I’ve recently found myself reflecting a lot on being a distributed team, and the nature of a company where the team works from remote locations to accomplish our work.

Scaling remote working has been a challenge as the team has grown. Remote companies are still relatively rare, and therefore all of us who are choosing to have a remote-friendly culture, need to both:

• work through the normal challenges of growing as a company and as a team
• also put time into figuring out how remote can scale, where there is no real pre-existing playbook

One of the significant commitments we’ve made recently at Buffer, is to approach our company growth goals in a long-term fashion, staying true to our culture of remote working. This means we deliberately make time to try to scale remote working, even if this may at times feel it comes at the expense of short-term financial growth.

It is my belief that working to develop a great remote working culture is an investment that will pay dividends for decades to come. If we can make this work over the long-term, we set the company up for many significant advantages and great freedom for us as a team.

The levels of remote working

In my reflections, I came to the realization that remote working is a scale, and there are actually a number of different options along across spectrum from “not remote” to “fully distributed”.

1. Not remote / office-based culture

Obviously at the far end of the spectrum we have what is today perhaps the most typical working environment for companies. In this model, you have your whole team in one or more offices.

This means that you typically have set down working hours (strict or loosely enforced). You will work from the office all day, and not have too much flexibility in your day, nor will you have the option to choose the work environment you enjoy and find yourself most productive within.

Of course, office-based environments are also awesome for a whole bunch of reasons. You more naturally have close bonds and friendships forming. You can whiteboard and brainstorm, which can be very productive. If you have people who are junior in their role, they can very readily and easily get help so they don’t get stuck.

2. Office-based with a work-from-home option

Some companies which operate from a single office, have started to give team members the option to work from home one or more days per week. This is a great start, and perhaps a perfect way to start to experiment with a remote working culture.

This small degree of remote-friendliness will already test the culture and require a few key changes to how work is done within a team. For example, those days that team members are working from home, the team will need to mostly communicate through email, chat tools, or some other means than the face-to-face methods which can be relied on without thinking about it in an office environment.

One key challenge when you start to experiment with this setup will be avoiding the people who work from home feeling left out of discussions that lead to key decisions. When you have the majority of the team in one place and a few people not in the office, it’s easy for those people to feel like second class citizens.

3. A remote team, in a single time zone

This is where things start to get more truly remote. In this category you’ll have companies which are more truly remote. However, some remote companies still choose to have the team mostly in one time zone, or very few largely overlapping time zones.

This is a truly remote setup, so the way work is done certainly is different from a team based within an office. Text-based communication and collaboration tools will come in here.

At the same time, in this setup, you still have a lot of hours of overlap, if not full overlap, with everyone in the team. So at least you can rely on someone being available when you need to get work done. Therefore, a lot of the day-to-day work can still be done in a synchronous fashion and work well.

4. A world-wide remote team spread across numerous time zones

A step further is to have a team where everyone is spread across different time zones. This means that asynchronous collaboration becomes even more vital. You’ll likely just have a few hours of overlap with other people in your team, and so this setup requires a little more structure to make communication and collaboration efficient.

Sometimes companies set up this way, will choose to concentrate certain roles in the same time zone. Other times, it will be a completely location-independent setup. In either case, you generally have team members staying permanently in their location, for a long duration of time. So you can at least have some consistency of the setup of each team, and can set up some forms of synchronous communication at the times of overlap.

The challenges with a fully remote setup like this are numerous, however there are also many benefits. One key one is around-the-clock coverage of customer support or engineering.

5. A fully distributed team with nomadic team members

The most extreme case of remote working, in my mind, is a fully remote team where some of the members of the team are nomadic and traveling.

Since Buffer’s distributed team setup is based around our vision to create a workplace of the future, and also around our value to live and work smarter, this is the ultimate level I am currently striving for us to reach.

Currently, we see some challenges in reaching this level of freedom for team members, and a collaboration system that can be efficient with this setup. A key milestone I believe of this level will be that work continues regardless of people moving locations. Of course, moving to a new place can affect productivity and this is for people to be mindful about. However, I do believe there is a way that collaboration can happen, where aside from those productivity challenges, work can happen in the exact same way, regardless of location. This is what is needed to truly be able to work efficiently with nomadic people in the team.

I believe open source can be a great inspiration for the kind of asynchronous collaboration that is needed for this setup. Synchronous chat tools are problematic. At the same time, to cultivate culture and create bonds, synchronous chat tools and video calls can be effective here too. The key, it seems, is to separate “how work happens” from those synchronous communications.

Do you do remote working at your company? Which level are you at, or do you see yourself a different level I’ve not covered here? What do you think is worth striving for? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

From office-based to nomadic: 5 varieties of remote working in companies was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By now we have a fairly long history of doing retreats at Buffer. We’re now a 75 person team, and we just wrapped up our 8th company retreat in Madrid, Spain. Here’s a quick history of retreat locations, timeline and size over time:

1. San Francisco & Lake Tahoe, U.S.A. (August 2013, 8 people)
2. Bangkok & Pattaya City, Thailand (November 2013, 10 people)
3. Cape Town, South Africa (April 2014, 16 people)
4. New York, U.S.A. (September 2014, 25 people)
5. Sydney, Australia (February 2015, 26 people)
6. Reykjavik, Iceland (July 2015, 31 people, 40+ with partners & family)
7. Hawaii, U.S.A (February 2016, 67 people, 90+ with partners & family)
8. Madrid, Spain (February 2017, 73 people, 100+ with partners & family)

It’s been a wild ride for us at Buffer, to this point where the regular company retreat is a very clear part of our culture. Each retreat has felt a little different, and the nature of the retreat evolves as the company grows and our vision and culture advances.

The purpose of a retreat, from a CEO perspective

As CEO of a 75 person remote team, I see the retreats as an essential part of the work we do together. I firmly believe that if we would operate the company without these regular face to face gatherings, we would be less effective and feel less connected.

When we were a team of less than 30 people, the retreats felt like they could be a productive day-to-day work time for us. A shift towards working together, but continuing with the projects we happened to be working on. In addition, when we were smaller, we would do the retreats more regularly (around every 4–7 months). By doing them more frequently, and having a smaller team, the retreat itself was not as much of a monumental event, because it would come around again quite fast. Today, we do it less frequently: this retreat was 1 year after our last one in Hawaii.

As a result, today our retreats serve less of a purpose of immediate productivity, and are more geared towards long-term productivity and meaningful connectedness of the team. We focus all of our sessions throughout the week on brainstorms and higher level discussions that will have an impact for months going forward.

As CEO, I find that beyond the opportunity I have to provide leadership, set vision and create alignment, the real purpose of retreats is to listen. I try my best to float in and out of different groups, whether for lunch or dinner, in sessions during the day, activities on off days or drinks in the evening. In these very different groups, I am part of the conversation but also sitting and listening, and trying to take a lot in. Of course there will always be blind spots for me as a leader, and so I lean on the leads I work with too, but I try my best to be present and soaking up the joys and frustrations that I hear expressed. Each retreat is an opportunity to take this in, and try to act to improve our culture and working processes further.

Timing of a retreat

The context within which a retreat happens is a key component of how it will feel, and the goals we try to have in mind.

2016 was a difficult year for Buffer, we had layoffs and then at the start of this year, my co-founder Leo and I came to the conclusion for him to move on from Buffer. Our CTO Sunil also decided to leave the company at this time too. A lot of change for a single year. It’s been rocky. We’re now in a great position and have rebuilt our cash reserves to over $2.4m since the low point of $1.3m around our cash flow crisis.

As a result, at retreat it was important to acknowledge the past year. Morale is still in recovery from those ups and downs, and the team gathering in Madrid could not have come at a better time. We had sessions in which people could open up about those feelings, and we also had a lot of serendipitous conversations around the future.

All in all, I think we did a good job of acknowledging the challenges, and also sharing the excitement with each other about our future. We shifted towards this throughout the week, and almost all teams focused on their vision for 2017. I shared a lot of my own ideas around the company and product vision going forward, and we have a huge number of opportunities based on our solid foundation of products, customers, culture and profitability.

Being a key part of retreat as an introverted CEO

I am lucky to have an incredible team I work with on retreat, and this year Stephanie really took on the task wholly and I didn’t need to be too involved in the planning. At the same time, I am leading the retreat in many ways, I officially start it and I run many sessions. Especially since retreats are not cheap (our budget for Madrid was $400,000) I strive to reflect on how we get the most out of the time and take a lot of personal responsibility for that.

The retreat itself is a week packed with so much energy and happiness. We are all incredibly excited to see each other after a year apart, and this year around 25 people were on retreat for the first time, meeting almost all the team for the first time.

I am an introvert, around 85–90% introvert vs extrovert in most tests I take. In the past, this has at times led to debilitating situations after long periods of social stimulation. Around 4–5 years ago, I started to understand myself much more clearly, and I now find in general I can take the action I need to in order to feel recharged most of the time.

During retreat, I took a 20–45 minute solo walk each day during the week. At an appropriate time in the afternoon between sessions, I’d just head out of our work space and go walk up the nearby hill. After a day with a lot of social interactions, my mind can feel clouded and I find it hard to think and articulate clearly when I am drained. It’s always fascinating to me how quickly I can recover from this and feel energized, sharp and ready to be amongst people again. A few times this was essential was before my fireside chat with the Madrid community at Google Campus, before our Sunday welcome drinks and before our Wednesday evening team dinner.

I have found that it absolutely is possible for me to enjoy the whole week, as long as I remember to be aware of my energy levels and take care of myself.

It’s been a hugely rewarding and energizing week. I am pumped for the rest of 2017, and I am confident we’re going to achieve some great things together. If there’s any single takeaway for me from the retreat, it is the reminder that I get to work with the best team on Earth.

The Power of Company Retreats: Thoughts after the 8th Buffer Retreat was originally published in Buffer Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Something we’ve naturally needed to do as we go through this growth is to think about the communication architecture of the company.

Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
— Ben Horowitz

What this has meant in our case is to start to think about my role as co-founder and CEO and the role of people who have experience. It’s no longer efficient for the whole company to know about and think about every change we’re making. We’ve formed smaller teams so that they can autonomously work on a specific part of the company, without needing to know everything about all other parts of the business.

Part of creating the communication architecture is to be aware of and embrace people in the team becoming leaders, and to then have regular conversations with these people to share my thoughts. Our product and engineering team is 20 people. There’s no way I can speak with all 20 people regularly enough to share all the insights and advice I have. Therefore, I need to speak primarily with a few people in order to get the context in a more effective way.

The other result of this is that I naturally end up with a unique picture of the whole company, since I’m learning insights from all the different teams and areas. I see patterns across multiple areas, and this leads me to ideas for making changes that could make the whole company more effective.

That’s where the danger comes. I’m both in one of the best positions to notice and implement changes to how we work, and also I’m far removed enough that I might be missing some context about how my ideas for changes could have negative implications.

Here’s how I’m personally striving approach this challenge:

1. I try to have the communication architecture to put me in the best position to understand a lot of the context and to draw patterns between challenges in different areas.
2. I aim to notice the challenges arising in areas, and spend time to reflect on them in a way that others might not have the viewpoint or time to do so.
3. Once I start to find myself moving towards a solution for challenges, I stop myself.
4. I then speak with people who will be affected by any potential changes to solve the challenge I’ve found.
5. When I speak with people, I try to share all the context, without a solution.
6. Sometimes I may have a hint of a solution in my mind, however I try to be fully open to a different solution being the optimal one, which I can only learn based on speaking with people.
7. The goal and result of this method is that often I’m not even the one who comes up with solutions, and the changes we make are more fully embraced.

It’s really hard to do this, and I often fail. It also takes longer. My belief is that this approach is the best long-term choice.

The difference between sharing a change with no context, and sharing context with no change, is like night and day. We’ve always taken the path with Buffer which leads to us all feeling happiest with our work. We also try to take the approach that leads to the most honesty and openness between all team members.

As we grow, it’s my belief that if we start to enforce changes without sharing the ‘why’, we are going to eventually incur a debt in our culture and see some adverse side effects from that choice. If instead we share the challenges we’ve uncovered and get advice to have the full context, then find the changes that should happen that we all agree on, we’re going to have a chance to create a culture of trust, honesty and joy.

One of my favorite things to do is to help others who are at an earlier stage of the startup journey. I had a lot of false starts before Buffer. I enjoy sharing my lessons from those failed attempts, and I also enjoy getting my mind back into those early days challenges, now that Buffer is almost 5 years old.

In the last week, I’ve had 5 sessions (typically around 30 minutes, in person or via Hangouts) where I’ve tried to help someone. I was surprised to hear the same challenge come up in 3 of those 5 sessions this week, so I thought it might be a worthwhile blog post topic too.

The thought process of outsourcing your startup

I think if you’re not technical and can’t code, it’s very natural to think that you can’t progress much with your startup idea unless you find help. Often the first thought is to either find a technical co-founder, or to outsource building the minimum viable product to a firm or a freelancer.

In my experience, both these options are almost always the less optimal approach for succeeding with your startup as quickly as possible.

Here’s why I think you shouldn’t outsource your startup:

1. Your goals and a freelancer’s goals are completely misaligned

If you think about it, the goal of a freelancer or a creative agency or firm is to serve many different clients, and to ultimately make money. Your goal when you have a startup idea is to reach product/market fit and make something that can get traction.

A big problem with these 2 differing goals is that the successful path for a freelancer to reach their goal is very different to the successful path for startup founders to reach product/market fit.

One of the easiest problems for a freelancer to encounter is scope-creep of client projects. If the freelancer or agency is setting a fixed price for the project, they need to take many steps to ensure that the scope of the project doesn’t grow beyond what was initially budgeted for. This means that in the beginning, they are going to want to set down a very defined specification of what this project involves. A freelancer’s goal is to make money and a key ‘tool’ for success is to be quite exhaustive with defining the initial specification for a project, and to avoid changes to the spec along the way if at all possible.

As a startup, your goal is to reach product/market fit. There’s a great insight Matt Mullenweg once shared which really puts into perspective why as startup founders we should launch as early as possible:

“Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.”

Therefore, the ideal approach for creating a successful startup is to put it out there as soon as possible and then iterate from there based on the new information that comes from usage and from doing customer development. This is almost completely at odds with the approach most freelancers will want you to take. Not only that, most freelancers or agencies are building websites for more established or more predictable businesses and they often don’t understand the nature of startups.

It’s not that a contractor or agency is doing it wrong, they’re just optimizing for their most common type of client project: to create a website. For example, it might be a website for a restaurant, a coffee shop, or a golf club. In the words of Eric Ries, these are ‘known problem, known solution’ situations. We know what a restaurant website should do. It should have a menu, show you where the restaurant is, etc. With startups, we live in a world of ‘unknown problem, unknown solution’ situations. We don’t know whether our new idea will work. It takes a whole different approach, and I think this is almost always misaligned with the way a freelancer will approach things.

2. It gets you into the wrong mindset of what it takes to get a product off the ground

Very much related to the first challenge, I believe that if you are thinking about outsourcing your startup, you likely already have the wrong mindset about how to create a successful startup.

I’m lucky to have been coding since I was around 12. When I got into startups, I was lucky to have that part of the equation taken care of. What I realized after a few years in the game was that my technical ability blinded me from what it takes to make a successful product. I just kept building, and that’s not the main part of succeeding with a startup.

I think that often if someone is thinking about outsourcing their startup, they’re also under the false impression that the key to succeeding with their idea is to get it built.

The idea itself is often way off, and most likely won’t work once you put it out there.

What it takes to create a successful product is eliminating all the unvalidated aspects, and finding something that users or customers truly want, that has product/market fit and can get traction. The interesting part about this, is that coding is actually not at all required to achieve this.

It’s my belief that, especially today, you can create a fully working (albeit potentially somewhat manual) version of your startup without coding at all. You can use tools such as Wufoo, Unbounce, WordPress, Google Forms, and other things to string together a set of interactions. You can fill in the gaps with hustling and manual work yourself. It won’t scale, but ironically that is the key to initially growth and understanding what is working and what isn’t.

Without coding at all, I think you can have an early (far from perfect) product and even start to get traction if you iterate and solve the unvalidated aspects of your idea. Once you start to get traction, so many doors will open up for getting help to code the product and make it much more beautiful.

Any decent coder is tired of hearing an idea guy come along and try to get them to build their startup. On the other hand, a decent coder will be extremely interested by a startup put together with no code that is getting really good traction. That’s something they can have a big impact on and has already been shown that it has huge potential.

3. The founding team should wear every hat

The other belief I have for why you shouldn’t outsource your startup is: the founding team should wear every hat. Here’s why:

• it gives you the mindset that you can make anything happen, you just need to figure out the hacks and shortcuts to do it with your current capabilities
• you retain full control over all parts of the process and can adapt and iterate super fast
• when you reach the point of hiring people, you’ll know the difference between someone great and someone not so good
• you’ll have a level of passion across many different areas of the startup. That can more easily help you be great at multiple things as you grow. It’s hard to hire passion and hard for someone else to thrive in something the founder doesn’t get excited about.

Therefore, I highly recommend you and your co-founders do absolutely everything in the beginning. In the early days, between the two of us Leo and I did development, design, database and sysadmin work, customer support, marketing, and more. I even built the first version of the Android app before we invited Sunil to the team to take it over. There’s almost nothing we do at Buffer now that myself or Leo haven’t done in the early days of the company. As a result, I get super excited about how far we can take things across all areas of the company, and I can speak on a deep level with anyone in any area.

What to do instead

I honestly believe that building your product yourself is the most optimal and in fact the fastest path to creating a successful startup.

It might seem counter-intuitive that building the product yourself could be the fastest way to success, when you don’t even have any coding ability at all. The thing is, I’m not talking about coding — I’m talking about building your product. In any way that you can. That could mean zero coding, or it could mean picking up things here and there (which I think is great, too).

The reason I think it’s the fastest path is that I believe you’ll struggle to find a great technical co-founder if all you have is your idea. And, I think if you work with a freelancer or agency, it’s unlikely you’ll have a working relationship that lets you cycle through the build-measure-learn loop and iterate towards product/market fit.

So, my recommended approach is to hack it together yourself, and at the same time keep meeting technical people in your local startup community. I believe there’s an inflection point where what you have is attractive enough for a technical co-founder to jump on board. If you don’t have a technical co-founder (or someone technical willing to join as first employee), I think you just keep hacking and doing customer development and validating your assumptions, to create something that gets traction.

What are your thoughts on creating a startup if you’re not technical? I’d love to hear from you! Enjoy the article? Please scroll down and hit Recommend. Thanks!

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ILO in Asia and the Pacific

Originally published at joel.is.

My advice to non-technical founders was originally published in Buffer Posts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In December, my friend and co-worker Brian casually mentioned to me that he would love to go traveling and explore Asia. I love Asia. I lived in Japan as a kid for 3.5 years, and I lived in Hong Kong for 6 months in 2012. It was a no brainer for me to jump on the opportunity and travel around Asia with Brian.

At Buffer, we’re a fully distributed team. We’re currently 31 people spread across 22 cities. We all work remotely, and it is a lot of fun. This also gives us the freedom to choose to be anywhere in the world, and to move or travel if we wish. Everyone is trusted to balance this with their productivity and getting the results for the teams they’re part of.

Being a fully distributed team, we still believe it is super important to meet and spend time with each other face-to-face. As a result, we have team retreats at different locations around the world every 5 months.

In December, our next upcoming retreat was Sydney. The result was that Brian was interested in traveling around Asia, I was keen too, and we had our Sydney retreat coming up. So we decided to spend a month in Asia and ‘travel’ our way to Sydney.

And that’s how it all started for me.

How an idea to travel around Asia turned into being a digital nomad in 11 cities in 3 months

I spent some time thinking and decided to take the plunge and give up my apartment in San Francisco and become a digital nomad with no fixed location. I had been in San Francisco about a year and was craving exploring again, having done a lot of travel in the 4.5 years since starting Buffer (which even contributed to us becoming a distributed team).

It just so happened that I needed to obtain a new US visa (I’ve obtained it now and have the O-1 visa) and I was required to go to a US consulate outside the country to get it, so I decided to make that one of my tasks while in Sydney.

I also had been lucky to be invited to speak on a SXSW panel which got approved, so that was a definite destination for the middle of March in my travel plans. I’ve found through my travels that I really enjoy breaking up long flights, so I chose to spend 2 weeks in Santa Monica to break up my travel to Austin for SXSW. Knowing that I’d only spend a few days in Austin for SXSW, I chose to spend a week in Houston right afterwards to get a more full experience of Texas (my first time in the state!).

All these factors combined, here’s where I ended up spending my time during the first 3 months of 2015:

• San Francisco, California (May 2014 → Jan 2nd)
• Tokyo, Japan (Jan 3rd → Jan 11th)
• Seoul, South Korea (Jan 11th → Jan 18th)
• Singapore (Jan 18th → Jan 27th)
• Jakarta, Indonesia (Jan 27th → Jan 28th)
• Singapore (Jan 28th → Jan 31st)
• Sydney, Australia (Feb 1st → Mar 3rd)
• Santa Monica, California (Mar 3rd → Mar 14th)
• Austin, Texas (Mar 14th → Mar 16th)
• Houston, Texas (Mar 16th → Mar 21st)
• Honolulu, Hawaii (Mar 21st → June/July)

I spent time in 11 cities in 3 months, and stayed in 14 different places (2 hotels, 11 AirBnB apartments, 1 friend’s place).

Here’s how that looks on a map:

Why I decided to become a digital nomad again

The last 5 years have included a lot of travel for me. Here’s a rough timeline:

• October 2010 — July 2011: Birmingham, UK
• July 2011 — December 2011: San Francisco
• January 2012 — June 2012: Hong Kong
• June 2012 — August 2012: Tel Aviv, Israel
• September 2012 — November 2013: San Francisco
• December 2013: Traveling around Asia
• January 2014 — March 2014: San Francisco
• April 2014 — May 2014: Cape Town, South Africa
• June 2014 — December 2014: San Francisco

As a result, I’m certainly not new to the idea of traveling. At the same time, I had been pretty settled in San Francisco for most of the last 2 years with some traveling around our team retreats. To give up my apartment and become a full digital nomad was an extra step. Here’s what made me take that step:

I feel like there’s so much to see, and I want to explore more while I’m (somewhat) young and single and have the flexibility

I started Buffer when I was 23 and I literally felt like I’d live forever back then, and that I don’t age. Having worked on Buffer for almost 5 years, I’ve realized that is quite a long time, and I’ve been getting older during those years. I expect that naturally I might be in a position some time in my thirties where I’ll want to settle in one place. In the meantime, I feel like there is so much of the world to explore, and I want to get out there and see it.

I have the opportunity to be an example of a whole new way of living your life

“Observe the masses and do the opposite.” — James Caan

A theme for my life for the last 5 years while building Buffer has been to always take the path less traveled, both personally and as a company. That’s how we ended up choosing to be super transparent, work as a distributed team, do a very unconventional $3.5m round of funding, be self-managed with no bosses amongst other less traditional choices.

Therefore, I felt a strong urge and that I might regret it if I don’t take this opportunity to become a digital nomad and be an example of a whole new way of living. It’s currently very rare to live in this way, moving around the world and working, with all your belongings in a single bag. Not only is it already rare to be a digital nomad, it felt less common still to be a digital nomad as part of a larger team with VC funding. I felt like it could be great for me to be an example of this being possible, and to explore it and share my learnings. Of course, it’s a lot of fun too.

I wanted to try truly experiencing solo travel

In my many travels in the last 5 years, I’ve always traveled with others (usually my co-founder Leo) other than one trip to Asia. I had read a lot about the joys (and the challenges) of solo traveling and I wanted to experiment with it. I found myself in a position where Leo was interested in travel, but not until later in the year, and he was focusing on building himself into communities more in San Francisco (something I admire, and will later describe, is a challenge I have).

The situation posed the perfect chance for me to try solo traveling. I felt especially excited as an introvert who feels quite happy to be alone. Solo traveling felt like it provides the perfect balance of being able to always find the alone time I need, but also being very incentivized to get out and meet new people myself, since I don’t have someone I know to rely on for my need for socializing. I actually find it exciting and much easier to meet new people when I’m by myself.

Some of the high points and successes in my 3 months of travel

Looking back, it was an incredible 3 months, a period of time I think I will long remember. Here are some of the high points:

1. I spent a month traveling with my friend and co-worker Brian, it was so much fun

If you have the opportunity to travel with a friend, be sure to take it. I was already great friends with Brian, but I think traveling around Asia with him for a month really gave us a chance to get to know each other even better. There were so many fun things we experienced together, like a traditional sumo wrestling practice, getting drinks with Japanese and struggling with the language barrier, traveling out to the North/South Korea demilitarized zone, and many more. I think we’ll both always look back on and laugh about some of those awesome times. What’s more, I think it makes our working relationship better too.

2. Experiencing some of the top cultural landmarks and sights in the world, all in just a few months

“A new psychology study suggests that buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for both the consumer and those around them.” ScienceDaily

On the whole, I worked a normal week most weeks, and I did all of my travel between places and relocating to new accommodation on weekend days. So, I maintained a decent level of productivity (more on that later). Despite that, I had the incredible chance to fit in a crazy number of experiences into the 3 month period.

In the 3 month period, I had a chance to experience some absolutely incredible sights. The view from the Tokyo Skytree was awesome. I visited several temples in both Tokyo and Seoul. I had dinner at a ninja themed restaurant. I had drinks on top of the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. I experienced Ludovico Einaudi in the Sydney Opera House and saw a movie at an open air cinema with a view of the Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I went surfing at Bondi Beach and Manly Beach in Sydney and at Waikiki and Diamond Head in Hawaii. I went for evening walks along Santa Monica beach. I ate breakfast in Beverly Hills and saw the Hollywood Sign. I experienced the SXSW conference and had dinner with Eric Ries, Tim O’Reilly and others in Austin, and I went to a Rodeo in Houston. And that’s cutting the list short.

I’m very aware how lucky I am to experience all of this. Many days I wake up and can’t quite believe it. I would guess that for many, this could be a list of things you’d see in a lifetime. It was truly a highlight to see so much in such a short space of time, and kept me energized.

When we did our $3.5m funding round at the end of last year, Leo and I were lucky to each sell a small portion of our shares and receive liquidity. I’m particularly happy that so far I’ve spent zero on any substantial new material possessions, and the only spending I’ve done has been on travel and experiences, as well as some investments. It’s early to tell, but so far this feels like one of the best uses for money. That doesn’t mean I’ve spent a lot on travel or these experiences. I believe this kind of travel is less out of reach than many people think.

3. Meeting lots of new people and catching up with friends

The cool thing about being in a new place is that you can’t help but meet new people. I find that I have this energy and excitement whenever I set foot in a new city, I feel like just the way I walk around with that extra curiosity and enthusiasm makes me more likely to get talking with people. I also find I’m more eager to reach out and meet people, whether by Tweeting that I’m around, or by meeting people through an existing friend in the city.

It was so much fun to catch up with old friends in almost all the cities I was in, and through those people meet new friends who I will stay in touch with for years to come. And one thing I’ve found in the past is that we live in a time where many people travel, and so it’s not at all out of the question that I’ll be hanging out with some of these people in a completely different city in the future.

4. Keeping up my gym routine while traveling

One of the things I was happiest about while traveling was that I almost completely kept up my gym routine. I found an awesome Gold’s Gym in Tokyo. In Seoul I struggled and found that there aren’t too many gyms, but once I arrived in Singapore I was eager to get back to my exercise routine and signed myself up for a 2 week pass at Fitness First and went several times a week.

All in all, I had 31 gym sessions during the 12 weeks, which is an average of about 2.5 sessions a week. I generally aim for 3–4 sessions a week, so this felt like a pretty good effort and outcome amongst all the challenges of being in a new place, finding a gym and having so many other things I also wanted to do and see.

In the last couple of years, I’ve generally focused solely on strength training, and enjoyed that a lot. In the last 3 months I also started doing some cardio again with a little running and more recently some high intensity interval training through tabata sprints. I added cardio and some bodyweight exercise to my strength training. I’ve been working towards achieving a muscle up for several months and went regularly to the outdoor gym at Bondi Beach in Sydney and continued my practice and finally achieved my first muscle up at Original Muscle Beach in Santa Monica.

5. Being in a new place and experiencing different cultures made me more open minded again

One of the things I didn’t anticipate, but in hindsight makes complete sense, is how much traveling would affect my interests and focuses. It’s something I’ve grown to love and crave traveling for.

For example, when I was in Japan, I naturally got very interested again in improving my Japanese, and I was able to practice it quite a lot (I lived in Japan for 3.5 years as a child, and tried my best to keep it up by studying it for 3 years alongside my Computer Science degree, but have let the language slip away quite a lot).

Another thing that happened in Japan was that I had the chance to meet a lot of Japanese Buffer users, and I realized how important localization might be for us to implement. I then proceeded to propose a task force within the team to work on localizing Buffer (as an update, that task force was put on hold to build Buffer for Pinterest, and may continue soon).

A final example is that when Brian and I were in Seoul, we visited the North/South Korea demilitarized zone and I was very motivated to learn about the history of Korea while I was there. I read Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, which I thoroughly enjoyed and found fascinating, and watched a couple of TED talks (here and here) by North Korean defectors.

I feel super lucky and find it very fun to learn about topics like this while also experiencing the actual place where the events happened.

6. I did a lot of speaking events while traveling, I was happy to be able to help many people this way

One of my favorite things to do is to be able to give back. I’ve written before that I’ve found helping others brings me a lot of happiness. In addition, as I’ve been lucky to be part of Buffer growing more successful, I’ve also experienced growing requests from people asking my advice on things. It’s got to the point where I don’t have the time to respond to every request, which is something I struggle with since I’d love to help everyone.

One great way I’ve found to scale my ability to help people is through speaking events, blogging and other ‘one to many’ methods. Additionally, I found that being in Asia and having only a week in each place, setting up some events was one of the best ways to be able to meet everyone who was interested in speaking to me.

The other key thing that came to my mind in the weeks up to leaving for the trip was that as a fully distributed team, one of the areas of the world where we have the least people is Asia. As a result, I think it can be a little more lonely for team members in that timezone, and also means as a company we’re less open minded to some of the cultural differences both on a team dynamics and a market level. I decided to take the opportunity to try to spread word of Buffer, and ended up with quite a solid schedule of speaking over the few months:

• Ad-hoc Buffer meetup in Tokyo
• Fireside chat in Singapore
• Fireside chat at StartupLokal event in Jakarta
• Speaking at SaaSBusinessAsia conference in Singapore
• Buffer Sydney meetup fireside chat event with Leo
• Speaking on Open Pay panel at SXSW in Austin

It was a lot of fun to speak at all these events and meet hundreds of people through them.

As an introvert, I have to be quite mindful of my own energy levels when I’m speaking a lot, and also aware of how much time it takes me to feel well prepared for speaking events. I generally try to do fireside chats if it’s a more ad-hoc event, since I find those a lot easier to do on the fly and still feel they’re providing a lot of value for people. I loved doing all these events, however I think in the future I might not pack as much into a short space of time, since I think it was somewhat overwhelming at times and I think it impacted how productive I could be with all the other tasks I had going on at Buffer during that time.

The biggest challenges of being in 11 cities in 3 months, and the digital nomad lifestyle

A key reason I wanted to write this post and document the experiences I had while they’re fresh in my mind, is that despite having the incredible privilege to travel across 3 continents in 3 months and have some massive highs, there were in fact some real challenges and low points. I feel it’s important to share that side of the story, and hopefully it can be interesting and useful for somebody.

1. At times my productivity suffered and I felt I wasn’t as present as I should have been for Buffer

I mentioned earlier that I traveled and relocated to new accommodation on the weekends, and I worked regular weeks for the full 3 month period. This went quite far in helping me to stay relatively productive during these travels.

At the same time, being in a new place means adjusting to many new things, even as simple as finding grocery shopping and food places. Everything takes a little longer than what you’ve become used to in a place you’ve had months or years to become familiar and comfortable with, and that can be a little frustrating if you don’t anticipate it. As a remote worker who enjoys the coffee shop environment to get things done, I also found that I could often get to a coffee shop which wasn’t an ideal setup or where the wifi was not quite fast enough, and so it could take a couple of attempts before I found a great one. That took away yet more time.

All in all, I do see the travels as somewhat of a failure with regards to my productivity and my contribution to Buffer. I’m not a student taking a year off to travel the world once before settling into work, this is instead something I’m working towards finding balance so it can be much more long-term. I don’t have a throwaway traveling job just to get by, I’m the CEO of a company with venture financing and I have a lot of personal ambition to take Buffer much further than where it is right now. Therefore, daily routine and overall focus is crucial to having fulfillment, and with so much travel in a short space of time, I couldn’t quite hit the flow that I feel I need.

Thankfully, I’ve been able to take these learnings and bounce to a new situation fairly quickly. Since choosing to adjust to ‘slow travel’ (more on that below) and stay in Hawaii for 4–5 months, I’ve hit possibly my best flow in years, both in terms of my work on Buffer and my fitness goals. I will always be someone who likes to challenge myself and push towards limits in order to learn. In some ways I see this compressed travel as similar to my experiment of working 7 days a week, which also resulted in some great learnings.

2. One or two weeks in a place is not long enough to build lasting friendships or understand the culture beyond the surface

I’ve learned as a result of experimenting with 1–2 week visits compared to 3–6 month slow travel, that whenever I have the choice from now on, I will always take the option to stay in a single place for a few months.

Beyond the productivity struggles that come with being somewhere only for 1–2 weeks, it is also not long enough to create true new friendships or relationships. It’s almost impossible to sustain this for a long period of time and also have any sense of community. It was a lot of fun, however as the travels went on I found myself craving that sense of community, being able to hang out with people that know me well. As an introvert, I find that I naturally get drained when I spend a lot of time with other people, and even more so when I’m constantly meeting new people.

In addition to the challenge of having friends and that sense of community, I believe that part of the joy of travel is to experience, understand, and be changed by different cultures. For myself, I’ve found that I really can’t start to understand the culture of a new place unless I “live” there, and I think it takes at least 3 months, maybe 6, for things to start clicking. I like to feel like I’ve truly lived somewhere, been a part of it, and hopefully even had some tiny impact on it for the better.

3. I was hit with loneliness and had several times I felt down

It seems almost crazy that I could be literally traversing 3 continents and visiting many places in the world that people dream of experiencing, and feel down. I felt almost guilty for feeling it at times, that it was a lack of gratitude.

For most of the 3 months I felt absolutely incredible, and had an awesome time. During my time traveling Asia during January, I didn’t feel lonely at all, because I was traveling with Brian. For the first half of February while I was in Sydney, I was with the rest of the Buffer team on our 5th team retreat and several people stayed in Sydney afterwards, so I felt great then too. It was the last few weeks in Sydney when I was there by myself, and then during my two weeks in Santa Monica that the loneliness hit me a few times.

It was a little scary to feel myself affected by this. Some days I lost several hours where I was just feeling down and procrastinating. I’ve had a couple of other experiences of feeling down for one reason or another in the past, but it had been over 5 years since I had any feelings like this, so it came as quite a shock.

I’ve realized that a key challenge as a digital nomad is loneliness, and in many ways my traveling lifestyle of the last few years has left me without many strong friendships or relationships. This being my first time solo traveling also brought this out even more for me, I think.

I’m generally quite a pragmatic person. I reflect a lot, which can sometimes make me dwell on something and feel even worse about it. However, this reflection often helps me pinpoint the cause and act on it. In this case, I instantly started making a big effort to meet new people, and I also chose to stay in Hawaii for several months in order to build some longer term friendships. The result is that I’ve been able to completely turn this feeling around within a month and a half, and haven’t felt down for weeks now. I also found that keeping up my exercise routine helped me immeasurably during the ‘downs’, by gaving me something to regularly get a win with (and the endorphins released). I never felt down when I was exercising, and it often triggered a high that lasted several hours afterwards.

3 key learnings I’m taking forward for future travel and being a digital nomad

To finish up, I want to share a few observations and learnings I want to take forward for myself:

1. Travel is incredible

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” — Mark Twain

I truly believe that the travel in the last few years has changed me for the better. If you have a chance to travel, I strongly urge you to take it. All the better if you can do it long-term in a sustainable way while working. Even short term travel is great, but if you can make it a lifestyle for even just a year or two, I think that’s when it becomes most powerful and fulfilling.

One of the best things about travel, and especially solo travel, which I’ve discovered in the last few months is how much you learn about yourself. I especially learned how to recharge and maintain energy and happiness, which came through experiencing both extremes of spending too much time with people as well as a few moments of real loneliness. I now feel much better equipped to strike that balance.

2. It’s important to know your purpose for travel, and your other chosen commitments

Whenever you choose to go traveling, you’re in a very unique position that applies only to you. We’re all different, and I think any sweeping advice is not wise.

I think it makes sense to think about what your own situation is. Are you young and focused purely on the travel, happy to do whatever job to just get by? Or do you already have your dream job and are striking the balance between the work you love and the destinations you want to see?

For me, I love working on Buffer, I couldn’t imagine a better job in the world. I also feel a big calling to see where we can take Buffer in the coming years. As a result, I plan to be very disciplined in the future about choosing my travel schedule. It’s important for me that I can spend the time I desire on Buffer, alongside seeing a new place.

3. For me, ‘slow travel’ is my preferred way to travel and be a digital nomad

Probably the most clear learning and conclusion for me of the 3 months of travel is that ‘slow travel’ is the perfect setup for me. By ‘slow travel’, I mean staying somewhere for at least 3 months, and generally 5–6 months or more. I’ve learned this for myself before in some casual ways, I even wrote about it a year ago. I feel like I’ve now truly pushed limits and experienced all options.

Most of these 3 months were short-term travel. Since then, I’ve been living in Hawaii for the last month and a half. I’ve found my flow and had some of my most productive weeks both on Buffer and with my exercise routine. I’ve met people who I’ve hung out with several times and hope some may become lifelong friends. This, for me, is what traveling is all about. This is my new plan.

What are your experiences of travel? Have you tried long-term travel, or do you want to? I’d love to hear from you in the comments! And if you enjoyed the article, please scroll down and hit Recommend. Thanks!

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Top photo credit: Andym5855. Rest are my own.

Originally published at joel.is.

How I worked remotely from 11 cities in 3 months was originally published in Buffer Posts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In mid-2011, I recieved an email asking some advice about co-founders, specifically about whether a 50/50 ownership split makes sense for a startup.

This is certainly a topic which has had heated discussion many times previously. So why would I choose to add even more noise to this debate? Well, I’ve had experiences of failed co-founder partnerships and with my latest startup Buffer I found a better solution for my own personality. This may resonate with others, so I want to share it.

The 50/50 co-founder model

When I talk about the 50/50 co-founder model, what I really mean is the equal stake model. Whether you have two, three, four co-founders or even more, I believe you should very rarely have equal ownership of a company across founders.

I have a few key reasons I believe that an equal split of equity can be a recipe for failure.

Fundamentals of problem discovery

I think more often than not, if you begin a startup with someone you believe will be a great business partner, you will sit down and “talk ideas”. You might have a long brainstorming session about what startup you could build together and how you can take over the world and become the next Larry and Sergey, or the next Chad and Steve.

I think it could easily happen that you might have this whole conversation for an hour or more without ever talking about a “problem”. The thing is, a “problem” is what matters for a startup. If you’re not solving a problem, you’re going to struggle to reach product/market fit and gain meaningful traction. Successful startups almost always come from problems, and problems are normally discovered when a single person personally suffers the problem for enough time to decide to search for a solution and then choose to solve it themselves.

If you delay finding a co-founder, I believe you have a much higher chance of building a solution to a problem worth solving. Pay attention to what you do each and every day, a little more than you do right now. Eventually you’ll come across problems which need to be solved. Find one and start solving it yourself. Then find a co-founder when you desperately need them to help you build upon the traction you have.

Validation of meaningful contribution

One of the hardest parts about finding a great co-founder is whether they will be worth the large equity stake you need to give them. Even with vesting (which I highly recommend), you are making a big commitment which will still be a hassle if it doesn’t work out.

The key thing about founders is that you need someone you can truly rely on to get their part of the work done. If you’re technical, you need a guy who can do serious hustling to get your product in front of masses of people. If you’re the hustler, you need someone you can count on to build a great product.

If you delay finding a co-founder until you’ve validated your startup with a first version and some meaningful traction, then they can see that you have validated the contribution you will make. Then, bring someone on board slowly and ask them to join you fully as a co-founder with a decent stake once they’ve proven their contribution.

A better approach

I believe that perhaps the best approach to finding a great co-founder for your next venture is to initially act as if you will never have a co-founder. I had no idea at the time, but looking back and connecting the dots I realise that this is what I did with Buffer, and it worked very well.

By taking the mindset that you will have to build the startup completely by yourself, it forces you to learn the parts which don’t come naturally. If you’re a coder, it means forgetting about beautiful code for a moment and thinking about what really matters. It means questioning whether you’re building something people want. If you’re not a coder, it means finding ways to build a very basic prototype to test and market to get enough traction.

The outcome? I think Andy Young puts it best:

“you’ve no idea how much more motivating it is to someone technical to look at the shitty prototype you had built for $500 on Rent-a-coder, or painfully clubbed together yourself, and say, Obviously I can help you build that much better, than it is for them to listen to a shitty pitch.”

Similarly, as a coder I put together a good first version of Buffer and got traction with minimal marketing skill and that’s when Leo came on board. For him, I think he could see massive potential to attract users to the product.

Mark Suster’s take on this topic is also worth a watch:

There will be exceptions

Of course there will be exceptions, and I’m sure there are countless startups out there formed on successful 50/50 partnerships. However, almost all startups I know which have failed (including one of my own) were formed on 50/50 partnerships.

I believe that experienced founders with a number of successful exits may be able to partner with another experienced founder and make it work. They will have experienced and observed enough failures to avoid building a solution to a nonexistant problem, and they have already proven they can make massive contributions and build something from nothing.

For the majority of us, however, we are first time founders and we have much more learning to do. This was the case for me, and when I validated the idea myself and took on a co-founder gradually to allow him to prove his value. He went far beyond my expectations in proving his value, and that’s when things really changed. I couldn’t have taken Buffer to that next stage without him, and he has a stake which reflects that.

What are your experiences of co-founders? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Click here to get my newest posts by email.

This post originally appeared on my personal blog joel.is.

Avoid the 50/50 Co-founder Model — Here’s Why was originally published in Buffer Posts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Along my journey with building startups, I’ve made a conscious effort to absorb as much of the fascinating insights and learnings of those more experienced than me.

Startups and large companies

One of the repeated insights I came across which never quite fully sunk in when I read it on Steve Blank’s blog is the idea that a startup is not just a smaller version of a large company, and that you should operate very differently as a startup. One of the key takeaways tied to this idea is the notion of doing things that don’t scale.

Doing things that don’t scale

Airbnb is the most famous high scale company to do this and succeed. Interestingly, however, they didn’t start with this idea:

“We thought that everything that we did here had to someday support hundreds of thousands to millions of users”

This belief is completely understandable, and it was my approach for a long time too.

The turning point for Airbnb was when they got into YCombinator and Paul Graham suggested they do things that don’t scale.

Does this really work for massive scale?

To really dig into this idea, I decided the best thing to do is to take the largest scale internet business I can think of and investigate their beginnings. What I discovered in an early interview Mark Zuckerberg had about Facebook is truly fascinating. His response to “what comes next” was the following:

“There doesn’t necessarily have to be more. Part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There was a level of service that we could provide when we were just at Harvard that we can’t provide for all the colleges, and there’s a level of service that we can provide when we’re a college network which we couldn’t provide if we went to other types of things.”

This means that in the early days the growth of Facebook was largely affected by Zuckerberg deliberately choosing to do things which wouldn’t scale. By taking this approach, he built huge value for his target users.

What does it mean to do things that don’t scale?

This technique is one I read about so many times throughout my journey with OnePage. When I made the decision to take everything I had learned and build Buffer, this was one of the things I disciplined to experiment with.

In the early days and even to this day, I have made an effort to do things that don’t scale. I’ve found that there are two key characteristics of “things that don’t scale”:

They help you avoid development before validating it’s required

This is certainly a key factor, especially in the early stage of a startup. Any time you can save on an activity which you haven’t yet validated as beneficial is worth doing manually until you can no longer do it manually.

Doing it “manually” gets you more benefits than if automated

I think the more important characteristic may be that when you do the task manually to begin with, you actually get more benefits than if it was automated. For example, emailing someone personally and taking care to read a little about their interests and find something to relate to, will give you a much higher response rate and trigger fascinating and useful conversations.

How can we use this approach for our startups?

With my latest startup Buffer I took this concept and used it to my benefit more than I ever did with OnePage. To briefly share real examples, here are two from the course of the journey so far:

Personally email the first 1000 signups

This is something Rob Fitzpatrick’s great article reminded me of. In the early days, I was in touch on my personal email address with almost everyone who signed up for Buffer. With low volume, I could always respond immediately and people loved it.

Charge without fully implementing a payment system

Some of the very early Buffer customers will know that I not only launched the product with paid plans from day 1, but that I also didn’t fully implement the payment system. When someone upgraded to a paid plan, I would email them personally as soon as I received the email from Paypal.

I didn’t do this to avoid the work, I did it because I had no idea whether it would be 4 days or 4 months before the first payment for Buffer. It would be a waste of programming effort to implement a slick payment system without validation with a few paying customers. Luckily, it was only 4 days until the first payment and after about 1.5 months and 6 new customers I implemented the full system.

With Buffer, doing things that don’t scale has brought us a lot of success, and the times when we make the big progress always comes back to doing new things which will provide enormous value but which we will have to adjust as we scale further.

What are your thoughts on doing things that don’t scale? Have you tried this approach before? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

Click here to get my newest posts by email.

This post originally appeared on my personal blog joel.is.

Achieving Scale By Doing Things That Don’t Scale was originally published in Buffer Posts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is easy to look at successful founders and see them as genuises, as people who were without a doubt going to be triumphant. When we look at people in that way, it is completely understandable to think that they were born lucky and that we have some kind of disadvantage.

The story of Tom Preston-Werner

Back in mid-2011, I was watching a Mixergy interview where Andrew Warner interviewed Tom Preston-Werner who founded GitHub. Tom is an amazingly talented and eloquent guy who has grown one of the most successful startups that exists today. Even more amazing, is that GitHub is completely bootstrapped. In 2011, I moved from the UK to San Francisco where GitHub is based, and I can say that especially over here a successful company being completely bootstrapped is very unusual.

Genius, or practice?

When you come across people like Tom who have built amazing, profitable companies like GitHub without taking a penny of outside funding, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that he was born destined to achieve this success, born with some kind of advantage over the rest of us.

However, before we assume that to be the case, let’s look a little into what he’s done previously.

What Tom did before GitHub

Tom has been an avid open source developer, and chose to start writing open source software through a desire to participating in the community and gain some recognition. He was one of the first to write a Flash Replacement for text elemtns, though Sean Inman was the one who improved on it and ultimately took the glory with his sIFR. Later, Tom saw a need in the blogging community for a profile picture which would follow you around blogs and the web, especially in the commenting ecosystem, so he created Gravatar.

How Tom’s practice helped him with GitHub

Tom says his motivation to do these projects was to be a part of the community and nothing more. The key thing, however, is that he kept working away on projects.

Tom tried to monetize Gravatar through premium accounts, but he says that nobody really paid for premium accounts. He even took donations to keep Gravatar alive. Reflecting on this experience, Tom says:

“If you have an idea that becomes popular, and you don’t have a way to make money from it, well now you’re in a pickle.”

It is now clear why he was able to build GitHub so quickly, and do it with no funding: he had practiced with previous projects. Tom took the experience of Gravatar growing so big without a revenue model and put in place a revenue model from the get-go with GitHub:

“If you’re gonna do a side project, that you think might become popular, you better damn well be able to make money from it, because otherwise you end up with a Gravatar where you just don’t even want it anymore and now you have to do something to get rid of it or otherwise deal with it somehow.”

We don’t know when we’re practicing

One thing which seems clear when listening to Tom talking to Andrew about his experiences, is that when he was writing the Flash Replacement script as an open source project, he had no idea he would go on to build Gravatar, and when he did Gravatar he had no idea he would eventually build GitHub. Looking back, however, it is clear how these projects helped him build GitHub.

We won’t always know when we are practicing, but the important thing is that we are. What if that seemingly insignificant bit of open source code you write today is the beginning for you?

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” — Malcolm Gladwell

Do you have an experience where in hindsight you can see that a previous project was the practice you needed for your current project? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Like Anything Else, We Need to Practice Startups was originally published in Buffer Posts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Firstly, one of my favorite startups Sprouter had announced that it was closing its doors. I had been closely following Sprouter for at least a year, and I’d also been lucky enough to be featured in their weekly newsletter a couple of times. It was sad to see it close, especially since I had seen how much effort Sarah and Erin have put in amongst others. That said, I can see that this will be a launchpad for future success.

Secondly, Nick Barker who’s a great friend of mine and a fellow british startup founder reached out to me to ask if I will go back to Nottingham some time to speak about overcoming failure. We had a brief conversation about how “celebrating failures” is a slightly alien concept in the UK and how the difficult subject must be talked about.

Failure comes with the territory

In TNW Sessions featuring Sarah Prevette of Sprouter, Sarah said that failure comes with the territory. Similarly, Dan Martell said:

“No one I know ever came out of the gate with a win. It usually always got preceded with a failure, or two.”

When I graduated from University in 2009, I knew I wanted to create a startup. I had an idea, so I got building straight away and I specifically found work which would allow me to spend a significant amount of time building the startup.

I had a co-founder and over the course of 1.5 years I had 4 other people involved. These are all people who in one way or another I feel I have let down, but we all knew that potential failure came with the territory.

I am not sure whether it helps for people to know that failure is part of the journey, but with hindsight I can see that it is definitely the case.

Learning from failure

Dan Martell wrote a post on Maple Butter about the end of Sprouter and the following words really stood out for me:

“We sometimes need to learn those lessons the hard way to lay the foundation for the next venture”

As someone who has a previous startup which didn’t go as well as I had hoped, I can relate to this on many levels.

The startup did not meet expectations, but it was the best 1.5 years of learning I have ever had. I learned the importance of building something people really want, about relationships and about not holding back with shipping a product and charging for it.

Sarah Prevette opened up about things she has learned from running Sprouter. She said that Sprouter was a great example of being a “victim of free”. Some of the things Sarah has taken away from her experience are great learning points:

“I would advise anybody to monetize right from the get-go. Don’t be afraid to charge. It is a much more difficult thing to discover a business model than it is to sell your product.”

Failure puts you in a better position to succeed

I can absolutely say that if I hadn’t spent 1.5 years working on a startup which did not succeed, there is no way I could have had some early success with Buffer as quickly as I did.

This is the mindset which Nick and I agreed was severely lacking in the UK. It seems that in the UK and perhaps other places failure is seen as a sign that you will never succeed. A “well done for trying, now quit the band and get a proper job” response doesn’t seem far from the norm. I honestly think the attitude is shifting, but now that I am in Silicon Valley I can see this particular aspect is one of the key differences. This is a reason location could matter for your startup.

Overall, I do not regret trying with my first startup, and I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today with Buffer if I hadn’t gone through that learning. Reading about the experiences of other startup founders I think there is great reason to celebrate failures.

Have you had an experience of failure? Do you think failures should be celebrated? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit: Ron Reiring

Click here to get my newest posts by email.

This post originally appeared on my personal blog joel.is.

Founders: Failure Comes with the Territory was originally published in Buffer Posts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back in mid-2011, I left everything behind in the UK and together with my co-founder Leo, and arrived in San Francisco to base ourselves and Buffer here for the next two and a half months.

I’ve been immersing myself in startup articles and trying to learn from others more experienced than myself for some time now, and out of anywhere the biggest portion of the articles I read are emerging from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

One of the things I’ve always wondered since I’ve been working on startups is how much of a difference location can make. In the UK, moving from Sheffield to Birmingham certainly helped due to more startup-minded people and easy proximity to London. We’re now in the startup capital of the world and whilst we haven’t visited the true Silicon Valley in terms of Palo Alto and Mountain View yet, I’ve started to form some thoughts about the benefits of being here and more generally the importance of location for startups.

It is much easier to meet like-minded and useful people

Since we arrived in San Francisco, my expectations of how easy it is to meet people and how helpful people are have been surpassed. In pretty much every coffee shop there are plenty of people coding away and who are obviously working on or interested in startups.

There are some fantastic spots such as The Summit in Mission which is a coffee shop crossed with a startup incubator. I’ve never seen so many Macs in a coffee shop in my life, and I’ve met lots of new interesting people there.

In addition, we’ve also had the chance to meet some fantastic startups in our space such as Twylah, and it has been fascinating to learn from Eric and Kelly who are doing a great job. It is much easier for these things to happen since many startups are based out here.

We’ve not even been along to one of the many events happening in SF yet and I’m sure that will emphasise this feeling even more.

People actually “get” what we’re doing

I think this point is actually pretty key for me. In the UK I found that most people didn’t “get” what I was doing or why I was doing it.

In San Francisco, you can skip right over a lot of the initial chit-chat because people “get” startups. The conversation can jump right on to what your startup is about.

For my startup this is even more apparent. In the UK I’d have to actually explain Twitter sometimes when describing what Buffer is about. Whilst even in San Francisco some people don’t use Twitter, pretty much everyone I’ve chatted to understands it and knows how powerful it is.

You don’t magically become productive in the “right” location

However, with all the positive things said, there is one thing which hit me pretty hard when I first arrived. Adjusting to a new environment and finding our way around certainly took up some of my time, but when we found a good spot and got down to work, I realised that location didn’t matter all that much.

We’ve been in bustling coffee shops packed with people working away, and we’ve been in quieter more relaxed places. Whatever the environment, it is still easy to procrastinate. Making meaningful progress is more about self-discipline and knowing what you want than anything else.

Location shouldn’t hold you back

In a blog post aimed at those who didn’t get into TechStars, Joe Heitzeberg, a successful serial Internet entrepreneur and TechStars mentor said his response to “what should I do now” is the following:

“programs like TechStars are great, but they shouldn’t be the single enabler. Keep on moving forward on your company.”

I feel the same about location. Sure, you might not be in Silicon Valley and you might not be able to just pack your bags and hop on a flight over here for many reasons, but not being in the “right” location shouldn’t stop you making progress with your startup from your current location.

Get into the startup mentality wherever you are

Overall, I believe that for myself, the most important thing has been to get into the startup mentality whilst I was in Sheffield and Birmingham working away on my startups. With the advantage of hindsight, I had a fairly good balance of reading lots about startups in blogs and books in order to learn from the experiences of others, and actually building and marketing my own startups in order to have experiences first-hand.

I think diving in and starting is the most important thing, and to wait for any “perfect” environment, be it location, experience, funds or otherwise, is a mistake to be avoided.

What are your thoughts and experiences on the difference being in the right location can make for your startup? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Photo credit: Ron Reiring

Click here to get my newest posts by email.

This post originally appeared on my personal blog joel.is.

Does location really matter for your startup? was originally published in Buffer Posts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.