Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

Great list. Add a few..

1. Meet in person every quarter. Fly people into the HQ if there is one. If not just rent meeting place.

2. Have a well written handbook like Gitlab that explains how your company works.

3. Onboarding program - remote onboarding sucks. Do onboarding in person (if you can) or assign an onboarding buddy if you can’t.

4. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everything. Many people get overwhelmed. Great engineers don’t read everything nor should they. Let everyone know that it’s a shared brain or knowledge source - and it’s ok to turn it off to focus.

> 1. Gitlab somehow statistically tracks public / DMs. Haven’t implemented at my startup but if anyone knows a simple way to do - please let me know.

If you use Slack, I think the admin panel already contains the number of messages in channels VS DMs. Long time I last saw it myself, but I think it was missing a breakdown on how many members of the Slack received the channel/"public" messages (as not everyone is part of every channel, 2 member channels vs 200 member channels for example), maybe it looks different now.

> 5. Slack Is Great But (SIGB) - teach people that they don’t need to read everything. Many people get overwhelmed

I think this happens when Slack is the "source of truth", because the ephemeral feeling it gives since it's a chat ultimately. If you instead use a wiki/whatever to actually collect things that are important, there is less stress about possibly missing out on important things. Make summaries by week/month and it'll be even easier for people to catch up easily, which means even less stress :)

Meeting in person >1 hour away is difficult for people in many life circumstances. And if there are constant meetings, it either strains families or makes the person who can't make it feel left out

Thank you! I'll check out the Slack admin panel! I removed that item from my main message because I was concerned some people might misinterpret "tracking" as something invasive (e.g., reading messages). What you're describing is exactly what I'm looking for—just the stats—to support public disclosure and knowledge sharing.

The "source of truth" and the place you post dank memes and ask what people are doing for the weekend--those shouldn't be the same place. Slack is not a good "source of truth".

Yeah. Once or twice a year should be fine, I would say.

s/Slack/Zulip

Worked remote most of my life. Quarterly meetups are exhausting for people that didn't sign up for travel for their job. Many people doing remote work do so because they have a lot of responsibilities at home and benefit from being able to work around family, pets, etc.

However, my experience is the difference between 0 in person meetups and even 1 per year is astounding. I was at one company that didn't have in person meetups for years and when they finally did the company culture changed (for the better) over night. The difference between 1 per year and 4 per year is negligible barring the fact that the latter makes me start to dread meetups rather than enjoy them.

Seconded, Zulip's model is fantastic. It makes it a breeze to catch up or coordinate.

Agreed. The sweet spot in my experience is twice a year but your point is very valid. Once a quarter, sustained, is heavy on personal lives.

Zulip is amazing

Slack is meant to be addictive. I only use the web client and modify it with tampermonkey

All notifications disabled and I only read when pinged. davison updates are the only mechanism allowed.

>Meet in person every quarter

What benefit would you see in doing this? The only thing I've heard is some consider it nice to be in close proximity to others, but that doesen't really sound like a business reason

How the hell do you get by with that? I’m jealous. I’ve gotten pinged by my fucking EVP for not responding to questions in chat fast enough (non-critical, too!). At least no one gets on me for missing emails. I don’t even read those.

Quarterly would be a gross misuse of budget, imo. I think there’s tremendous value in physically meeting your team—-I can’t quantify it, but I can feel it—-so once a year is good, to me. Maybe twice if one is business and one’s a party or something.

> How the hell do you get by with that?

You have a company policy that allows that. For example, if anything is decided in Slack, it has to be "codified" somewhere else, like a wiki. Then you'll be able to justify not reading through all messages.

Seconding this. My team meets annually for several days, at a conference that gives us plenty of social time together in the evenings.

As you said it's hard to quantify the value, but anecdotally I notice it most in 3 (distinct but somewhat overlapping) areas:

(1) Overall morale - everyone enjoys work more when you have a good relationship with your coworkers, so people are willing to do more than the bare minimum. People approaching burnout feel more enthusiastic about work afterwards. (2) Everyone is more inclined to help each other out with tasks outside of their routine but within their skillset, reducing bottlenecks. (3) Similarly, you develop a better sense of each other's personalities and skillsets in a way that's much more difficult when remote, so communication is more efficient, and collaboration more effective due to that increase in understanding and empathy.