I've spent the better part of the past month working out of
coffee shops. It's an interesting aspect of the modern economy
that distributed teams can be so effective. Github, for example,
which hosts code for much of world including
Google,
Microsoft,
Facebook,
etc, has a single office in San Francisco but employees all over
the world. Several are right here in Nashville. I know a guy in
Chattanooga that works for Microsoft. An increasing trend
I've noticed in user group communities is that leaders tend to
be part of this remote workforce.
In the 21st century, why pay for expensive office space and be
limited to the local talent pool? One of the guys I work with
now lives in Florida. The bulk of our communication occurs
through Github and Slack. The same is true for the local guys on
our team. Next month we'll be getting a small office, though,
because coffee shops don't have whiteboards. Or refrigerators.
Ray, my wife's father, has been living with us again since late
summer. This is the third time he's lived with us in the past
few years, but hopefully he'll have his house back from his
other daughter next month. Ray plans to use it as an office. He
too is building a startup with a distributed team, although
several of them are in Johns Creek. Ray is not really into the
coffee shop thing, but he is on the phone alot.
Back in September before I started at GiveToken I built a nice
little piece of SaaS software (is that redundant?) to expand the
spreadsheet I'd been running since I watched Randy Pausch's
last lecture.
I called it
TaskGiraffe,
Cara made me a nice logo, and I started living in it like I used
to live in my spreadsheet. I got some friends and friends of
friends to try it out, but none seemed to find it as useful as I
did.
When I started at GiveToken last month, I stopped
spending time developing TaskGiraffe, but I still spent every
day on it. It does just about everything I want in a task
management system except complete the tasks for me. Maybe a
TaskRabbit
integration could solve that though... The point is, it is a
product that lends itself naturally to dogfooding. I recently
saw a
local Githubber
comment on the
NashDev Slack
that Github wikis are not very good because they don't use use
them at Github. "The parts we dogfood get more love."
Some products, however, do not lend themselves very well to
dogfooding. At LeadsPedia we didn't really start using our
performance marketing platform until we were doing a significant
amount of online marketing. At PatientFocus we couldn't really
try to collect our own medical bills. So I've been racking my
brain how we can dogfood at GiveToken. We aren't doing a
large amount of hiring right now, so we can't really send out
recruiting tokens ourselves to see how they improve the hiring
process. And we don't want to start trying to fill positions for
other companies because that would put us in direct competition
with the recruiting firms who are our customers.
Such are problems for next week. I'll keep noodling on it, but
right now I have to take a daughter to a soccer game. In the
mean time, enjoy my coffee shop selfies in case you missed them
on twitter:
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