Hi Wade, Love how outspoken you guys are about Remote work! I'm actually starting a podcast to help others learn about Remote development by interviewing developers that work remotely and sharing their experiences. Would any developers at Zapier be interested in coming on?

Find me as tjbarbour on twitter or Gmail.

Thanks!

I'd listen to this for sure. Is following on Twitter the best way to stay updated on the podcast?

Hi! We're just getting started, so yeah you can follow

https://twitter.com/wayoffsite

I'm also interested in a podcast about remote work, followed

Thank you!

Hi,

I pinged you on twitter because I've been working remote for the past 6 years. :)

(I'm @pryelluw on twitter and snapchat)

Thanks, replied on there. Appreciate it!

You are welcome. Best of luck! :)

Sure thing. Send me an email and I can work on scheduling something. wade at zapier.

Thank you! will be in touch

We have 20 remote engineers, lmk if you wanna talk to some of them :)

Sure! hit me up tjbarbour on twitter or gmail Thanx!

Hi Wade, great guide. In chapter 6 Sqwiggle is mentioned as a tool to help build strong relationships as a team. I know you used to use Sqwiggle. We did too until it shut down earlier this year. I'm curious to know if you ever came across any alternatives or what you use now?

Disclaimer: I'm lead developer on our replacement for Sqwiggle which is currently in open beta, PukkaTeam.

We tried Sqwiggle for a bit, but honestly didn't take to it very well. Basically it's Slack, Async and Zoom for us these days and it does the trick.

Thanks for the reply :)

I'd be interested to know why you didn't "take to it"... was it because you were already using other tools that created functionality overlap? Price? Or were there more philosophical reasons like some teammates didn't like the camera being always-on or the ease of interruption?

I think all of the above?

:) cool. If those reasons could be addressed, do you think you'd consider using a tool like Sqwiggle again?

You guys should sign up for the remote working conference this December. http://remoteworkingconf.com There will be a lot of non-tech presenters there as well, I think you can still even submit a talk.

Do you plan to make async (the tool) public in any way? I'm pretty interested in that.

btw: I really love your companies "chattyness" on all types of knowledge that you guys gain! :o)

We get asked this a lot and unfortunately don't have any immediate plans to release it in any way. It's pretty tied into Zapier and would involve a decent chunk of work to decouple the code base to make it more general.

Someday it would be good to release.

You can probably replicate it with P2 the WordPress theme which is where we started before building Async.

What made you decide to build Async in house?

P2 wasn't working for us. We wanted something that used the same authentication as Zapier so it could just be one account. We also had a few other features we wanted to customize a bit too.

+1 this would be great for our team. Things get lost in chat, and email really isn't great for group discussions. Plus most email has a bit of a formal tone in our company, but Async looks like due to the reddit style people would be a bit more relaxed and we could develop some culture that way.

How do you respond to investors who push back on your company for being remote?

I've had dozens of institutional VCs say that they wont invest in us because we're a 100% remote company.

We have on institutional VC and no outside board. Remote is more and more common especially with engineering and support teams so they didn't have any pushback. I think if we weren't performing as well they might have more concerns.

I am not a VC.

The first thought is to have a successful compang that'd be worthy of investment. Next, show they've thought about the trade-offs, which I'd say these docs prove. Lastly, don't hear no when a VC says they don't invest in remote companies, but be prepared the address in a short response how you understand why they feel that way, why it is a non issue, and then leave the door open to let them changd their minds.

Looks like you're developing 3D tech. Maybe the VC's in that space believe physical interaction is important since it's a nascent tech without a proven business model.

Awesome stuff. Can you comment of the actual production of the book, how it was written, marketed, etc? Seems like a nice content marketing case study.

Most of these started as one off blog posts. After a while we built up enough chapters that it didn't seem like it would be that farfetched to make a book. So we filled in the gaps on some chapters that were missing and turned it into a book.

The Zapier process is mostly outlined here: https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-publish-ebook/

It's almost 50M! I understand it's full of funny pictures, but have you turned image compression off when generating PDF?