znq

Google Sites. Not specific reason, other that we use Google Suite already for most things and everyone has already a Google Suite account.

Good morning! Just marketing fluff. Boutique App & Web Development Company is just a term we made up, to reflect our focus of being small, tailored and of high quality.

Thank you very much. We actually did spend more than 6 months (not full time of course) working on this and are very proud to release it this week.

Currently the team is spread over Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Spain, Australia, UK. That said, 1/3 of the team is in Barcelona (where we started the company), but not necessarily Spanish. That said though, while we're quite diverse and from many countries and cultures, most of us do live in Europe though and once the summer is back we'll migrate back there.

So in summer it's quite easy for us, as we as a team sit closely together. However many of our customers are from the US West Coast and then the other extreme is a client in Australia. Winter time is then more difficult as some people go back home to Latin America or over to Asia. But so far we've always managed and actually sometimes it helps to have someone being in a different time zone. Makes it easier to monitor servers around the clock.

We do however require that team members do have a certain overlap with CET. Just in December I was myself in Brazil, so I simply started working at 6am and stopped around 2pm to go kitesurfing. Maybe not something everyone wants to do, but since our company is mostly about lifestyle everyone in our team appreciates that freedom, but also understands the responsibility that comes with it.

It has been a great choice. I've incorporated companies in multiple countries before, and Estonia has been by far the best. Easy, unbureaucratic, extremely competent, they speak great English and are always very pro-active and helpful. We work with the guys from LeapIN and it has been a great and pleasant experience since day 0.

Great! Thank you. We've also fixed the landing page to make it a direct download.

Absolutely! Basically everyone can propose new ideas to the team. If multiple people are interested and we see a benefit for the company (e.g. learning a new technology) we will run it.

These experiments range from little internal dev tools, to scripted spreadsheets, to open source libraries to even hardware projects. Sometimes an experiment is also just trying out a new way of running the company. For example MJ Talks and MJ University were initially experiments. Or our trip to Thailand in 2014 was an experiment. Now we do 5-6 company trips per year (workations, skiing, hiking, kitesurfing). Our bonus/profit-share program was an experiment that we started 11 months ago.

Also some of those experiments turn into products. At least we try. Some are successful and spawn their own company from it, e.g. Bugfender. Most experiments however failed to gain traction as a product. Maybe not because the idea/product itself was bad, but because we're a tech company and suck at sales and marketing.

As stated in a sibling, it was our genuine intention to send out updates for those who want to get it. I agree it wasn't implemented in the best way and I should have reviewed the landing page, but it certainly wasn't because of ulterior motive.

To be honest, there were no bad intentions behind it other then updating people with updates to the book as written there. But we do get your (and other people's) point and have fixed it to a direct download. Thanks :-)

To be honest, we're currently not really thinking of growing the company much. But you're right.

However, this whole thing started out as a Onboarding Handbook for new team members. Then however we thought it's also a great book to share with the world. So we decided to remove certain items and have those in the internal wiki only.

I'd say so. I think especially "management" (we're mostly a flat company, so management including founders is more of a counsel) are big proponents of using Asana.

Currently the team is spread over Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Spain, Australia, UK. That said, 1/3 of the team is in Barcelona (where we started the company), but not necessarily Spanish.

All fixed. Thanks for the feedback guys. We're a tech company, not so much a marketing company, so we probably don't really know what we're doing here :-)

If profit is not the priority, there's a lot of things a company can do. To be honest, from our own experience of scaling up the company, the years between 0-10 employees were the most difficult ones. Now, 7 years later running an established company with a great reputation and 20 excellent team members leaves a lot of room for experiments and doing things like this.

HN moderators: I noticed this just made it to the front page and then got removed. This is really disappointing. Is there any explanation why? This was a genuine effort of sharing something useful with the HN crowd.

Thanks. I'll get that sorted out.

Here's the direct link to the PDF for the HN crowd: https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com...

Alternative download (Google Drive) in case the server goes down: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16D90e7L7whbeRSCLxhZ_X3-K_3R...

EDIT: Added alternative download.

I think that where having a team comes in handy. When I used to be a freelancer I had exactly that problem. Being a perfectionist. But when working with a team, doing shared product testing and code reviews and other kind of evaluations gives over time a very clear measurement of what "the standard of good enough" is. And I guess that's different for each company. We definitely strive for excellent quality, but certainly not by sacrificing people or team happiness.

The problems we see is when people are overloaded because of bad planning on our side or customers asking for too tight deadlines and we wanting to be nice and help them achieve it (again our fault). Then people actually tend to feel pressured doing more for the company's sake. Which is sometimes ok in my opinion and also appreciated when there's an emergency, but we try for it not to become the rule.

Regarding owners/managers working less, I see it the same as you: leading by example. And generally I don't see a problem with that, as everyone is mostly working very responsibly (in our case). However, what we've noticed over the years is that it still needs some people with a global company vision and also visionary mindset to push the company to new frontiers and help people to look beyond what they're currently working on and to think outside the box.

With freedom, comes responsibility. There needs to be some communication and information/knowledge exchange, otherwise it's difficult to coordinate and synchronize in a team of 20 people. Therefore updating other people via Slack/Asana is the minimum anyone should do in my opinion.

The two weekly stand-ups, one is actually work related (the team meeting) and people are encouraged to be there and not go surfing just during that specific hour and the other one is the MJ Weekly, where we just exchange personal and professional learnings for about 1 hour, which is a great way to get to know other people being a remote company.

That said, making those things "required" is not that bad compared to requiring people sitting 8 hours in an office. Again, my personal opinion.

As just commented on a related thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649) this doesn't seem to be a problem for us, as since ever and always we gave people the choice to work as much as they want and when they want. People take breaks whenever they feel like. Go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same.

But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working.

Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine.

I really don't want this to be a promotion and also because I just shared it on the other thread, but I really think people (both business owners and employees) should have a look at our just released company handbook which covers a great deal how we work. If anyone thinks this is unrelated spam I'm more than happy to remove it.

* https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates)

* https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF for the HN crowd)

At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-existent (specific people that then ended up not staying very long in the company) and the advantages by far outweigh the "loss of control". In the end myself as a business owner and managers have far less stress by trusting people and empowering them to do great work.

With this framework, people will take breaks whenever they feel like. They go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same.

But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working.

Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine.

We also just released our company handbook which goes in a lot of detail on how we run a 20+ people remote business:

* https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates)

* https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF)

EDIT: Added some more details

At Mobile Jazz we've a weekly meeting every Wednesday with everyone where we share all company updates. We're not a large company (~20 team members) and we also deliberately want to stay small, simply because we really enjoy this culture of being fully transparent (amongst other reasons). The bigger it gets, my feeling is that it's harder to make everyone happy and transparency turns into endless debates, so bigger companies, as a result of that, usually end up being less transparent.

Coincidentally, we just released today our company handbook:

* https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates)

* https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF)

Hope someone finds it helpful! :-)

Edit: typo

No problem :-)

Two years ago I made a video about 3 years of living in a camper van. As of next months it's actually gonna be 5 years.

https://optimizingforhappiness.com/3-years-of-living-in-a-ca...

My plan was to make a whole video series out of it, but just doing one video already took me so much time and with running and managing two companies[1][2] at the same time, I didn't feel that I wanted to spend more time in front of a computer editing videos. But maybe in the future I'll pick it up again and continue the series.

[1] https://bugfender.com/

[2] http://mobilejazz.com/

SEEKING WORK: Mobile, Web & Backend

Location: International with clients in US, Europe, ME and Asia. HQ in Barcelona. Remote: YES

Remote: remote-only

Technologies: Mobile (iOS, Android), Web, Backend (Go, PHP, Node.js), Design

Résumé/CV: http://mobilejazz.com

Email: stefan@mobilejazz.com

We’ve worked with various folks from HN over the past 9 years with very satisfying outcomes for everyone :-)

Without wanting to spam, I just want to share our summary of our favorite web dev tools https://mobilejazz.com/blog/the-best-web-frontend-developmen...

(We're a 25 people remote company and have been in business for almost 10 years now, so we've a little bit of an idea of what we're talking about. Disclaimer though: one of the tools mentioned in this blog post -- Localname -- if one of our own)

Awesome! #vanlife is becoming a big thing it seems :-)

I also made a video recently about "3 Years of Living in a Camper Van and Running a 20 People Remote Business" [1]

Now I'm in it for 3.5 years already and thought I'd settle down eventually, but I still love it as on the first day if not even more.

[1] https://optimizingforhappiness.com/3-years-of-living-in-a-ca...

Shameless self-promotion: our Bugfender blog https://bugfender.com/blog/

We share technical posts about mobile development, about scaling our backend and database systems and our experience using Go. On the other end of the spectrum we also write a lot about building a bootstrapped lifestyle business without any external investment.

Some examples:

- https://bugfender.com/blog/go-pros-cons-using-go-programming...

- https://bugfender.com/blog/three-years-bugfender-9-5m-users/

- https://bugfender.com/blog/why-a-lifestyle-business-beats-a-...

Most recently I'm a fan of http://devcraftweekly.com/ which some of my employees started as a side project. It's a weekly newsletter on the "Art, Craft and Lifestyle of Software Engineering" but there's also a blog format: https://devcraftweekly.com/archives/

Have a look and check it out. Focus is on development & software engineering as well as remote work and work-life balance.

We've developed an internal tool to remotely access iOS and Android log files (NSLog and logcat). We work remotely, so we always had issues debugging problems that we couldn't reproduce.

Initially it was just an internal experiment at Mobile Jazz and at some point we even thought killing it, but now after 3 years we're at €7300 MRR (~$8600/month) and growing consistently.

That said, we still haven't reached our break even point (also because we decided to invest more in marketing and supporting additional platforms) and it'll take us some more years to recuperate the time (=money) invested.

We've written about our story here: https://bugfender.com/blog/three-years-bugfender-9-5m-users/ and have provided an updated to revenue numbers and other statistics here: https://bugfender.com/blog/updates-from-bugfender-q2-2017/