I'm so passionate about remote work because of everything it has given me.
Time, opportunity, happiness and freedom.
The chance to let my daughters know their father far better than they otherwise would have. Freedom to drop and pick them up from school, attend events without having to get permission from my boss.
Opportunity to organize work around my life rather than the other way round
Why I needed to Become a Remote Worker
Peering over the top of my smartphone I caught my daughter doing something heart-breaking. She was competing for my attention, literally banging her drum louder and louder until my attention was both captured and ensured.
Having won my attention, smiling back at me, she continued to play and sing in the same manner with her, me her captive audience of one.
I captured it and tear every time I look at it now
As I sat enjoying the moment it immediately filled me with guilt and made me question how many times she’d wanted this before without having something as attention-grabbing as a drum to get my attention.
How much had I already missed and how much would I regret my life years from now looking back at everything that I had lost?
I founded my first startup remote from day 1
We intended to be a globally remote distributed team from day one, so you’d have thought that we’d have all the advantages when we hired the first member of our team. No systems existed to slow us down or get in our way so it should have been a simple process. Our CTO was joining us a month from now, we have 4 weeks to get everything in order.
I discovered how hard it was to get a remote worker set up
It was time-consuming, expensive, and the stuff never arrived on time. It led to a terrible first experience for our CTO.
We were in the process of raising seed investment to accelerate the platform and couldn’t believe nothing existed to make it easy to get everything any worker needs to work from home as safely, comfortably and productively as a other workers do from the office. Before we scaled up and hired 15-20 remote workers we decided to build a simple platform that made it easy so we would never have this experience again.
The web application let us send a link to our future team members, where they got to select:
- The laptop they wanted
- Microphone and headset
- The desk that fit their home
- The seat that matched their decor
- A refreshment machine (coffee or soft drink fridge)
- Refreshment subscription (soft drinks or coffee beans)
We wanted to create the best remote experience on the planet
We finished the product, and forgot about it while we built the FinTech product and raised investment. Long story short, we realized 6 months later than our CAC was far too high and it would be incredibly difficult to ever make money before we raised investment.
With 2 months runway in the bank, we began thinking about options. I mentioned the remote tool we built to a friend who is operating a similarly staged remote-first startup.
This was a huge problem for their team as well. They referred us to other people who had the same problem. We spoke to 250 founders of large and small startups, huge enterprises and small teams later and we understood that this was a massive, universal problem. Every team experienced the same problems, and they increased as the team got bigger. Not only that, but organizations who wanted to offer remote working to their teams held off doing so because there was no solution that let them offer the same experience to their remote workers that they got in the office.
At the same time, we realized we were the best team on the planet to deliver this product. I had delivered and installed physical products to the most remote environments on the planet our CTO had done the same thing for the installation of technical infrastructure and security.
What is Firstbase and who can it Help?
Firstbase is an all-in-one provisioning platform that lets companies of every size develop a remote work strategy instantly. We are progressing with the largest enterprises, all the way through to the hottest startups on the planet.
We provide all the practical equipment remote workers need at the touch of a button. Firstbase takes care of everything as a monthly subscription per worker, including delivery, upgrades, maintenance, repairs, and collections when a worker leaves. We help you:
- Be more cost-efficient
- Comply with regulation
- Save time on onboarding
- Slash your real-estate costs
Sign up for a demo of our platform here.
