The future of work, undoubtedly, is remote. Large established organizations are looking to move some or all of their employees to a remote workforce. New startups are being built from the ground up through a 100% remote team.
However, there are still companies that haven’t grasped the importance of going remote. It could be that they have misconceptions about remote work. Maybe they are not prepared to handle the challenges that come along.
But whatever the case may be, remote work is here to stay. Some companies are doing it better than others. And to help potential remote companies with some lessons, we compiled a list of the 20 remote startups doing great work and making an impact with distributed teams. These companies will help you understand the ins and outs of running a remote team, how they’re doing it. The challenges and how they’re facing them.
Table of Contents
RemoteTeam Inc.
RemoteTeam Inc. is an HR tool built by remote professionals for remote companies. The startup has built payroll, time off, and tax compliance tools to help remote companies to manage their employees seamlessly. With RemoteTeam.com, a remote company can onboard employees, set up automatic payrolls, enable batch payments of remote workers, and automate the entire HR process.
Team: RemoteTeam operates a 100% remote company. Employees are located in Africa, Europe, America, and Asia. We use Slack for everyday communication, Google Drive for document handling, Atlassian for project and task management, and of course, Remoteteam.com for our HR needs.
Remote Team Inc. on Twitter & LinkedIn
Articulate Inc.
Founded in 2002, Articulate is an e-learning solutions provider for individuals and companies. It develops applications for course developers to create great online courses and also tools for companies to create e-learning solutions for employees.
Remote team: Articulate isn’t our usual remote company that just joined the trend recently. It has been operating as a remote company since 2002 and it’s a company that knows how to play the remote game. This has enabled the company to hire the best talent from around the world.
The company has about 153 employees spread across the globe, working from all the continents.
Articulate on Twitter
Boldly
Boldly was founded in 2012, and operates a completely remote team that works from different geographical locations. It’s a premium staffing subscription company that provides remote teams to startups. Boldly operates a subscription-based staffing model where they help businesses and startups to staff their organizations with a remote team vetted by Boldly’s in-house experts.
Remote team: Boldly’s team is 100% remote and spread mostly around North America and Europe, supporting companies spread around the world.
Boldly on Twitter
Gruntwork
Founded in 2016, Gruntwork’s aim is to simplify the entire process of software development and deployment. Gruntwork offers a lot for the development community, including a collection of more than 250,000 reusable code, an end-to-end tech stack, an interface for Dev teams to manage and deploy infrastructure, and more. It also offers training on DevOps topics and provides support for many teams.
Team: Gruntwork operates a 100% remote team spread across the globe. Employees are located in Helsinki, Berlin, Lagos, London, Dublin, Fremont, Phoenix, and many other cities.
Social: Twitter
Timble
A web development agency focused on opensource solutions for organizations. The company is lead by Joomla co-founder Johan Janssens. Timble is also involved in other open-source projects including Joomla, Joomlatools, product management platform MexiPass, location and image management platform Find, and a lot more.
Team: The startup’s team is spread across the globe. Timble’s workers come from different countries, including the Philippines, Turkey, France, Belgium, England, and Scotland.
Social: Twitter.
Code Control
A gig economy startup, Code Control provides on-demand freelance developers for companies, startups, and individuals. Startups with difficulty selecting freelancers can have Code Control handpick for them. Startups can assemble a complete software development team in less than a day using Code Control.
Team: The company was founded in 2015 and has more than 400 senior developers and product managers. It’s 100% remote and employees can work from anywhere.
Social: Twitter.
Sleeknote
Through high converting and beautiful website popups, Sleeknote helps online businesses, e-commerce platforms, and blogs to capture and retain quality leads. Sleeknote achieves this by providing simple drag and drop editors that enable website owners to easily create beautiful lead generation forms to gather the right information from their visitors.
Team: Although Sleeknote is headquartered in Denmark, it hires remotely from around the world, allowing employees to choose where to work from.
Follow Sleeknote on Twitter
MailerLite
Recognized as the 5th fastest growing SaaS business worldwide in 2019 by SaaS Magazine, MailerLite is an email service provider that loves remote work. The company, which started as a web design agency in 2005, has grown to become a great email client for freelancers and startups after moving into email marketing in 2010.
Remote Team: Although MailerLite has its headquarters in Vilnius, Lithuania, about 50% of its 62+ employees work remotely. Their remote employees are spread around the world, including Germany, the USA, France, Indonesia, Mexico, and Thailand.
Social media: Twitter.
DesignLab
DesignLab is an online learning platform that teaches user experience. Students learn to design and work on numerous projects. The company also pairs students with mentors, who help these students scale their learning experience and build careers in UX/UI.
Remote Team: DesignLab’s team is fully distributed. It has over 400 mentors spread across the world as well as employees who work from different locations around the world.
Social Media: Twitter.
Kinsta
Founded in 2013, Kinsta is a WordPress hosting provider that uses its cutting-edge technologies to help scale online businesses. It has a wide range of features, including free site migrations, daily backups, and great speed. It’s also highly secured and provides great support to its customers.
Remote team: Kinsta isn’t fully remote. It has offices in London, Los Angeles, and Budapest. However, it has a lot of workers working remotely and offer remote work options for employees who prefer working from a location of choice. Kinsta also has a remote expense budget for its remote workers and usually gather for an annual retreat.
Follow Kinsta on Twitter.
Airpush
A mobile advertising platform, Airpush provides mobile ads, push notifications, and customer targeting solutions for businesses around the world. The company has over 450 million users and more than 6,000 impressions a month. Airpush helps its customers find the most effective way to monetize and uses its global team to get more knowledge on location-specific markets.
Remote team: Airpush has its headquarters in Denver, Colorado. However, the 150-team is distributed around the world, from Africa and Asia to Latin America and Europe.
Airpush on LinkedIn.
Uscreen
Startups, artists, coaches, entertainers, fitness trainers, and entrepreneurs use Uscreen to create on-demand videos. As a video monetization platform, Uscreen helps video creators to craft great monetization strategies and earn money from their craft.
Remote team: Uscreen is headquartered in Washington, DC. However, as a remote-first startup, many of the employees work from around the world. It’s a 20-person team that’s growing steadily.
Uscreen on Twitter
Odball
Odball is a software engineering and consulting startup helping companies with software solutions and digital business consulting. The company has built web solutions for many companies and also for government agencies.
Remote team: Odball is a remote-first company. Although its headquarters is based in Washington, it has teams spread around the globe, working on projects by its clients.
Odball on Twitter.
Olark
Olark is a Y Combinator funded company which started operations in 2009. It is a live chat platform that helps businesses to connect with their customers in real-time. Today, Olark has more than 12,000 businesses using its platform to close leads, increase sales, and drive customer engagement.
Remote team: Although it started operations in Palo Alto, Olark’s team is fully remote now. Most of its team members are located in the United States, and a few found in Sweden, Scotland, and Brazil.
Olark on Twitter
Toggl Track
Toggl Track is a productivity tool that helps employers to monitor employee productivity. Apart from real-time tracking of productivity, toggl provides great reports for employers to make better decisions on what’s bringing the money and how much the hours employees put in the work fetch the organization.
Remote team: While it’s headquartered in Estonia, Toggl Track is a 100% remote team, made up of over 80 employees working from more than 19 different time zones. The team uses great communication and collaboration best practices to make work best.
Toggl Track on Twitter
Shogun
Shogun is an e-commerce platform that helps agencies and online shops to build powerful and high-converting pages. Shogun comes with a visual editor, analytics tools for monitoring platform visitors, AB testing, and publishing features.
Remote team: Shogun is a fully remote team with designers, developers, product managers, and growth experts spread across the world. The team works from many countries, including the US, South Korea, Brazil, Jamaica, Italy, Australia, Georgia, India, Spain, Philippines, Croatia, Argentina, and many other countries. It’s a great remote team worth following.
Shogun on Twitter.
1Password
1Password is a password management tool for individuals and teams. It saves passwords and helps you log into websites seamlessly. It also helps you store your credit card details and use an auto-fill feature to fill your forms online when you’re buying something.
Remote team: 1Password runs a completely remote team, enabling members to choose their work location and under which conditions they would love to work. The company allows employees to plan their own flexible schedules. The team also goes on retreats – all these build the remote culture at 1Password.
1Password on Twitter
Sticker Mule
Sticker Mule is a custom sticker producer that offers a wide range of products for individuals and businesses alike. They make custom coasters, gift cards, and wall graphics. Apart from producing, they also ship these products to customers around the world.
Remote team: Sticker Mule runs a remote team that is spread across 4 continents and 17 countries, who are united by the desire to make a change wherever they are.
Sticker mule on Twitter
Coveralls
Coveralls help developers and developer teams to maintain and deliver well-tested codebases. The platform scans codebases to find problem areas and helps developers figure out which areas of their code are lacking – and provide solutions accordingly. Coveralls is free for open-source repos but private repos will need a Pro account to use the platform.
Remote team: Coveralls is a remote startup that allows its employees to work remotely, from a location of their choice.
Coveralls on Twitter
Bugcrowd
Bugcrowd is a security solutions provider and consulting that handles penetration testing, bug bounty and vulnerability disclosures for organizations. They help organizations maintain the highest form of security using a network of highly talented programmers, hackers, and security researchers.
Remote team: Bugcrowd runs a distributed team with its headquarters in San Francisco and other offices in London and Sydney. It also has bug hunters and researchers working remotely from around the world.
Bugcrowd on Twitter
Final morsels
I hope you’ve seen these companies and how they are building great products and services using remote employees? You can also do it – either build your startup from the ground up with a remote team or transition an already exiting company to a remote team. It’s possible.
Further Reading:
