Week 3 @ Grow Remote

Grow Remote
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

Week 3 down at Grow Remote where we spent the most time focusing on the selected location; booking spaces, onboarding local partners, drafting press releases, changing dates and reworking speaker diaries…that we can’t talk about. We’re waiting on the press release to go out Monday but as always, there’s progress is in the mundane!

In terms of stats from social, our focus was off all channels this week so there was growth, but it was fairly minimal which is perfectly fine for this week!

We published six blog posts, set up a Tito account for ticket sales, made a lot of changes to the website, and built the new events page to go live next week.

The biggest work we did this week was on our own structure. We were hitting a roadblock when we were trying to get things done because we couldn’t answer a question on it. We were incredibly hesitant to say Grow Remote belonged to anyone. We wanted to keep it open long enough to allow all community doers to get invested. We wanted allow any sponsors to gain value, but not hold ownership. As we went on some structure was needed purely to cope with the amount of inbound questions on it. So we made some small changes that should help provide context.

The changes were best communicated by a restructure to the site where we separated the community from the event. This is core to Grow Remote. The community is everything around the event and we believe that a focus on the community will bring on brilliant events, as opposed to visa versa. The community will appear different in all cases, but they are all underpinned by an ability to do, and take steps towards a common goal.

We’re more pruning the hedges than doing the landscape. Grow Remote is evolving and needs space to do so…while also being able to move alongside partners. It’s a balancing act.

We also added an about us page to include the story of why we were hesitant, including the multiple conversations happening at one time in spaces all over the country, that just happened to be heard by some common denominators and manifested into this.

We have considered if opening this up with nominations was the best approach. It creates an environment where getting the event ‘wins’. The event location is a bonus, but the win is in the numbers of remote workers employed in any location. Amazon, Empire Flippers, Zapier, Shopify, 10up, all new employers in your rural Irish town simply because you looked for them, that’s still the win.

We think that community is the boring infrastructure stuff. So we’re creating capabilities to set up locally, and we’ve had 2 monthly meetups start already! We also outlined other ways to get involved:

(p.s We’d love to find a sponsor for these local groups. If that could be you with budget for about 10 groups to run monthly before March let us know to helllo@growremote.ie)

Luckily for us, two meetups have already been set up with Caroline in Tullamore, Cian in Sligo and two on the way for Gorey and Strandhill. This is a big indicator of success for us, when people are empowered to make their own change in their own community, and where people give up their own time to make change happen. Ronan Connolly came on site edits, as did Laura Hanlon, Rebecca Spellman hopped on site copy, and the likes of Kevin McGowen rowed in with brilliant suggestions and tangible actions for posters where we could deliver a template that would allow communities to customise it to their area….

Next week is tickets, press, more speakers, and working on a super secret project to set us up for March 2019.

A big thanks to everyone who has supported the project so far, we appreciate it lots and we’re incredibly excited to blow it out of the park on September 28th.

Grow Remote

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We're a community project opening up the regions of Ireland to talent, companies who hire remotely, and nomadic workers. Keep September 27th free!

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