No People Left in the Office

In 2012 they started with a team in office. Then a few years later their marketing manager started to work remotely. And when the whole development team had been phased out by 2019, they closed their office and embraced a fully-remote setup.

They’re now working from coffee shops, co-working spaces, home offices and even from the beach.

Marketgoo is building a do-it-yourself SEO tool for improving your website’s traffic.

It’s still good to meet in real life too

They meet in person as a team at least four times a year, and team members also meet among themselves often if they’re in the same city. Meeting in real life is crucial for team building as conversations flow more naturally face-to-face.

They’ve been to remote team retreats in different parts of Spain, like Lanzarote and Ciutadella de Menorca, but also in Portugal.

Communication is the hardest part

With a physical office, topics about progress, issues and needs for help often arise organically. With a remote team, there’s more need for structured meetings to see if your team’s projects are truly done and if which are the issues to be solved in order to catch problems early.

As a lot of remote companies, marketgoo is also mostly communicating through Slack. No immediate response is expected, everyone answers when they find the time in their natural workflow.

It’s also common to really unplug from the communication flow when involved in deep work.

Get the engineering culture right

In a remote team that’s working on a software product, it’s crucial to get the engineering culture right. There needs to be a constant flow of communication happening in the development team to overcome any obsticles and to raise the topics about issues that needs to be solved early on.

To keep track of the development progress and discuss ongoing projects, marketgoo is doing daily standups in their agile development process. They’ve also set up continuous delivery mechanism to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Marketgoo also encourages their team to share what they’ve learned with other team members – something that can be hard in a remote team, as these kind of conversations tend to happen more organically in person. Still, with a “watercooler chat” happening in Slack and deliberately building a strong remote team culture, this is possible in a remote team too.

Choose the right tools for remote work

As all the work and communication in a remote team happens through software tools, it’s important to choose the ones that work well in your team. Marketgoo, like many other remote companies, is mostly using Trello, Slack, and Notion for their remote communication and project planning.

Working remotely has a lot of benefits

While working remotely from anywhere in the world is a great benefit itself, most remote companies offer a lot of additional perks for their team members.

Marketgoo pays 200€/mo for your co-working space, helps you set up your home office and gets you a gym membership to keep you fit. They also embrace the freedom that remote work often provides by letting you choose your own working hours as much it’s possible so that you could live your life more freely by combining work and life.

People who are burnt out are not very useful in the team. It’s important to get enough rest so that you would be happy in productive with your work. Marketgoo agrees with this by giving you as much vacation you need.

BBQ and fireplace is the perfect mix to celebrate weekly project update in a remote team with people close by.

Learning as you go

There is no magic formula for remote teams to succeed. You’ll learn as you go and keep incorporating feedback from your team members to make sure everyone is happy with the remote culture.

Learn more about marketgoo

marketgoo's remote team is currently working from 6 cities across 3 countries covering 4 timezones. This makes them #122 on RemoteHub with employees coming from most countries.

You can learn more about marketgoo from their 12 answered questions about remote work from their full interview.