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I wish more people would see this HN thread and video. This is a truly amazing and well produced hobby video.

Not sure what your skills are, but at Mobile Jazz [1] we offer remote part-time and full-time jobs for software engineers, designers and project managers.

We've been a fully remote company since inception and put a ton of emphasize on providing every team member with what they need in terms of flexibility and work-life-balance.

We've written an extensive Company Handbook about who we are, how we work and what we do [2]. It's free to download.

We’re proud to say that our average employee stay is four years — more than double the average for our industry.

[1]: https://mobilejazz.com/careers/

[2]: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

Mobile Jazz Company Handbook: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

We just updated the public version two days ago to the latest internal version.

Yes! https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/ (free to download)

Simple cost/result calculation. Creating a PDF + simple web page was something our designer can do easily. Developing a whole website around would have been much more expensive.

We've been working remotely since 2013. Here's a short blog post that we've put together today with input from everyone in our team on what their recommendations are for someone working from home for their first time: https://bugfender.com/blog/coronavirus-covid-19-how-to-embra...

Here's also a direct download link to our company handbook with more in-depth tips: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

We've been working remotely since 2013. Here's a short blog post that we've put together today with input from everyone in our team on what their recommendations are for someone working from home for their first time: https://bugfender.com/blog/coronavirus-covid-19-how-to-embra...

Here's also a direct download link to our company handbook with more in-depth tips: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

I think it was "Our Handbook for Remote Work" or something like that.

I've noticed someone changed the submission title on HN to the headline on the page. Which is fine with me, but somehow misses the point why I've shared it here. Which is sharing our company handbook for those who are "forced" now to work from home, rather than making a claim about a grand vision. Again, I don't mind much, just wanted to clarify and explain myself.

We've created this handbook already a year ago. It is a more visually appealing version of our internal wiki. We've received a lot of very positive feedback so far and I hope it can be even more useful now that so many people are "forced" to work from home.

We're also working on a blog post right now with some tips and tricks helping especially those people who work remotely the first time now and have now clue on how to organize their work and personal life around it. I'll share it as soon as we've published it (probably today).

Our Company Handbook for Remote Work https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

Other HN members have pointed out previously, that it looks like a landing page where you need to leave your e-mail address. You don't. You can download the PDF from here directly.

At Mobile Jazz and Bugfender (two remote companies that I started) we have:

* Weekly meetings (every Wednesday for 1h) where everyone can just share what they're doing in life. Can also be about work, but it's mostly about general life stuff. That is where we connect.

* 1-2 per month we have an educational talk similar like TED talks where we talk about topics like GTD, personal finance, investing, health, hobbies, training, etc.

* 1 time per year we have a mandatory "University" event where we spend a week in a remote location teaching each other mostly technical skills (but can also be management and design skills). All paid.

* 1 time per year we rent a huge house over an extended weekend and fly everyone in. Including partners and children. All paid.

* Multiple times per year we offer skiing, surfing, and hiking trips. We pay for the accommodation. Team members have to pay for their own food and travel expenses.

More details in our company handbook: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/ (free to download, no email required, just click the download link)

Unfortunately that is a very difficult question to answer as it is very specific to your company's tax and legal residency and those of every single team member.

In our case we offer proper employment where we have a legal entity and thus actually can employ team members. For people with tax residency in other countries the only somewhat non-bureaucratic and sustainable solution is for them to go self-employed and have a "consulting contract" with us. That said, regardless of the legal technicalities, we treat everyone the same.

While it wasn't the initial reason to create the company handbook, there are for sure marketing intentions behind the site and the handbook as well. Otherwise it wouldn't justify the effort of turning our internal wiki into a well designed PDF. But I believe giving it away for free and having people talking about it positively is already great for our brand. Actually by now I know this already for a fact, as many people have reached out to us because of this.

I've shared this a lot recently, sorry for doing it again, but usually the feedback we get is extremely positive:

We've turned our internal wiki with processes and experiences from running a fully remote company for over 8 years in a nice digestible PDF: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

We started as an "office company" in 2011, turned partly remote in 2014 and fully remote in 2018. Being all in an office worked great. Fully remote worked great. Anything in between is difficult. Remote workers are just not fully integrated, no matter being it things happening spontaneously in the office or social events.

Also in confirmation of one of the sibling comments these have been for us the main issues as well:

• Communication is a skill that most engineers don't possess and have difficulty learning.

• We stopped working with junior people. It's just too time-consuming grooming them remotely.

• Teaching team members that they are responsible for their own working environment. Shitty Internet and working from a loud coffee shop is just not acceptable. Still, they do it.

To onboard new team members and even as guidelines on a daily basis we've written and published an extensive company handbook (used to be a not so visually appealing internal wiki): https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

We're working on a Web SDK for Bugfender, but unfortunately it'll still take a couple of months to finish and test properly, before we can release it.

On our platforms page we have a subscription to get notified once a new platform is supported: https://bugfender.com/platforms/

As a remote company we're dedicating a 1-hour video call every week to learning. On top of that we've 2-3 voluntary video calls that we call MJ Talks (similar to TED Talks) talking about all kinds of topics ranging from technical and software related topics, but also health, fitness, personal finance, etc.

On top of that we dedicate one week every year to something that we call MJ University. We rent a hotel in a location and fly everyone in to that location. If you're interested on all the details, we've written them up here: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/mj-university-staying-ahead-of-t...

We tried ads, but that didn't work. Whether developers just block or ignore them, or we didn't figure out the right message, I don't know.

So all of our traffic is now organic.

There also seem to be a 2nd and 3rd part to this blog post.

- Part 2: https://manifold.co/blog/founders-guide-developer-tools-mark...

- Part 3: https://manifold.co/blog/founders-guide-developer-tools-go-t...

This. A thousand times.

We are developers ourself. 4 years ago we built a great tool (a remote logger for mobile apps)[1] internally for ourselves. We had such a huge benefit from it when developing mobile apps, we thought this tool must be very useful to other developers as well. It was a no brainer to turn it into a SaaS product. But we had no clue about how to market it to people.

So we started reading every book on marketing out there (e.g. "Traction") and listened to a tons of product marketing related podcasts (e.g. "Smart Passive Income", "The Art of Product"). We tried many things over a period of 2 years. Nothing worked. After investing 100k€ in development and marketing money plus a lot of our own hours we were almost about to kill it. When suddenly, after the summer break, sales slowly started to ramp up. Without doing anything, but gaining traction on some of our blog posts about technology and development.

Now almost 5 years since inception we have a nice and stable business with 20k€ MRR and constantly growing. We stopped doing any marketing as you'd learn it from the books and focused entirely on creating value for developers through generating content that is also interesting for ourselves. And to be honest, it also makes you feel a lot better, not having to trick people into buying something.

There's probably still a lot we can learn and do better in order to "sell more", but we're quite happy with the current situation (financially) and really appreciate the feedback and praise we get from the developer community valuing our product.

Without wanting to self-promote our product too much, if you're interested in getting more details about our "failed marketing story" we've just published a blog post[2] on Indie Hackers about exactly this.

- 1: https://bugfender.com

- 2: https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side-projec...

THANK YOU!

Just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you! I started out as a freelance mobile developer in 2009 and over those years got many great work contacts and friends through this monthly thread. My single freelance activity has grown over those 10 years into multiple successful businesses[1][2][3] and even investments and partnerships.

Super stoked to be part of the HN community! It's still my daily #1 website. I hope it to be around for at least another 10 years. Hopefully forever.

[1] https://mobilejazz.com

[2] https://bugfender.com

[3] actually many businesses that failed as well (Localname, DevCraft, Enterprise Push Technology)

We've built Bugfender 5 years ago as an internal tool at Mobile Jazz for solving our own need of iOS and Android debugging and remote logging. After the first 2 years or struggling we've now just crossed MRR $23k USD and the business continues to grow healthy with small and big customers.

https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side-projec...

We have a business bank account with LHV. For us it was as easy as making an appointment, quickly flying there and walking into their main office in Tallinn. After ~30 minutes everything was set up.

That was 3 years ago, though. Maybe things have changed?

I've run and invested in businesses in multiple countries (Spain, Germany, US, UAE, Sri Lanka). One of them (Mobile Jazz - a fully remote company) we've moved to Estonia in 2016. One of the best business decisions we've made admin-wise. While there are for sure better alternatives when it comes to "saving on taxes" (I'd say Estonia is in the European average with 20% corporate tax and an interesting taxation model on capital distribution), it is definitely a huge improvement when it comes to dealing with authorities compared to virtually elsewhere in the world, based on what I've experienced myself of heard from others. Estonian people speak really good English. Typically things just work as they should and it something doesn't, they're super fast in responding and very eager to solve the problem for you. While I don't have visibility on everything that happens in the country, in terms of how they handle their bureaucracy, they're certainly a role model for other countries.

At Mobile Jazz (fully remote company) we've a weekly 1-hour video-conference call dedicated to sharing knowledge and experiences with each other. For that we share a Google Doc where everyone has a section to write down a few bullets, add links or images. Then in the call everyone gets 2-3 minutes to talk. Usually it takes less than a minute and we have the other 2 minutes to discuss.

For the actual organization of knowledge we use Slack (#team room for work related stuff, #coffee room for everything else) and then for the serious information and processes we use a Wiki (Google Sites) and Asana.

We've also written an extensive Company Handbook [PDF] which can be downloaded here for free: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf

To give some background: This project was part of the Bugfender suite of developer tools to make developer's life a little bit easier every day.

Localname was built by Mobile Jazz and Bugfender as a commercial product experiment. But in the end the ROI wasn't there for us, so we decided all marketing and product efforts and release it as a free-to-use open source version.

Good morning Paul! Maybe I didn't get your question, but could you elaborate of what you want examples? Happy to give them, just didn't understand what you want exactly.

We did in the past. You might still find some entries on our blog. However, currently we're not hiring for specific positions as our goal is not growth in quantity or higher revenue. We're only hiring if we came across individuals that we think are a very good fit for our company culture and have the right mindset and attitude. That's why it is an "open application".