100+ Remote Startup Mantras

The TL;DR of this piece Remote Startup Mantras is:

1. Remote Startups should HCI Design Every Business Decision
2. Distributed Team Management
3. Recruiting and Hiring
4. Customer Success
5. Software Development in a Remote Startup
6. Marketing and Sales for Distributed Teams
7. Finance and Operations
8. Branding in Design
9. Distinguishing Culture in your Market
10. Positive Psychology and Happiness for Entrepreneurs
11. Daily Chores for the CEO

About the Author: Gobi Dasu is the founder of ldtalent.org and a CS PhD Student at Northwestern University. He holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. Born out of a masters research project, LD Talent (“Learning Dollars Talent”) is a network of software engineers financially incentivized to engage in lifelong learning.

Remote Startups should HCI Design Every Business Decision

1. Think about Human-Computer Interaction Design when making any decision. Design matters even more when working with remote and distributed teams.
2. Ask yourself why → how → what.
3. Do needfinding and talk to real people.
   • Just because all processes are happening online in your remote startup, doesn’t mean you don’t need to speak to real customers face to face on video chat.
4. Conduct interviews to define a problem.
5. Write down personas and scenarios.
6. Ideate → 25 stickies → 3 sketches → 1 final sketch
   • you and write down 25 ideas – no judgement
   • do some affinity mapping
   • you isolate down to 3 of them sketched out
   • you make one final detailed sketch to prototype
   • use tools like sketch.io/sketchpad/ on zoom calls with your distributed team
7. Storyboard and mind map.
8. Implement an MVP.
9. Do RITE testing (rapid iterative testing and evaluation)
10. Problem before solution: understand the problem before designing the solution.
11. Address your riskiest risk.
12. On any given day, work on the most important business improvements first, but time box them. This is so you’re always optimizing product market fit. Then, complete required periodic tasks to maintain your company. If there’s more time, then you can do more improvement work.
13. Complexity kills.
14. Keep Cognitive Biases in mind.

Distributed Team Management

1. Promote a constantly moving distributed team.
2. Delegate all tasks. As a CEO or engineering manager, you should only prepare, communicate, review, merge, and iterate on coding tasks. You need to context-switch a lot, so don’t assign yourself self tasks. Management is your role not coding. The schedule of a remote startup CEO and engineering manager and the schedule of a developer look very different.
   • heuristic1: only engineers should be assigned trello cards and subtasks, not you
   • heuristic2: assign every trello task/subtask to an engineer – one at a time so they don’t get overwhelmed
   • heursitic3: turnaround time for feature requests from bizdev should be around 1 month on average — otherwise your startup isn’t iterating in a RITE fashion
3. Generously give feedback to new team members even if it’s way off. Mastering this art of delegation and feedback makes you scalable.
   • You can even ask them to undo wrong work. This is an investment in their training.
   • It’s an art to delegate work to a person and give feedback to them to get them to achieve an end, rather than do yourself.
   • But, make sure you delegate the right things to the right people.
     • Think about what each person would like and be able to do, and delegate accordingly.
4. Let engineers make time estimates (in hours or days), multiply them by 3, and then set trello card deadlines.
5. Leverage TV (task visualization) and MPST (minimum possible subtask breakdowns) to make better time estimates.
6. Add developers to your github repo but use a wiki (to update) establish rules of the codebase.
7. Use a careful feedback sandwich to keep morale high in your remote startup. As clichéd as it is, it works very well, as long as your compliments are genuine and growth mindset oriented.
   • For example, say you don’t think someone did a good job with content. But, you think they were very organized in their presentation. Then you can say to them that you thought their organization is strong. But, improving content in particular ways will significantly bolster the content depth of the well organized presentation.
8. Remember that every time you give feedback, it’s an investment in your distributed team.
   • Over time new members will know the codebase better and will code in the way the team expects them to.
9. If an engineer fails to to do a task after 2 chances, let them go, so your team is pruned: clean and strong.
10. If your team gets into debates a lot then: always use an hourglass when holding discussions. It’s a round robin, and each person gets 1 minute to talk, where they can’t be interrupted. Minimize discussion and focus on people’s strengths.
11. Always congratulate team members in front of their peers when they achieve a significant feat.
    • For instance we congratulate engineers in our network when they get a client.
    • We give them even stronger praise, in front of all their peers, when they successfully convert a free trial client to a paying client.
12. Praise team members for collaborating in your remote startup.
    • Silo’d organizations suck. We encourage you to create groups of people that make connections on their own and collaborate.
13. Inspired by the 5 levels of remote work, we encourage you to setup slack based check ins. They are little slack bot reminders that encourage your team to write an update in a channel at a specific mutually timezone convenient time on weekdays. This facilitates real-time text based communication for critical items that aren’t well served by otherwise asynchronous slack communication.
14. Leverage effective tools for collaboration in distributed teams. For instance we use:
    • Google Drive, especially sheets and docs
    • Trello, where each board has the following lists:
      • to do, in progress, done, in review, completed, think about later
    • Box for large files
    • Slack for communication
    • Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools for site traffic analysis and decision making
    • Zoom for recorded webinars (see here for our first webinar)
15. Do a security check up every month.
    • If you and your team use a password manager (we use Dashlane), then make sure that all your core members have high scores for security. Check that your:
      • business model is secure without loopholes.
      • cloud resources are all cleaned up and secure.
      • core team’s physical devices are secure.
    • Setup permissions structures so that you can share specific resources with specific people intentionally. Being a remote startup is completely compatible with a secure setup.
16. Organize all the internal tasks that your core team has to perform in a single spreadsheet. As your organization grows, it’s impossible to keep track of everything that’s going on. We have thousands of people interacting with our company as clients or developers or potential stakeholders. I can’t keep tabs on what everyone is doing. The only thing I can control is what I do (described in this sheet) and what my core team does. We have to create processes (i.e. periodic tasks) that ensure that our organization operates effectively at scale. So, as such I recommend creating a sheet with the following columns, for your cofounders and virtual assistants:
    • Cofounder 1 | Task | Done || Cofounder 2 | Task | Done || VA | Task | Done
    • Everyone should fill this sheet.
    • Then you should check and clear this sheet daily to ensure that everyone is doing what they should do every day. People should only get paid if they “fill the sheet”, for instance.

Recruiting and Hiring

1. Even if engineers are skilled and responsive, you may not want to put all eggs in one basket.
2. Interview, try, and hire multiple engineers.
3. To build a remote distributed team, you should assign engineers pieces of work so that you can evaluate them. And so you can get the right cultural match and work dynamic in place. Some LD-specific advice:
   • You can tell them to spend no more than X number of work sessions on a particular subtask to keep costs under control.
   • You can and even should reject work sessions you are not satisfied with within 2 days.
   • This way you can build up a distributed team of engineers who are familiar with your project codebase.
     • at least one of whom can help at moment’s notice, even if some engineers don’t stick around

Customer Success

1. No response to a client or customer should be custom. Being a remote startup eases this.
2. Learn from every situation and add it to a standardized but detailed customer support handbook.
3. Answers for new questions / scenarios should be developed, standardized, and documented.
4. That way, in future, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and can use the standardized response.
5. In addition, add each Q&A pair to a public FAQ document or portal for your customers.
6. You should do all this so you can focus your time on important, scalable work.
7. Now, when truly new customer situations come in, they are rich feedback to learn from.
   • They can’t be answered by standard responses.
   • You may even need to modify your product or processes.
8. Deal with negative events like customer complaints, team complaints, rejection, hacking, legal disputes, blocking (i.e. when your clever guerrilla marketing is labeled spam), etc. as feedback on the robustness of your system (a regular expense, not to be personally affected by)
   • Don’t waste days on a negative event – write down the steps to resolve the matter over the next few days, and deal with it as a daily chore.
   • Collect as much info on the offending party / incident asap and counter it diplomatically.
   • Don’t let one incident stop you from enjoying everything else which is going great.
   • If you personally don’t get flustered and waste time, you and your team will be better equipped for customer success.
9. Anticipate concerns that your customers face, and message them with an answer in the following format:
   • If you are concerned about [something you know they are concerned about], then you can overcome that obstacle by doing [A and B].
   • For instance we message our engineers saying: If you are concerned that you haven’t been invited to interviews by any clients, then you should send your profile to peers in this network for a peer review. Remember when the client’s first impression of you is through your profile so you want it to look good.
10. Leverage effective SaaS tools to streamline your remote startup’s customer service. For instance we use:
    • Zendesk and Zendesk Chat for customer support
    • Calendly for customer appointments
    • Hubspot CRM for keeping track of leads and customers
    • HelloSign for digital contracts
    • Freshbooks for digital invoices
    • Mailchimp for sending non-spammy mail
    • Twilio for sending automated reminder texts
    • Slack for coordinating work for clients
    • Rocketreach to get potential clients’ contact info

Software Development in a Remote Startup

1. Before sending important messages or pushing code take a few minutes to:
   • scan each piece of what you have done calmly,
   • walk through a few scenarios,
   • and see that it makes sense.
2. Don’t rush because you’ll just pay for that time down the road when correcting mistakes.
3. Follow this guide to engineering management which covers DevOps, Continuous Integration, linters, unit tests, end2end tests, package management, logging, a dev testing environment, a protected prod server, and organized peer code reviews on github.
4. Specifically, regarding organized peer code reviews on github, we recommend all tech teams maintain a github wiki. The wiki should have certain heuristic questions, best practices, and rules to check during code reviews.
5. We recommend blocking pushes into master until at least 3 team members approve a pull request (PR). During the peer review phase, we recommend that the 3 team members go through the project’s “wiki rules” and make sure the pull request’s diffs respect them.
   • Code, unit tests, end to end tests, linters, and static analysis scripts will run.
6. When approving code from a development environment to production, your distributed team will need to do the following at minimum:
   • Manually test features (that were pushed after the commit currently deployed to prod) on dev server if possible.
   • Manually click into all tables on database admin to make sure there are no migrations errors.
   • If it’s a major deploy affecting many cron jobs, you may want to do the following:
     • comment out all the crons
     • go through each cron one by one and uncomment it if it’s trivial
     • or run it once in the shell if it’s not (control C if something’s going wrong) before uncommenting
   • All your crons are now are tested on development and uncommented.
7. Test Driven Development: when you assign work, you need to assign / tell developers to write corresponding e2e for views and unit tests for crons.
   • Even if you are making an exception, you need to explicitly note the exception in the test file.
8. No piggybacking in pull requests.
   • By this, we mean that you should have one pull request per new feature.
   • Do not piggyback some quick but unrelated fix into an existing pull request — create a new pull request for this.
   • As a team reject such piggybacked PRs .
9. Overconfidence, unilateralism, sloppiness, and arrogance to not ask others questions, for help, or for a peer review of important things like critical code and work assignment is not acceptable.
10. Only do or assign work once you’ve understood it.
11. Nobody at your remote startup can be responsible for monitoring you – you have to ask others.
12. Never touch a database migrations folder! Let it be autogenerated.
13. Leverage effective tools for coordinating code version control, continuous integration, and deployment. For instance we use:
    • Github for source control
    • AWS Code Pipeline for continuous integration
    • AWS Elastic Beanstalk for hosting
14. Check if packages or APIs you’re using need to be upgraded.
15. Monthly, you should make sure that your server and database instances are getting backed up. You should make sure that autoscaling of your servers is configured correctly.

Marketing and Sales for Distributed Teams

1. Decide on a sole goal for your remote startup (the uncontrollable goal).
   • You don’t know whether you’ll meet this goal because you don’t have control. (i.e. get 10 new customers / day)
   • Keep track of your progress toward that goal in a spreadsheet.
2. Recite your sole uncontrollable goal weekly.
3. Decide on what you’re going to accomplish this month that will help you achieve your sole goal (the controllable goal).
   • You are in complete control of this goal. (i.e. write one major blog article, implement 2 features, etc.)
4. Recite your monthly controllable goal weekly with your distributed team.
5. Marketing activities should be prioritized over engineering new features, once you have product market fit. Use spreadsheets to organize the following outreach for your remote startup. These may include
   • SEO
     • we learned seo from backlinko.com, neilpatel.com, blog.hubspot.com, and criminallyprolific.com, yoast, web master tools academy, moz academy, seoland though we have since beat Criminally Prolific’s alexa rank
     • also to guide effective qualitative communication you should check out Steven Franconeri and Liz Gerber’s work at visualthinking.psych.northwestern.edu, as well as the qualitative chart chooser
     • email based outreach
     • such as google groups where your customers would hang out
       • go to groups.google.com
       • search for what your customers would be asking for (i.e. for us we search “react freelance”)
       • select “all groups and messages”
       • search
       • select “outside my org”
       • identify the google groups of interest
       • request to join them
       • stay tuned for future requests into that group and pitch them when they occur
   • outreach in specific groups and communities
     • such as public slack organizations where your customers would hang out
     • search for such slack orgs using google and then request to join
   • outreach to people who publicly express needs that match your product
   • referrals
6. Those marketing activities will bring you customers, what your growing startup needs most.
7. Reserve a few days (i.e. Mon-Thu) to focus on periodic marketing chores, and a few days (i.e. Fri-Sun) to focus on design and engineering improvements.
8. The caveat to the above is if there is an urgent client need or piece of feedback.
   • Say the situation is so dire that most of your customers have this need.
   • Or that you’d be able to 10x the number of customers if you address this need.
   • In that case, stop doing periodic chores and declare a state of emergency.
   • Buckle down on addressing those needs with major design changes and pivots.
9. Use referral systems to grow your customer base. Ask your clients to talk about you in the right circles.For instance at LD Talent we offer clients the following ways to gain free credits:
   • refer a friend who becomes a paying client and you get $100 in credits
   • write a testimonial, google review, facebook review, or product hunt review and you get $50 in credits
   • write content on quora, medium, or reddit featuring your positive experience with LD Talent and you get $50 in credits
10. Maintain a blog. Get your team to write about topics that your customers want to read about during the 99.9% of their time when their not specifically searching for your product. You should decide the keyword phrases you want to go for before even writing the post. For instance we went after “developer time tracking” when we wrote this cultural piece. You should go after keyword phrases where your domain can compete on the first 10 results (i.e. you aren’t competing with super impressive alexa ranked sites). Note, this is not the same as writing about your product. But also include:
    • newest product details (example)
    • interesting and latest customer case studies (examples)
    • major brand / cultural pieces on your blog (examples)
      • It’s important that when you write such posts, you double down and make accompanying media to spread across social: think webinars, youtube videos (examples), podcasts, posts on quora (eg) medium (eg) reddit (eg) and stackexchange (eg) that cite your cultural piece. Dress well for the video content and use a high quality mic. Announce cultural pieces across your social media accounts – facebook (eg), linkedin (eg), twitter (eg). TED talks are also great ways to show off cultural content.
      • It is also important to send mass cultural emails to your entire CRM where you share these cultural insights, so make them good!
    • you should also share customer case studies and stellar workforce performers across your blog and social media
    • you need to actively invite people to follow your blog
    • try to crowdsource some of the content from your distributed team rather than making it all yourself
    • these cultural artifacts will significantly improve your SEO
11. Networking: When you attend online conferences or events, then make sure to connect with the speakers on LinkedIn the next day saying you enjoyed their talk.
12. CRM: Make sure your CRM system is clean. For instance, deals and contacts are named, organized, and associated as you expect. Make sure that there aren’t duplicates. You can use automation and your CRM’s API to help with this.
13. Monthly you should iterate through your customer pipeline. Go through the customer and check what stage they are in. Write down feedback from the customer – i.e. the reason why they didn’t convert.

Operations and Finance

1. Be transparent about wanting to compensate your whole team fairly and in a timely fashion. For instance we explicitly post in front of all our globally distributed team the following message monthly:
   • “A reminder, please report to us directly if ever you are ever having trouble receiving payments in your country. We will work to correct the situation ASAP.”
2. Automate whatever you can. Compute time is way cheaper than human time. Caveats:
   • Don’t spend time to automate a process, if you’re still testing whether that process is necessary for your company.
   • Do a process manually on a periodic interval. If it is worthy of being automated, only then automate it.
   • Until then, do the task manually to test its value. At LD Talent, internally, we dub this wizard-of-oz-ing of routine tasks as “mancrons”, short for “manual cron jobs”. These are the pillars of remote startup logistics for us.
   • They are only automated when the cost of automating it is lower than the value of the time saved adjusted for the confidence we have that that task will stick around.
   • Examples:
     • We automate reporting the balance funded hours clients have because that is a task that is easy to automate and is a task that will always exist for our business.
     • Our staff hand reviews resumés of new candidates, since that is too qualitative and complex a task to automate at this stage.
     • We manually send holiday greetings in slack channels, since it is infrequent and special enough that it is not worth automating.

Branding in Design

1. Strongly encourage your entire distributed team (workforce, customers, investors, advisors, etc.) to follow all the company social media accounts: facebook, linkedin, twitter, youtube.
   • Tell them what they will gain by following.
   • For instance we tell our network that following our fb, linkedin, twitter, youtube, and blog help you identify:
     • who’s good at what within our network, as well as
     • what are the most effective ways to leverage the network
2. Each month, you should monitor how your company appears in search results and on social media. Put your empathy hat on and think like you would if you were the customer rather than the proprietor. What is the chatter around your company like.
3. Each month, you should think about each stage of your pipelines (for customers, talent, partners, etc). Think about what is the riskiest risk that is causing drop off. You can analyze these in your CRM for instance.
   • See if you want to up your scale a bit by raising your marketing spend, doubling down on effective marketing strategies.
   • See if you want to run any A/B tests.
   • Pretend to be a customer on your own site and looks for gulfs of evaluation and execution.
4. Share swag with your loyal customers and remote startup workforce. Examples can be found here.

Distinguishing Culture in your Market

1. Build your distributed team culture in small ways, like custom slack channels. Here are some that we have in our organization:
   • skill related: #skill-android, #skill-blockchain, #skill-datascience, #skill-django, #skill-ios, #skill-javascript, #skill-css, #skill-ml, #skill-node, #skill-python, #skill-react, #skill-reactnative, #skill-rubyonrails, #skill-scraping, #skill-selenium, #skill-tensorflow, #skill-unity, #skill-vr-ar, #skill-windowsdev, #skill-csharp
   • location related: #ldt-africa, #ldt-east-asia, #ldt-europe, #ldt-latin-america-caribbean, #ldt-middle-east, #ldt-oceania, #ldt-south-asia, #ldt-southeast-asia, #ldt-us-canada
   • fun ones members requested: #spiritual, #worklifebalance, ldx-jokes #ldx-music (where they are free to share music from any part of the world), #ldx-films #ldx-books #ldx-memes #ldx-gifs, $ldx-pairhelp (where folks can collaborate on work as pairs and triplets),
   • business related: tips-marketing, #tips-sales, #tips-engineering-management, #tips-hr, #tips-operations, #tips-finance, #tips-bizdev, #tips-branding, #tips-customer-success, #tips-design, #deals (which has special perks such as free credits to 3rd party services useful to startups)
2. When evaluating your remote startup or any business, you should start with the following four criteria:
   • Need – your culture will reflect how you serve this need
   • Market Size – TAM, SAM, TM
   • Competition – your culture should distinguish you in this respect
   • Unit Economics

Positive Psychology and Happiness for Entrepreneurs

Software engineering, entrepreneurship, and innovation can at times be stressful lines of work. Check out some of these resources for a thriving mental health in your remote startup:

1. a B-School Happiness Course on Coursera (there’s another one on Coursera by Yale but I took this one)
2. your life is a work of art (by me)
3. top pleasures in life
4. old people discuss regrets
5. how to make a year last longer
6. the evolution of anxiety
7. how to stop giving a f… what people think
8. what does it mean to be part of something bigger than yourself
9. happiness unlimited
10. cognitive behavioral therapy – new information processing mechanisms that challenge distorted thoughts and assumptions
11. combatting negative thoughts
12. subtle art of not giving a f…
13. healthy sleep tips
14. for focus and productivity we endorse the Pomodoro Technique

Daily Chores for the CEO

So, how do you orchestrate all the above in the 10 working hours of the day? Well you need a sophisticate interwoven schedule.

1. Monitor your social networks and the news.
   • This is the order I follow: whatsapp, instagram, google news, sms, facebook, email, linkedin.
2. Decide up front which emails you respond to. For instance, I run a network of software engineers for hire, and I only respond to:
   • engineers who want to join the network
     • I have become better at giving feedback to engineer resumés that need changes, in order to maintain the quality of the network.
   • potential clients looking to hire a developer or data scientist
   • entrepreneurs, tech teams, and labs that may be potential clients down the road
   • venture capitalists and incubators that may list our network a resource for their portfolio companies
   • journalists or HARO opportunities I can pitch for inbound links
   • cool influencers and researchers whom we can connect with, interview, and write about on our blog
   • opportunities where I can easily do some good karma
     • the person’s ask is clear to me
     • I can easily help the person through an introduction, resource, or tip — within say 3 minutes
     • the help I’m offering is something that most others wouldn’t be able to easily provide, so I’m in need
     • write these opportunities down when you take them – score your karma
   • … all this being said I still subscribe to a lot of relevant email newsletters, google groups, etc and read email titles (and sometimes even email bodies) to keep up to date with what’s going on.
3. Check slack in a special round robin fashion using keyboard shortcuts.
   • Designate a set of channels you check every:
     • day
     • week
     • month
   • Check channels appropriately based on how much attention they deserve.
   • Use the keyboard short control+down-arrow to whiz through channels.
4. Reflect for 1 minute: Are you working on the right thing?
   • This to pushes you to challenge your assumptions about product market fit and the need for your remote startup.
     • Think of the ways you can fail. Figure out how to prevent them.
     • Are any of your assumptions dumb?!
   • But don’t take this thought exercise so far that you become unstable.
     • While many startups fail because of their wrong assumptions, Hiten Shah explains that over-pivoting was his billion dollar mistake.
   • Balance is key.
   • Most important of all, make sure you approach work in an agile and iterative fashion. Ask yourself:
     • Are there any features you can cut for this launch to save time? Remember the 80/20 Pareto Principle.
     • Remember to talk to people about your ideas. Talking to people, rather than living in a box, can speed you up 10x, as we learn so much from others. I learned this from Andrew Ng when taking his Deep Learning course at Stanford University in 2018.
5. Invite people to like your page on facebook or linkedin or producthunt. Invite people you’ve recently talked to on a call or on chat. I’ve found that if I invite someone who I recently talked to, they are a lot more likely to like my page than if I haven’t spoken to them for years.
6. Announce a Tip of the Day to your distributed team in slack. This helps you create culture over time. For instance I give tips on the following topics:
   • remote work
   • happiness and mental health
   • help-seeking and feedback
   • tools
   • dealing with difficult situations like illness or motivation
   • interesting and fun slack channels to join, like jokes and films and donut
   • communication
   • organizing your digital infrastructure from cloud storage to continuous integration to SaaS accounts
   • lifelong learning
   • rewards and bonuses for doing cool things that help our organization
   • HR policies for your remote startup
   • supporting our companies social media
7. Monitor your companies help desk chat (i.e. Intercom or Zendesk).
8. Every week, check all your bank accounts, payment accounts, and anywhere you store money.
9. Check in with blog writers on your team.
10. Check on your server logs, alerts, etc. In AWS this is in Cloudwatch.
11. Check on your database data and cron logs in a database admin.
12. Congratulate high performers in slack in front of the team.
13. Every month, share your brand colors so team members can modify their slack theme to fit your company’s brand. Slack will auto-format the message to allow for easy theme switching. For instance we send the following message:
    • You can change your sidebar to match the LD Talent brand if you would like:
    • #202020, #CC8C72, #85BB65, #FFFFFF, #B3816D, #FFFFFF, #C8FFA8, #85BB65
    • If you do this, then please message your ldc/lde channel with feedback, we’d love to know how our branded slack theme feels day to day.
14. Check who you have calendly calls with tomorrow. Remind them saying “Looking forward to our call tomorrow!”. This will save you from a lot of missed calls!
15. Minimize the number of messages you send in a day, especially custom ones, by keeping track of the messages you sent.
    • You should have templated Q&A spreadsheets that document every situation that can come up, and your templated response to that situation.
      • For example when a developer in our network says that they are not getting matches I use the templated response shown below as not getting a match example Q&A.
      • You should also develop such scripts.
    • You should store in a spreadsheet how many messages you are sending every day so you know your business is scalable. See the example below.
16. Document your periodic tasks and do them just as often as our needed. For instance I have a task that I only do on the “3rd Wednesday” of each month. You have to round robin them to stay sane!
17. Things you might want to check on one of the weekend days or on “quiet” days.
    • Inspect your bank spending for spurious charges. Make sure you are running a tight ship.
    • Study of other successful entrepreneurs.
    • Study feedback from customers and other stakeholders. You may store them in your CRM or in feedback spreadsheets. Create action items in to do lingering items in trello.
    • Scan lingering items cards in trello and prioritize them. Clean up your trello in the process.
    • Try to stay in control of the frequency of family visits, vacations, and such things. Space them out in a way so that you get rest, but you also get time to reflect on business.
    • Watch videos from a free imba or startup schools, or related articles and media content.
    • Track the source of valuable customers and workforce members.
    • Keep tabs on competitors. Are they brick-and-mortar or do they also have benefit of being a remote startup?
    • Scan your codebase for cleanly maintainability.
    • Remind yourself that you are creating a scalable business, so you don’t waste time on non-scalable issues.
18. Your thinking should be process oriented. This is something some of the business books I’ve read have emphasized in one way or another: Traction, Zero to One, Think and Grow Rich (a tad dated)

---

Cover image citation: https://pixabay.com/photos/mantra-nepal-buddhist-himalayas-139634/