Remote Co-Founders, what's been your experience?

for technical co founders just keep in mind that most of the people that can build a product by themselves are good enough to be well paid and only some personal reason can make them join. Most of the others are more enthusiasm than capabilities, unfortunately you will find out which one you end up with 3-4 months after work on the project is started.
Only good developer can recognize another good developer, everyone else are just guessing

Let me share a bit of the advice I learned at localazy.com. We are entirely remote from the beginning - not even living in the same country.

1. You have to find great people that share the same vision and goals. They must believe in what you want to build and that the goals are worth it. And you have to share the vision with them first.

2. While money can be a strong motivating factor, you should be in business to do something great. To help people. To change something. That's what will drive the whole team.

3. Your team must have inner motivation to move forward. You can't be there checking their work every day. And you don't even want to do that. The micro-managing is going to limit all of you. Over time, as they start to understand particular parts of the business better than you, they should take responsibility, and you should put them in charge. I had a clear vision of what our product should look like at Localazy, I shared the vision with the team. Over time, we learned that not all my ideas were perfect, and today, I wouldn't dare to tell my team what to do. They know better. They speak with customers; they use the product on their own; they have outgrown me.

4. You have to trust them. Sometimes, you may feel like you could do something better and faster. And you may be right. Trust your team and allow them to learn, grow and do it on their own. Learn to accept that things are not always the way you want them.

5. You must be there for them. They are your priority. Get all the obstacles out of their way. Build the company, not the product. I know that I often fail at this one. When working in an office, people can communicate easily and solve problems in seconds together. They need to be sure that the same things are possible for remote jobs too.

6. Transparency. There's no secret information at all, including money, bank account balance, etc. Of course, not everyone has access to everything, but I answer honestly if any team member asks me how much money we have. Seeing all parts of the progress motivates the team and helps people build the company, not just work isolated on their job.

7. Everyone can share ideas and opinions. We listen to each team member here on all topics. Our product is built by combining the experience of developers, designers, marketers, translators, customers, users, and just anybody around.

8. Culture, tools, and processes. Several things keep our team going:

• Synchronization meetings (aka syncs) - Every Friday, we hold a whole company call to share progress. Every team member says a few words about the last week's successes, failures, blockers, and ideas. And we also have some time for friendly small-talk.
• Smaller syncs - Regular or irregular planning call about the product, marketing, content, sales, etc.
• Adhoc calls - Whenever needed and written communication is not good enough, we jump on a call.
• Slack - It's our primary tool for communication about everything from work to the random funny stuff. Numerous bots keep the whole team synchronized about earnings, new customers, etc.
• GeekBot on Slack - Every day, this bot asks each of us to share how we feel, what we worked on yesterday and what's on our list for today, and if there are some blockers.
• ClickUp - This tool runs our company, and it's the primary place to go every day to know what to work on, cooperate, etc. It's actually the most critical tool we have.
• Other tools like Figma - We use a lot of additional tools for more specialized tasks in smaller groups.
• Emails - We don't use emails internally at all :-)

Closing note: The most important factor for remote work is building the culture and getting people on the same board. The work itself is what naturally follows when all team members want to reach the vision.

My advice also applies to non-remote cooperation, but it's overly important when working remotely.

The best luck I had was to meet all these fantastic people I work with at Localazy. I came up with the idea, but they turned it into something I couldn't even imagine back then.

I've been building tech startups since 2004, all remote, all bootstrapped with two exits. During this period, I worked out, that looking for a technical co-founder is simply a waste of time.

I had co-founders in the past. For many reasons, they didn't last long. I wasted a lot of time looking for a co-founder. What a waste!

My latest tech startup is https://skilledup.life - free talent for tech startups.

Our first customer found a technical co-founder through us. We now have 4,755 Volunteers from 84 countries.

If you know what you are doing, then you can build a successful tech startup without a co-founder.

All the best @simple_ben

Founded my new company with two co-founders in November. It's been great. We're remote-only.

Yes and no, it works but it's so hard to keep track of small nuances , how are they really doing? are there problems etc.

Currently yes; but in the past some didn’t work out.

It’s been hard, I’ve wasted a lot of time in the past coding for non-serious commercial folks. It seems that commitment really is the biggest stumbling block. I’m hoping doing EF (https://joinef.com/) will fix that.