Building Your Remote Team: Lessons From Nudgespot

A billion dollar valuation is no longer a pipe dream for many startups across this country. JustDial raised less than $100 Mn as compared to > $200 Mn by Snapdeal to reach a billion dollar valuation, even though the former took 17 years to get there and the latter took just 4! For the first time ever, this ecosystem isn’t facing the problems of forceful bootstrapping and lack of money. But instead, all this money seems to be spent in making better offices around the world, in spite of the fact that more companies than ever are adopting remote work as the norm!

Last year, Zomato ran a very location specific campaign attracting the best Bangalore engineers to Delhi to join them. Aside from how they chose to execute, the outlying philosophy behind that campaign still suggests that we look at talent in the constraints of aparticular geography. It’s effectively saying – “You’re really smart; if only you were smart enough to live here in the first place”.

Today’s startups, in my opinion, can use their funds and resources in a much smarter way – by hiring the best talent, no matter where they are. It may be quite difficult for your top-priority-hire to move from where they are, and that’s a really silly reason to not hire them!

At Nudgespot, in spite of being only 8 permanent employees, we’ve moved to hiring contractors and consultants from all over the world. We’ve already got some of the best UI/UX designers from the Bay Area that work with us, and their location was not a deal-breaker at all. Tomorrow if we need engineers, and our best candidate is someone whohappens to work out of his home in Israel, his location won’t stop us from hiring him –because talent trumps anything.

Working remotely without the confines of an office can be a little unnerving at first, but we live in an age of the best productivity and collaboration tools of our time! Most companies that hire remotely use Slack, Asana, and Flock to make sure that there is some method to themadness, but there are so many other tools worth exploring that may help you transcend geographical boundaries.

In essence, the next time you’re looking to fill an open position, try to keep in mind the following:

When trying to hire, the best talent should always win, irrespective of where in the world they are.

Instead of spending on expensive offices, spend on collaborative tools that make your team more productive.

For us, just the two steps above have resulted in a large productivity increase across the board, not to mention a much smaller hiring cycle and access to a larger talent pool for each job type. When you give talent the priority over convenience, the culture in your organisation becomes truly special.