exciting and interesting for ourselves, rather
than just being a sweatshop that churns out code.

We mostly work with startups, some of them as clients and some as partners.
But we also have been recommended and introduced to some big corporations in
various industries. And while we don't like the bureaucratic hassle that comes
with it, it does give us quite some stability. For example, a big medical
company just switched to use as their main supplier for web development, which
immediately gave us 30 new long-term projects.

Overall we always try to give a lot, be involved and pro-active and help where
we can. In the end you always get something in return. This has been my
personal philosophy since ever and always and we've also established this as
one of the cornerstones in our company culture.

~~~
joeyspn
Hi Stefan... your company culture sounds amazing. I see you're currently
hiring (via API... lol). I'd like to know what can a candidate expect
regarding salary. Do you have a reference/range?

~~~
znq
It's difficult to give a general answer to this question, for two reasons:

1) Everyone at MJ can choose how much they work. The the salary is depended on
how much you actually want to work. And that can change monthly and in extreme
cases even weekly.

2) We share the company profits with all employees. We basically pay out
quarterly bonuses, which are depending on the time worked, but multiplied with
a "subjective" of how much you've contributed to the overall success and
growth of Mobile Jazz.

Even though I can not give you a specific number, I can say that we pay very
high for Spanish standards and slightly above average for Germany. But still
below what a top engineering in SF would earn. But we might get there at some
point. That said, it all depends on where you live.

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kauffj
I run a ~10 person completely remote SaaS company and that matches our tools
exactly, even down to the way we set up our HipChat rooms* .

For MobileJazz or others that operate completely remotely, how often do you
meet face-to-face? We assemble the team twice a year. It's definitely possible
to run a company completely remotely, but I've still seen no remote substitute
for the interpersonal bonding that happens in meatspace.

* We don't invoice, so no Harvest.

~~~
philbarr
I work for a company that is completely remote, and we have an all-hands
meeting 2-4 times a year. As an employee I find I need these meetings just to
put faces to names, at the very least.

It also means you get a broader view of what everyone else is doing. It's easy
to have a very narrow view of just the project you're working on, so you lose
some of the cross-pollination of ideas between projects.

~~~
jgimenez
At Mobile Jazz we have a weekly meeting with everyone. We share what we have
been working on and especially the learning experiences of that week,
regardless if they are related to work or not. This helped us know each other
a bit better and also speak about things unrelated to work.

Also we pair people from different projects to work together for a couple of
hours per week, two different people every week. This helped a lot in learning
from other team members but also in general helping each other more often,
because we now know better who to ask when a certain question appears.

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balls187
I got a toast notification saying that one of their developers is in the top
3% in the world (according to stackoverflow).

Interesting.

~~~
fmsf
Top 3% in stackoverflow doesn't mean much. SO says I am top 2% and doesn't
make me feel special. I just answered a couple of questions through the years.

~~~
joeyspn
Agree. I wonder if it's top 3% _overall_ , or top 3% on a given period...
During the end of 2014 I was in the top 0,06% and don't even consider myself a
good dev. In fact I'm better at design...

~~~
znq
Top 3% overall. And I agree. It doesn't mean much. Just that I've answered a
lot of questions that people liked and upvoted. Nevertheless, it works for
marketing.

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agopaul
I presume that you have to work with crappy internet connections in exotic
places, how do you deal with it? It's interesting because, at Redokun, we
switched away from Hipchat and migrated to Slack only because it worked much
better on our slow/crappy connection.

~~~
znq
Actually in many places in the world (e.g. Middle East, Asia and Africa)
you've crappy landline Internet connection, but if you use your phone you get
4G/LTE with high-speed and relatively low latency.

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pitchups
The biggest challenge we found in working with a globally dispersed team, is
the time difference - between say, India/Thailand and the US. When it is
working hours in one zone, it is bedtime in the other. How do you deal with
that?

~~~
jgimenez
Hey pitchups. You're right, this is a complex thing.

We try to have a minimum amount of overlap where we all work together every
day. If you realize our offices are only in one half of the globe
approximately, so this is usually possible. The trip to Thailand was a special
case, for example, where we had to shift a bit the regular working hours in
order to make it work. But the important part is that we could make it work :)

Also we try to have a lot of communication asynchronously via Asana tasks or
Google groups for things that don't need urgent attention.

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antidaily
Mobile Jazz? Is that like radio on the internet?

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kamilszybalski
Just wait until they try Slack..

~~~
jgimenez
Ha! We tried it! But so far we're happy with HipChat.

One thing that makes Slack better for a company like us is the possibility to
be in several teams at the same time. This is something HipChat should
definitely look into!

