I think there’s a lot of ways to do remote work. Every company does a little bit differently, and I think what we believe remote work is, is that remote work needs to have that human element to it.
Ho Yin Cheung, founder and CEO of Remo
Today I’m joined by Ho Yin Cheung, the founder and CEO of Remo, a tool that helps you organize virtual events and office space, and Riotly Social Media, an Instagram social media agency.
We discussed the challenges Ho Yin faced when he began transitioning to be a better remote startup leader, how his perceptions about remote hiring have changed from enabling cost-cutting to enlarging the talent pool, and how Remo helps provide the right amount of transparency for remote teams.
Ho Yin also shared the resources and thought leaders that helped him to be a better remote startup leader. Make sure to check these out in the Learning Resources section below!
Since we recorded this episode, Remo organized several virtual webinar events and has even more events coming up.
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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:
- 05:54 — What fascinates Ho Yin the most about remote work
- 08:41 — Challenges and lessons Ho Yin faced while transforming to be a remote startup leader
- 13:08 — How Ho Yin’s hiring process changed
- 19:38 — Ho Yin’s “superpower” that helps him manage his remote team better
- 21:35 — Why recording is a powerful tool for creating processes in remote teams
- 24:59 — Resources that helped Ho Yin to be a better remote leader
- 26:54 — What is Remo?
- 34:21 — Use cases for Remo
- 40:58 — How Ho Yin’s transition to being a remote startup leader affects Remo’s product roadmap
- 49:11 — Advice to startups that want to start hiring remote team members
- 50:45 — Why it’s important for remote startup CEOs to have a deep bond with early remote team members
Learning resources:
Mentioned resources:
- Remo
- Riotly Social Media
- Zapier
- Automattic
- Running Remote
- Running Remote Podcast with Ho Yin Cheung
- How TaxJar Creates a Remote Culture by Prioritizing Employee Experience
- Help Scout
- Loom
- Using Voice to Bring “High-Resolution Communication” to Remote Teams
- The Sims
- Remote Work Summit
Full transcript:
Jovian: Hello world. Welcome to another episode of Outside the Valley, the podcast where we interview remote startup leaders, remote workers, remote work advocates, and companies who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. This is a podcast where remote companies share what works and what doesn’t, so you can do it right. Outside the Valley is brought to you by Arc, the remote hiring platform that can help you hire remote software engineer and teams easily on demand just like that. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama.
Today, I’m joined by Ho Yin Cheung. Ho Yin is based in Hong Kong and he is the founder and CEO of Remo, the tool that helps you organize virtual events and office space. Ho Yin is also the founder and CEO of Riotly Social Media, an Instagram social media agency that helps you manage and increase the exposure and engagement of your Instagram. We discuss the challenges Ho Yin faced when he began transitioning to be a better remote startup leader as his company transitioned to be a remote-first company. We also talk about how his perceptions about remote hiring have changed.
In the beginning, he started hiring remotely just to cut costs, a very pragmatic reason, but now he realizes that it’s more than that. It’s about enabling yourself to hire different talents from around the world. We also talk about how his tool Remo helps provide the right amount of transparency for remote teams. Ho Yin also generously shared with us the spreadsheet template that he used to track his transition to make Remo a better remote-first company.
Since we recorded this episode, Remo has organized several virtual webinar events and they have more events coming up, so you can also check it on the show notes or on the Arc blog. Okay, without further adieu, let’s start the episode. Here is Ho Yin Cheung from Remo. Here we go.
Ho Yin, how’s it going?
Ho Yin: I’m doing good. Thank you for having me.
Jovian: Great, awesome, thank you for coming to the show. So just to start everything, can you share a bit more about your own journey and your experience as an entrepreneur?
Ho Yin: Yeah, sure. I guess this is like a little intro. I started off as an entrepreneur in Hong Kong, did a lot of different things. I had an eCommerce business, did a mobile marketing agency, and then most recently right now it is like a SAS solution for small and medium businesses to grow their Instagram and social media and this company is called Riotly Social Media. And then since the beginning of the year, we’ve been starting to work on our new project which is called Remo, and Remo is essentially a virtual office [inaudible 00:03:12] platform for remote and distributed teams. It’s like an immersive 2D map that allows you to talk and easily communicate with your teammates, trying to solve problems like loneliness, social interaction with others, and so this is the project that I’ve been focused on right now lately.
Jovian: Yeah. I find it interesting that you’re building a tool for remote workers and for the remote industries. Can you share a bit more how was the transition like because your previous product Riotly is pretty different from Remo. Can you share a bit more what made you interested in the remote work industry?
Ho Yin: Yeah. I actually had a remote team for quite some time and I actually didn’t know really what remote work was. I hired a team from the Philippines more of as a cost-effective strategy rather than really thinking about it from like, “Oh hey, this is really for remote work.” So I had a remote team pretty much like maybe four or five years ago, starting off with a team in the Philippines and then it wasn’t until about two years ago that I started to read more about what remote work was and learning about companies like Zapier and Automatic that I started to realize that remote work was actually a thing. It was actually something that people really were pushed to for.
And so I went Running Remote, this conference that was for people who are leading remote teams, and that’s when I started to really dive into and really think that, “Hey, maybe remote working is something that is a trend that would be a trend for the future.” And it was at that point where I started to think about how I was running my remote team. It wasn’t until probably last year when I was running my remote team and I was scaling it that I started to face a lot of challenges while scaling it. And so, I looked at those challenges and tried to figure out how to resolve them, and that’s how Remo really came about, was really solving a lot of our own challenges.
Jovian: Right. So how big is your team now?
Ho Yin: 25.
Jovian: 25. And how many of them are remote?
Ho Yin: Right now, about 20 of them are remote.
Jovian: All right. And so five of them are based in Hong Kong?
Ho Yin: Yes.
Jovian: Right, cool. So just to backtrack a little bit, so at that time you mentioned you just started to … There was an increased interest from you about the whole remote work thing, right? What fascinates you the most about remote work at that time when you just started going deep into it. Some people are fascinated by the work-life balance it brings or the flexibility. What about you?
Ho Yin: I think for me at the beginning when I first started, I would say it would be split into phases.
The first phase was that it was very cost effective. That was the first reason why I chose it. And then when I learned more about remote working, the second phase was more about, I realized that you can get a really huge talent pool, and in Hong Kong, we don’t have… We have talent but it’s hard to get and expensive, and so it also was a cost measure, but also that you could get more for the same price. And that was really attractive.
So it was talent, and then second really is that I started to realize what big of an impact that remote work had on my employees’ lifestyle and the way how they lived and the fact that they can work at home and take care of their family
[…] or take care of a sick family member, which a lot of my employees [inaudible 00:07:31] or take care of their children or maybe their sister’s children or whatever. There’s this element of being able to do more with your life by working remotely and I think that’s something that a lot of people struggle with and I see that as a liberating… You’re just liberated basically by remote working.
Jovian: I totally agree with you on that. A lot of startup founders or CEOs, in the beginning, a lot of them they start on the first phase, those pragmatic way of thinking. I hire remotely because it’s cost effective, it’s cheaper and whatnot. But when they go deep into it, it’s absolutely just more than that. It’s not even only talent but it’s also having a more productive team because they’re happier, being able to take care of their family and friends and whatnot. So yeah, I’ve seen a lot of leaders that came from the same position as you. It starts from a practical side of things and then you just realize, “Hey, this is more than just that.”
So another followup question, you mentioned as you were scaling, there was a lot of challenge that you faced. And I guess for yourself and also noticed from your previous podcast interviews, you went through this transition phase to be a better leader for your remote team members so to speak. I would guess that’s a lot of work that you need to do yourself there. What was the transition like and what was the challenges?
Ho Yin: Yeah. There was definitely a lot of challenges in maturing myself as I tried to mature as a leader.
I think one of the critical things that I’ve learned most was that you really have to show empathy and you have to assume that the people that you hire, assuming that you hire well, are doing what’s best and not doing what’s worse.
I had a time when somebody wouldn’t… I had a time when this girl, she wasn’t able to do this task that I did. It was a research task that was quite repetitive and she would just do a really, really bad job. And my first instinct was like, “Oh, you’re lazy, you’re not doing your job or whatnot,” and your first instinct is to think the worst of people, and I think that was something where it’s very easy to do that because you’re not in front of them, you don’t know where they are, they don’t communicate. So you just assume the worst because you just can’t see.
I’ve basically yelled and been really pissed off at people. There’s this one girl that I yelled so much that I made her cry and she… I’m definitely not proud of it. I’ve definitely made a number of people very unhappy in a very emotional way, and I slowly realized that that’s actually not really the truth. I might be angry about something and it turns out that she had trouble with… Or it’s always some other reason. Like she had trouble with her internet connection or she had trouble with doing this or doing that, so it’s a lot of about trying to figure out what are the problems first before assuming the worst in people. But this is assuming that you hired correctly and you have the right processes in place to make sure that they are doing, you can see that they are doing some work and building up that trust initially.
So that was one thing that I learned a lot, was you just have to ask questions first, figure out what’s wrong, and then figure out what is an excuse and what is an actual real reason and whether they’re repeatedly not able to do the tasks that was assigned to them. And if they’re repeatedly not able to, then you can start assuming the worst and then start being more aggressive in the way how you do stuff. For example, at our company we have a process where we ask questions, figure out what’s wrong, making sure that we have supported them as much as we can to succeed.
Jovian: Got it.
Ho Yin: And we ask them all the questions, like do you guys have any issues? And we say that multiple times, do you have any challenges, do you have any issues, multiple, multiple, multiple times, and then if they still don’t improve, then we say, “Look, we’ve tried to support you as much as we can, is there anything else that we are unable to support you with?” And if they say no, then we say, “Okay, well, it looks like you have a challenge here and I’m not sure.
So right now, I can only assume that you are unable to do your work or you are not really committed.” So now, we have to take it to the next step, which is if we want to keep this person… By the way, most likely at this point we probably won’t want to keep them. We would’ve already said, “Hey, maybe we’re not the right fit,” and we would end that relationship.
Jovian: Yeah, I think especially when you’re a remote team, trust is literally everything. You also mentioned that, based on what you said, the key of everything here is you hire the right people, hiring correctly. So as you transitioned to be a more remote-friendly company, or you are a remote company, right now, right?
Ho Yin: Right.
Jovian: Which means that these people that you hire, you’re not only hiring contractors anymore, you’re also hiring remote core team members, people that you want to have a lot of interactions with and you want to trust to… how to say? To apply themselves and help the company go to a better direction. Is there any adjustment that you made in your hiring process? Because now it’s much more important.
Ho Yin: Yeah. So the way how I do it now is it’s all test based.
We test them for actually tasks that they would do. So we basically test them for the job. If the job is that they have to write emails and pitch to people, we just get them to write emails and pitch to people.
Right now we’re hiring for someone to help us organize events, online events, for our conference platform, which I’ll talk about later. So, we actually get them to do it. We actually get them to organize the event. Because from a remote working perspective, all you care about is really the results.
In some ways, remote working the focus is really on results because it’s not about how well you interview, it’s not about how well you dress, it’s not about … Almost and actually in some ways it’s not about how well you get along with your boss from a friendship standpoint. Sometimes, you might meet someone, you interview them, you’re like, “Oh, you know what, we connect well,” and that might give you some bias. I’m not saying that we wouldn’t connect, I’m just saying when you do a remote interview, it’s a bit more difficult to connect. So that element is removed, so you really, really just evaluate that person’s communication skills and their ability to do whatever the task is, that’s required.
So we do, I’ll a take on test. We give them a list of tasks that they need to do to test their ability, and that itself already evaluates how much that they want the job. The people that say, “Oh, I don’t need to do this test because I have so much experience,” then it’s like, “Okay, great, we’re probably not the right fit.” Because people, if they put effort in the test, it shows a lot. It shows that they really, really are serious and they’re not just … it just shows commitment and I like that.
And then the next level is we do some interviews and the third part is we do a one-week trial, paid one-week trial. In some cases, it might be one or two days that’s not paid, but for some of the core members, it’s definitely paid for one week.
And the one-week trial for me is probably the most effective way. It’s not scalable, but it’s very effective. I’ve pretty much been able to not have anyone leave after I started this process. It’s just so effective for me. I know that person really, really well within that one week. Not super well, but I’m saying that I know quite well how they work within that one week and then I’m very confident to say, “Okay, I know how you work, then we can start working.”
It’s just, you would never buy a car or buy a computer without test driving it, or date around or marry someone without test driving them. So I feel like you should definitely do that for key employees or core team members.
Jovian: Right. How long is the usual hiring cycle, especially for core team members?
Ho Yin: It’s a bit longer, I have to be honest. It’s around about maybe a month to month and a half, but one of the interesting things is that we’ve been able to optimize that process and we’ve been able to get the process down where people come in and they just do the tests and then we start the one-week trial. So we can get someone in within like two months if we can. I would [inaudible 00:17:11] say is the only reason why this works is because right now, there’s a lot more people that want to work from home than people that want to hire remote workers. So from an employee perspective, you get a lot of talent and you can basically target the entire world. That helps tremendously in the speed of hiring.
Jovian: Yeah. And I think it’s normal for remote companies to have more than one-month hiring cycle. I’ve seen that other companies like TaxJar that are based in Boston and I know TaxJar or even Zapier, they have really long hiring cycles just because that it makes more sense to be more careful when you’re hiring remotely. You have this skin in the game approach where you work with these people for a couple of weeks or almost a month to figure out how they work. Yeah, I think it’s pretty common and I think that’s a lot of-
Ho Yin: Well, it depends on how you calculate the hiring cycle. Because a lot of these companies, they will start a freelance contract first, like for one month. And then after the one month, then they offer something more permanent and more real. We do the same thing. After that one week, we also have another one-month freelance contract as well. So it’s actually not two months, it could be extended to three months easily because of that one-month trial. It’s a freelance contract and then after we evaluate them at the end of the month, then we make the call.
Jovian: Got it. So going back to more on the team management side communication side of things, I’ve listened on one of your previous podcasts, I think it’s the one with Running Remote, you mentioned that you’re a very operational person. You like to do things very hands on. Setting up Zapier or write some codes and whatnot. However, I think when you are transitioning to be a remote team, you have to play this CEO role a bit more, like you have the company vision and those kind of leadership role, like big picture things. Was that a challenge for you to transition from this more operational role to more… how to say it, high up, so to speak?
Ho Yin: From the perspective of Riotly, which is where a lot of the growth and the scaling came from, would definitely say that yes, it was challenging to get less operational and more high level. I think honestly for me, the only reason how I was able to get away from doing some operational stuff is I just didn’t have enough time, like I just had not enough time to take care of everything. And one of the things that I really did really well, I think I do relatively well, is creating SOPs and processes. I do that relatively well. So I create the right processes and get all that stuff done in order to scale myself so that I don’t have to look at all that kind of thing.
So, Zapier is a good example of that. Like Zapier, I don’t mind creating all the Zapiers, all the Zaps, you do it once. Because you know what the process flow is, you do it once and it’s pretty much done and set. So, that stuff is stuff that I enjoy doing, but slowly not doing that initially it was just because there just was not enough time. It was more of like I was forced into giving up a lot of that stuff, for me personally.
Jovian: It’s interesting you mentioned that you like building SOPs and processes because a lot of startup founders that I know, they actually hate processes, you know what I mean? And a lot of them actually had trouble when they’re transitioning from a smaller startup, a nimble or agile startup to a medium-stage one where they need more processes and they just absolutely hate it. And it’s interesting that I feel like in your case, this is a superpower for you to actually… You like to design the process and then let everyone do it. So that’s super interesting, actually.
Ho Yin: I think for me, the way how I see it is like I see it in a way when I do things manually, I always love to do things manually, and then when I develop the process, it’s like I’m starting to hand it off to someone. That’s how I see process. I see process as we’re now at the next stage of scale and I can now hand it off to someone, so I need to create the process to give to that person. Now, I think if you weren’t in a remote company, if everybody worked at the same place, that training would be done side by side. I would have, “Hey Person A or friend, I need you to do this, so I’m going to teach you right now, blah, blah blah, blah, blah.”
So, I just do that. This is the same thing, very similar. And what I do is I bring someone in and I teach them, but record my entire stream while I’m teaching them. And then after that, I tell that person, I say, “Hey, you watch this video, you learn it, that is the process.” And then we use the video as basically the process.
Jovian: Got it.
Ho Yin:
We use the video as the process. Because when you train someone, when you train the next person, all you need to do is just show them the video and then they do it. And if the process changes, you just re-record it as it is. So, what we’ve done at this scale, when I talk about SOPs, it’s not an actual document. It’s actually not a document, it’s actually a video recording.
And the reason why is because people, when you show it to them in a video, the learning rate is much faster, it’s super fast. And you can follow along and then people can pause and start. And the other great reason why video is so great is that when you teach someone something for the first time, what percent do you think the average person is going to be able to absorb?
Jovian: True.
Ho Yin: It’s probably maybe 50% at most of what you said. So they need to go back and review it anyways. And so that’s why I like using products like Loom to do that kind of recording.
Jovian: Right. Yeah, Loom is amazing, I also use it from time to time. And I think this is a really smart way to approach it because now I realize it, a lot of people that I know that hate processes, they actually not necessarily hate the process, but they also hate the documentation of it, right?
Ho Yin: Right.
Jovian: I need to spend time writing that, but if you start with recording a video, and you can still delegate, “Hey, I recorded this video,” and then ask someone, “Can you create a written version of it?”
Ho Yin: Yes, exactly. That’s a much easier way. You could even say, “Here’s a video.” And you train someone and you tell that person after you train them you say, “Please write the documentation of that video and give it back to me.” I’ve done this before, get it back to and I review it. Then it’s like they’re just translating the information onto a piece of paper. But the reason why I don’t like documents yet, processes yet, is because our processes are still in flux. So recording a video is just so easy. It just takes five minutes, or the amount of time that you need to do for that process, and you can talk through it.
Jovian: And recording video, it’s in a way some like magical, it’s some like high-fidelity communications, right?
Ho Yin: Yeah.
Jovian: It’s not only a written document. I interviewed the CEO of a startup called Yac Chat, so they basically are voice communication tools for remote teams and it’s amazing to see when you move out from the written form of communication, things can get easier if you know how to do it well and it just opens different … how to say it, different possibilities or different feelings for your remote team. People feel closer and whatnot when you move out from the written form, Slack and so on.
Still around the … Before we move on to our next topic, still around the … how to say it, the topic of communication. When you’re transitioning to be a better leader, to be a better communicator, so to speak, is there any top resources that help you to go to that place, any recommended books, podcast episodes, or blog posts?
Ho Yin: To be a better leader?
Jovian: Yeah, when you’re transitioning to be a better remote leader.
Ho Yin: Yeah, so Workplaceless has a whole module about leadership, workplaces.com. That place is actually pretty good. In terms of books, like Lisette Sutherland has a pretty good book about that type of stuff, Laurel Farrer, she’s definitely one of the major I guess… I don’t know if it’s an influencer, but a major player in terms of remote work and communication and she’s pretty good. That’s specific for remote leadership and communication, not for general though.
Jovian: Got it, right, awesome. Now, I want to talk more about Remo. Is it, the full name’s Remo or just Remo App?
Ho Yin: Remo. Yeah, Remo.
Jovian: Remo. So can you elaborate more about Remo to our audience again?
Ho Yin: Sure. Remo is really hard to describe in words. Usually at this point I would show a video, maybe you can put a YouTube link there and I can send you it and you can take a look at it.
Jovian: Sure, yeah.
Ho Yin: But imagine The Sims, the game The Sims. The Sims is 3D and people walk around and stuff like that. Imagine that except it’s 2D and it’s like a top-down map of a building. Kind of like an architecture drawing. And people are represented by circles and in each circle, it’s like that person’s face. You can double-click and you can go into any room that you want. And the moment that you walk in that room, you can turn on your audio and video and you can talk to the people in that room immediately, just in that room. So, you can think of as like Skype on steroids, like a Chatroulette for work. And the biggest difference of really what we’re trying to solve is several things.
One is that when we talk about work and we talk about meetings, we talk about how people communicate, people do their work and then they have a meeting and then they do their work again. And they’ll go to lunch and they’ll eat lunch with their colleagues, or people will walk around in meetings and have hallway chats and all kind of stuff. That’s what a normal in an office is like.
But in remote work, you’ve got work and then meetings and then you don’t really have anything else. And what you also don’t have is you’re also in a box, inside one room in your own office and you don’t see anybody else. So, there’s no extraverbal hallway communication and there’s no visual communication. I can’t see someone that’s actually there, their back for example. You can’t see it.
What we’re trying to solve, number one, is the feeling of togetherness, the feeling that we all are here together. And that this is our home, this is our office. And using one common visual map as a visual language, a foundation where we can all say, “Oh, let’s go to the Game of Thrones room,” and point at things that we all know and see. So, number one is presence. Number two is the fact that because of the reduced amount of social communication, people get either lonely or they get isolated or they don’t feel as a team and there’s no social elements to work. Or it’s just literally just work, like you’re literally just sitting at your desk doing your work and then having meetings. So we’re trying to solve that.
And the third final thing is the ability to talk to someone immediately. And when you’re in the office you can do that. You can just tap somebody on the shoulder, you can’t just immediately just turn around and say, “Hey, I have this question,” to your colleague right next to you to get feedback, to whatever. But it’s really hard, it’s a huge barrier, when you do that when it comes to a remote work. And so, we want to lower that barrier of entry for people so that they can easily enter into high-quality, high-resolution communication easily, and not just talk through voice or just talk through text, which in relative aspects is relatively low-quality communication. It’s very one dimensional. There’s a lot of things you can miss just by text alone. So, those are the things that we’re trying to solve.
Jovian: Right. I think in general, a lot of remote companies are trying to tackle these problem with a combination of Zoom, Slack, and probably there’s another employee experience person that organize a bigger meeting or let’s watch a video-prepared meeting, I’m not sure. How is it different from that? How is Remo different from that?
Ho Yin: Let’s talk about Slack and Zoom first, and then you can tell me what else I need to compare to, which other one which other one I need to compare. So, Slack is text-based. It’s just text-based. So, that’s number one. There’s a lot of back and forth that happens when you’re on Slack. There’s a lot of times when I use my product where I just want to talk to someone else, I just call them. Or I just go to her room and ask them a question and that saves you a lot of time of that back and forth, that’s number one.
Number two is that misunderstanding, and number three is the amount of time you have to spend typing things. TaxJar has a place in communication. All I feel or what we feel at Remo is text should be used for everything.
It should be used for some things, but it can’t be one size fits all. I think there’s certain situations where you should be changing it up to different mediums in order to convey feelings, be more persuasive, give feedback, do more things that require more of a human touch to it. So that’s number one.
Zoom is great for meetings and it goes back to what I was talking about before, which everyone does meetings at work.
Jovian: Got it. Yeah.
Ho Yin: But Zoom doesn’t tackle everything else. It doesn’t do anything else aside from that 30 minutes of meetings. When you go to a Zoom meeting … I know some people that do a really great job that they’re like, “Oh Hey, how’s it going? How’s the family, blah blah.” They get to a chat, which is normal when you work at an office, and you have those conversations. But in remote work, a lot of people don’t know how to do that, feel shy, they haven’t developed that close enough rapport beforehand to be able to ask those type of questions. There’s a lot of [inaudible 00:33:26] and a lot of that stuff doesn’t necessarily happen there. And therefore, it doesn’t happen.
Jovian: Right. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I guess with the visual … How does it? With the visual aspect of Remo, I saw when I first saw you guys, I saw that, hey, this is actually super interesting because they add the playfulness essence on it-
Ho Yin: Yup.
Jovian: Do you know what I mean? So it’s not all about work. I know this will be sound very sales here and I’m supporting with there’s this genuinely what I felt when I first-
Ho Yin: Thank you.
Jovian: …I saw your product on your website. So yeah, I just found the idea fascinating. Currently, now you guys are developing this mostly for internal communications or remote work. Any under surprising use cases that you’ve found people are using it for that you never thought of? Because in my mind, there’s a lot of different things-
Ho Yin: Sure. Before I answer that, I do want to mention one of the thing about remote work is
I think there’s a lot of ways to do remote work. Every company does a little bit differently, and I think what we believe remote work is, is that remote work needs to have that human element to it.
Jovian: Right.
Ho Yin:
We believe that for remote work to be adopted by more people, it needs to be more accessible. It needs to be more real work and have that social element rather than not. And it needs to have that presence and that ability to connect with people very, very easily. And that’s what’s core to remote. It’s more about the human experience between people, how to develop connections. And my belief is that the future of work isn’t remote work and everybody just works by themselves.
The future of work is, you’re able to connect with people at a very, very high quality way and very easily socialize with them just like in an offline environment. And if just using text or just using audio or even just video without anything else, that alone will not be the… I believe will not just by itself be able to solve the future of work, be the future of what remote work is. And just the final point, the reason why we’ve developed Remo, because what a lot of people view remote work is, is that it’s either zero or one. It’s either I come in and I don’t know anything or I’m fully remote and I work by myself in my room. And for someone who has worked remotely or as someone who has not worked remotely or they worked in a co-located location with others, I think that’s too big of a job.
I think that’s way too big of a job. It’s like telling a basketball team, “Oh, hey, go play football.” The first thing is that the coach can’t even yell across the field to tell you what to do.
Jovian: Right.
Ho Yin: There’s such a big distance. That’s a really something that you can compare to, that’s the biggest thing. And so we believe at Remo is, we don’t claim to say that this is the right way to remote work, we say that this is like 0.2, this is like 0.4, it helps people get into the idea of remote work.
Something that’s familiar with what they’ve been doing already and how do you slowly sink into that remote work environment while retaining some of these social aspects, rather than just cutting off all those social aspects and expect people to be okay with that. And I think that might work for some, but I don’t think it works for everyone.
Jovian: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So basically you’re saying that going forward, you can see Remo … Remo, sorry. You can see Remo being promoted or being used for even other broader use cases other than internal team management. So it’s big, right?
Ho Yin: Yeah. So, that brings a good question. We started to host events now. Internally, we use the product a little bit differently too, we experiment with it, and one of the ways we did use it for is for happy hours and everything. So we set up a time and we say, “Hey guys, we’re going to have you have an happy hour.” And people will just organize themselves into different rooms and talk, and they jump into from room to room and then they do that. So we started as, “Hey, why don’t we do this for networking?” And so we created a similar platform where it’s just strictly for it, to help people to come together to network. So it’s like Webinar plus Networking.
And we did this for the remote work summit where it had 10,000 people go to that summit. And we basically had a lot of spaces, having people in the comment, they network across the different tables, turn on their audio and video, and then they listen to a discussion. So we’ve literally 100% basically mimicked an offline conference experience online. And when we did this, the response was really amazing. And so, this is something that we’ve seen as another use case for our platform.
Jovian: I can totally imagine that like as you mentioned, like an offline event, there are several speakers that’s currently speaking and you can just hop on from one room to another to see which topics interest you the most.
Ho Yin: Yeah, that’s right.
Jovian: And if you don’t it, then you just leave.
Ho Yin: That’s right.
Jovian: So currently, I feel like Remo is in a way… How to say it? It’s quite innovative in a way, the essence is not exactly new, as in it’s just communication, better communication. But it’s innovative in a way that you present it, using it for Webinars and whatnot. Have you ever met any challenge when you are marketing Remo itself? Does that makes sense?
Ho Yin: Yeah. The biggest challenge I think is that people need to come in and experience it with a group of people in order for them to feel the full aha moment, and I think that’s a big challenge. It’s a big challenge to get people in and it’s a big challenge to get other people to come in, and to get that feeling to get that sense that, “Oh, this is how it’s like.” I think that’s one big challenge. I think the second biggest challenge is that it’s a hard thing to describe. It’s not easy to describe these two people and to make them feel excited about it because it’s an experience product. It’s a product where you have to experience in order to get it. So the way how we try to pitch this product is, we try to make it as… we use video a lot, we basically use video a lot trying to explain the product to people.
Jovian: I think that makes sense, I totally agree with you. When I first see Remo, it looks cool. But I think to fully appreciate it, I probably need to be there in a certain event for example, or use it fully with my team to actually appreciate the whole experience of it.
Ho Yin: Right.
Jovian: So yeah, I can see that. You mentioned several things about the product itself and also your transition quote unquote from a normal CEO to be CEO that leads a remote team. How many of the things that you’ve learned during that transition part affect your product positions on developing Remo? For example, when you realize that, okay, price is super important, and that’s why you want to build a more social aspect of Remo. Basically, is there any learnings?
Ho Yin: There’s a few. The first one is, trust can be better established if the managers can actually see what people are doing, but not seeing someone 100% what they’re doing. I’ll give you an example, when you’re at work, right?
Jovian: Right.
Ho Yin: When you walk by someone, you don’t go and peer over their screen and look at what they’re doing, right?
Jovian: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ho Yin: You don’t do that. But you do feel that they’re working. And-
Jovian: Got it.
Ho Yin: …from a manager’s standpoint, you feel that the working is like, well their back is towards you. They’re clicking, maybe they’re on a phone call. Most managers, if you hire well, you know that they either don’t go on Facebook or you’re okay with that because you trust them that you know what you’re doing. So, I try to replicate that in Remo. For example in Remo, you can see when people are talking, when people are typing and when people are turned their video or share screen on. So it’s really exciting to see a group of your teammates in a room with share screen video on. It’s just an icon on top of their circle avatars. I don’t actually see their screen, it’s just an icon to show that they’re sharing their screen.
Jovian: Got it.
Ho Yin: And we also have another icon, is when they’re talking, that there’ll be an icon showing that their mouth would move, an icon showing that they’re talking. A little yellow icon of an emoji. And that changed everything. Because then now, I have this feeling that people are working. It’s such a superficial thing, managers shouldn’t be saying that, they should be [inaudible 00:43:34] them, but … I think it’s partially that you see them working, but I think the second thing is that you see feedback.
You see things going on. You don’t know exactly whether they’re working. They could not be working, they could be talking about random stuff. But you see things happening, it builds up that feeling that like, “Hey, you know what, we’re doing great stuff here.” That’s one. And the second thing is asking people how they are, doing check-ins. For that, we’re developing a better feature where people can write in very quickly what they’ve been up to, what they’re doing. For example, what is our favorite game of Thrones character? It’s a very short Twitter update.
And this Twitter update pops up very rarely on a map. And so, you see what they answered on a certain question, for that question of the day, for example. And you can see those questions and you can also see their emojis. So it’s like a status update, but it’s a status update on a specific contextual topic.
Jovian: Got it, yeah.
Ho Yin: And that conceptual topic drives conversations and it also allows you to feel more empathetic to people to say, “Hey let’s … Or maybe you’re not in a good mood, what’s happening at home?” And allows you to start those conversations with people so that you can ask and understand, oh, maybe they have a lot of things going on at home, therefore that’s impacted work. Okay, what’s going on? What’s the context behind that?
Jovian: Yeah. I think that makes sense. Even though when we say on remoting, trust is 100% important. You just mentioned as a manager or as a leader, you should be able to trust your team member that they are actually doing stuff. But my mind like you mentioned that with Remo, you can actually see that this person is sharing his screen and this person is having a video call with another person. To me, it seems like you’re giving the right amount of transparency without being invasive.
Ho Yin: Yes, that’s right.
Jovian: The most invasive one is, okay, I want to crack your monitor, so that’s the [inaudible 00:45:57]. But the least invasive way is like, “Oh, you’re online on Slack, you’re probably working.” Especially when you’re new … How does that? New leaders in remote team, you probably can feel that now. But with Remo, it can give you the right amount of transparency. So I think it makes sense.
Ho Yin: Yeah. I think for Remo, one of the things that we really value is that remote work is you can do every, the things that you want to do whenever you want, and you’re able to have the privacy. Nobody wants invasive tracking. And so, we definitely don’t feel that that is the solution to everything. However, it’s, how do you balance the right amount of transparency so that it doesn’t make people uncomfortable with that?
And I think that’s what we’re trying to do, and that’s what our map allows us to do. And that’s actually our biggest differentiator, is this map. This map allows us to bring in a lot of these type of elements that make people feel better more transparency. Other tools out there, they can’t afford that, they’re unable to do that. It’s just text or it’s just a chat box with a bunch of names on it, and you have to manually update your status on it. Those are all good stuff. That’s all great. I think that works for a lot of teams and that is the way how we differentiate ourselves.
Jovian: All right. So for the office map, you actually can design the office yourself?
Ho Yin: Yeah. We have a package where you can design your office and then we can then set it up for you, yes.
Jovian: You should sell office template, that sounds like offices from certain sitcoms or something that. Like the [crosstalk 00:47:42]
Ho Yin: Yeah, it’s a cool idea.
Jovian: …could be office. That’ll be interesting.
Ho Yin: Yeah, that’s a really good idea.
Jovian: So, what’s next for Remo? What’s your next product roadmap or events or activities that you’re planning right now?
Ho Yin: With respect to Remo, a lot of stuff that we’re doing right now is really related, going more into the social aspect of the remote workplace, I guess, if you could say. Like how do you make people connect better? And we’re really, really focused on that, on the connection between people and how to create natural conversations, how to make people feel more comfortable in sharing or participating in events within the company. So we’re really, really focused on that type of aspect. And the second thing we’re focusing on is doing more events. So we’re doing a lot, lot more events now, we have an event coming up this week, and [inaudible 00:48:45] we have another event next week for remote working as well-
Jovian: Oh, cool.
Ho Yin: …which you guys are a part of actually, which could [inaudible 00:48:52] sorry, Arc is a part of. So, we’re doing a lot of online events.
Jovian: Got it. That’s super interesting. So, my last question for this interview, some of our listeners, our audience out there are probably startup founders or CEOs or managers, that is, want to try to hire remote team members, mostly core team members or even contractor, but they probably are still hesitate to take the step because they’re afraid, they don’t know how to manage people remotely. Is there any advice from you to them to make sure that they’re again, the transition to be a remote leader much more smoother?
Ho Yin: Yeah. I think the first thing is as a leader, you should definitely work remotely for a few days. You should try to work remotely a few days. Even if you have team members in your office, you should tell them you and your whole team to work remotely for maybe two days a week, three days a week, and then slowly ramp it up to four or five days a week, and have the whole team realize what it’s like to work remotely and use that as a baseline and say, “This is what it’s like, and we need to be remote first,” if that is the goal-
Jovian: Got it.
Ho Yin: …to be remote first, and then that gives everybody that feeling and understanding. And then the second part is to build trust within your employees by having deep conversations about expectations.
Here are the expectations, here are the rules, this is what I expect from you, making sure those expectations are very clear.
I do have a transition template that helps people transition from a normal [inaudible 00:50:56] company to a remote company.
Jovian: Oh, cool.
Ho Yin: And it gives you all the documents that you need to prepare. It tells you all the documents you need to prepare, it tells you these are the things that you need to do., and it’s something where … it gives you even a timeline of how to do it. And also if your company’s really big for example, and you want to transition to a fully remote team, it’s also that. So if you’re just hiring, there’s a lot of stuff in there that you can definitely pull out. So for example, communication protocols, all these documents, all they do is they just set the expectations between the manager and the employee or the team member so that they all understand that these are the expectations that are being set.
Whether you follow them or not, is up to the company itself, and whether you want to. But at least there’s something written on paper where people can look at, because that’s all there is. In a remote world, if it’s not written on paper and it’s talked about, it’s very difficult to communicate to a team, if you just verbally say it. It’s very difficult. And that’s when [inaudible 00:52:03] case where Slack is useful. Where you have policies, you have announcements, Slack is great for that because it’s on paper, it’s on writing, it’s in words. And that’s the point where Slack for chat is really good.
I would say that and then to make that jump, I would also say, to hire remote full-time member, is to make sure that when you hire your first person, you really need to work hard, making sure that you connect with that person on a personal level. So, having a one on one chat with that person. Or the manager to have that one on one chat with that person on a weekly basis. I think that’s pretty important, very, very important. Usually people should be doing that, I think that when you’re working in a co-located office, but sometimes people don’t do that for whatever reason.
Maybe not on time or maybe the team is not big enough. But for a remote team member, you should always do it no matter what the size of the team is. I got burned because I did not build a deep enough connection with remote team member and then they left.
Jovian: Got it.
Ho Yin: Because they didn’t feel that they’re part of the team, they didn’t feel… They’re just this one person in the clouds and it just wasn’t good.
Jovian: They can feel like a second class citizen especially when it’s co-located.
Ho Yin: Yeah.
Jovian: For the [inaudible 00:53:30] you mentioned, there’s something that you can share with the audience?
Ho Yin: Yeah, I can definitely share that template with the audience for sure.
Jovian: Yeah. We’ll definitely share it on our show notes and also re-tweet it and our social media if you don’t mind.
Ho Yin: Yeah, that’d be great.
Jovian: Cool. Ho Yin, thank you so much for your time to actually learn a lot and it’s a very fascinating talk. So for the listener out there, where can they find you online?
Ho Yin: They can find me on LinkedIn if they searched for… but actually you can find me on Twitter, it’s just Ho Yin, H-O-Y-I-N-C, and also LinkedIn, I can give you the links as well for that.
Jovian: Right, awesome. Ho Yin, thank you so much for your time today.
Ho Yin: Great. Thank you so much, Jovian. This is great, this is fun.
Jovian: Have a good one.
Ho Yin: Thanks.
Jovian: And that’s it for another episode of Outside the Valley brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with the hope that in each episode, you can learn something new from other remote startup people. So if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at Jovian@arc.dev. It’s J-O-V-I-A-N at A-R-C dot DEV. Or you can find us on Twitter at arcdotdev. See you next week with another episode of Outside the Valley and ciao.
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