Founder of Starter Story
The Interview
- Tell us about what you do and where your team is located.
I run StarterStory.com, an online media company dedicated to helping people start and grow their own business. Since starting in 2017, nearly 10 million people have visited the site.
The team is located all over - I'm in Florida, and we have people in California, Spain, Philippines, India, Canada, Venezuela, Pakistan, Kenya, and more. - What's a modern benefit you offer your team that isn't mainstream yet?
At Starter Story, instead of hiring people full-time in a role-based system (e.g. 40 hours per week), we have a team of people that work on assigned tasks whenever they'd like (and often part-time).
In other words, we assign our team members a specific amount of tasks to get done per week. They can work on them on their own time - at night, in the morning, etc.
I think this is a great benefit for the "modern freelancer". We don't micromanage and we have minimal check-ins. - Tell us about your approach to meetings vs async communication?
At Starter Story, we have no meetings, and all communication is async through Google Docs and a Trello-esque task system. I believe that almost any project can be done via async. I also believe that 'writing' is more effective than meetings when it comes to getting work done, finding solutions, and solving problems (with minor exceptions). - What's your favourite tool for remote collaboration?
At Starter Story, we've actually built our own internal collaboration tool for our own needs as we have 20+ people working on various projects - all built on top of our custom CMS.
But before this, we lived in Google Docs. Google Docs is an amazing tool and I don't think early startups need anything more. What I love about Google Docs is that people write freely, and writing is the most important thing in a business like ours. - Can you give us one prediction for the future of work?
Globalization: Countries like India will take over the workforce.
More organizations will move towards a structure like ours - (task-based instead of role-based). This will lead companies to hire based on merit, rather than credentials.
This will lead to companies hiring amazing talent from places like India, Kenya, Philippines, etc. Managers and teams will soon realize that people from these countries can do as-good-or-better work than their Western counterparts, with more productivity and less cost!
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