Founder Spotlights: Insights from Maren Kate, co-founder and CEO of Inde.co
Part of our monthly webinar series in partnership with the NY Tech Alliance!
This month we were excited to connect with Maren Kate, co-founder and CEO of Inde.co, a virtual community designed exclusively to help remote workers thrive, personally and professionally. Maren is no stranger to remote work. In fact, she’s only founded and worked with remote-first companies! The relevance of Maren’s experience is especially poignant during COVID times as the circumstances of remote work have changed drastically.
Maren sat down with us to discuss her journey as an entrepreneur, how COVID-19 has affected her business and personal life, and shared her thoughts on the future of remote work. Read on for key insights from our thought provoking conversation centered around remote work or watch the full video here.
Failed ventures and altered plans can have big rewards
Fear of failure is often one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face, but Maren tells us that fear of failure was not a barrier for her. She credits this to her upbringing, telling us that her family emigrated from Syria to the United States and were always “scrappy” in their endeavors. This helped her develop a philosophy of taking small risks, knowing that they can snowball into great things. Maren says, “Once you’ve failed… you start to realize that next time you see this again, you’ll know how to {handle} it”. This philosophy came in helpful during COVID when Maren’s new business were deterred. She’d planned to raise money to build her minimum viable product, but as the pandemic took hold, funding was sparse. Maren realized that while she couldn’t code her own product, she could still move her business forward by writing, so she wrote a book called Going Remote. The book has provided a fantastic opportunity for direct feedback from her consumer base. Maren explains, “Every time someone buys the book, we’re talking to our core user,” and “It’s been a forcing function to go down a different path. I think, at the end of the day, we’ll sell enough that we can bootstrap our own development… {and there may be} other services that the community is needing and requesting”. The foundation of Maren’s core offering will be built using direct feedback from the community she’s selling into — a founder’s dream, and the direct result of altered plans.
Everyone has a professional DNA
Strategies and plans changing quickly is often a matter of course for founders. Defying traditional conventions is something entrepreneurs are well known for as well, and Maren is no exception. One long-held idea that Maren is ready to eradicate is that any job has the power to define you who you are, what you do, and how & when you do it. She tells us, “human beings are purpose-seeking missiles”. She wants to guide people toward steady, meaningful work that they can find, keep and evolve as their profession. Seeing her father in and out of work growing up, Maren recognized how deeply our work and identity are intertwined. Maren says, “Everyone has their highest calling of work”. She suggests that if you can understand your own core competencies, interests, and drivers — and accept that they evolve as your life does — your work can and should naturally evolve with you. Maren shares, “Meaningful work and helping people find it is my passion”.
Building a team with ’remote fluency’
Maren has built or worked with remote companies exclusively throughout her career, so remote work is truly her expertise. When asked what those new to remote work should consider when hiring for remote roles, she suggests thinking through remote fluency — Have they worked remote before? If not, do they have a clear, conscious communication style? How tech savvy are they with the platforms you use? Maren says, “Successful remote workers need creativity, curiosity, incredibly strong written communication, and they need to be self-motivated”. These traits and skills are crucial in a work-from-home environment where you have more autonomy than in a traditional office. Training remote employees brings both familiar and new challenges. You must consider how seasoned a new employee is in the traditional workforce and their comfort level with technology. You also need to account for the fact that trainers now need to rely entirely on virtual tools. Maren suggests implementing a buddy system for new hires, instituting longer training cycles that include a gradual introduction of work, and incorporating shadowing of existing employees into the training curriculum. Importantly, managers should understand the skills they need to focus during training based on the employee. Some remote hires will be digital natives that are new to the workforce, and some will be used to in-person interaction at an office.
What remote work looks like moving forward
Setting up structure is paramount for effective remote work. Leaders should work with employees to help them set a cadence for when to be productive, as well as when to turn off and disconnect from work. Post COVID-19, we know that we’re likely to see more fully remote teams, but many will likely move toward a partially remote, partially in-office structure. In those situations, Maren recommends defaulting to a remote-first culture. For example, everyone in the office or working from home would dial into a meeting individually, from their respective computers.This levels the playing field and ensures those not in the office aren’t left out of the conference room side conversations. It’s also critical that processes are well documented and leadership makes an effort to be transparent. Maren says, “The more transparent you can be, the better”. In practice for Maren, this means that whenever a new project is assigned, they start with ‘the why’, which helps employees understand how day-to-day projects and the work that they do ties into the bigger picture. She says this practice has been a game changer for her remote teams.
With remote work becoming more widespread, it benefits every founder to start asking how we can each best optimize for it. Digital-first companies may have a head start, but we can all potentially benefit from things like an improved quality of life by eliminating our commutes or the ability to source higher quality talent at lower costs or having an opportunity to better document our processes, and more. We hope this conversation with Maren Kate of Inde.co helped provide some direction as you think about how the shift to remote work may affect your business!
Keep up to date with the latest trends via Grasshopper Bank’s Resource Guide — offering a compilation of the best articles on remote work, strategies and tips for managing a business and maintaining your mental well-being during challenging times, and more.
Join us September 3rd as we welcome Genevieve Ryan Bellaire, Founder & CEO of Real World, a one-stop-shop for helping adults navigate and conquer life decisions.
