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

238 points aml183 | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source

We are a remote company. Everything is going well. No plans to be in person, but I’d say we can do a better job at communicating. Any tips or articles to read?
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paxys ◴[15 Nov 24 20:51 UTC] No.42150868[source]▶
Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
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andrei_says_ ◴[16 Nov 24 20:03 UTC] No.42158830[source]▶
Basecamp is incredible for this.

Encourages grouping people by projects, with all communication on a project being public.

All activity on a project listed in one place.

Catching up with work takes minimal effort, including when someone goes on vacation or leaves the team. All it takes is skimming through the project.

Slack is built around chat with high has its limitations when applied to the context of a longer term project.

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Cthulhu_ ◴[19 Nov 24 18:30 UTC] No.42186652[source]▶
While Slack - if you pay for it - permanently stores all communications and makes it archivable, it's also ephemeral and anything said more than a day ago is effectively gone. They do have an AI summary tool to catch up though, if you pay for it, which is alright.
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1. andrei_says_ ◴[20 Nov 24 01:52 UTC] No.42190114[source]▶
To me the difference is in the affordances and mental model.

Basecamp - groups all communication, assets, participants, tasks in a project space. I open the project which establishes context for everything and everyone. This predefined context makes short efficient communication very powerful.

It’s incredibly simple and sophisticated at the same time - allowing grouping activity by people projects tasks etc.

The ephemeral nature of chat-centered systems makes me incredibly nervous about missing things or being unable to find them.