Kim Gjerstad and MailPoet

Kim Gjerstad is one of the founders of the popular newsletter plugin, MailPoet. In this episode we talk about how he’s been able to build a successful product and company with a fully remote team. Kim gives great advice about on boarding, tools, and building a company culture.

Show Notes

* Kim Gjerstad – [email protected]
* MailPoet
* Buffer’s Open Blog
* Matt Mullenweg on Remote Environments
* We Work Remotely
* Angel.co
* StackOverflow

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Transcript
Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode of 104 of How I Built It. Today, I get to talk to Kim Gjerstad of MailPoet. We cover a little bit of a different topic today. We’re not just talking about how MailPoet was built. We’re talking about Kim and his team has been able to build a really great remote company culture. Working for both non-remote and remote companies within the past six, seven, 10 years, I can tell you that building a culture among remote workers, well, your remote workers is a lot harder. You don’t see those people every day. You don’t get to go to lunch with those people. You don’t get a lot of face time. And so, Kim offers a lot of really great advice on how to build a remote team, where to find remote workers, and some of the tools that they use to make sure that the ship is running smoothly.
This is a really great episode, and it piggybacks pretty nicely off of a couple of weeks ago when I talked to Liam Martin from Time Doctor about making sure that your remote teams are tracking time and productivity in the right way. Kim has a philosophy on tracking time, as you’ll hear in this episode, but still there’s a lot of really, really great advice, especially as more and more teams move to a remote philosophy.
We’ll get into all of that in a minute, but I do want to tell you about our sponsors for today’s episode. The first is Pantheon. You’ll hear about them later in the show. The second is Creator Courses. WordPress 5.0 is an inevitability, and there’s a lot of concerns around how’s the new editor going to work, how should I talk to my clients about the new editor, what do I need to do to make sure their site doesn’t crash during this very important holiday season? Well, the courses over at creatorcourses.com will help you. There’s one just for users, so if you just want to know how the editor works, you could take that very affordably. There’s one for freelancers to communicate all of those changes to your clients, and there’s one for theme developers. If you go to creatorcourses.com/Gutenberg, you can see all of the offerings there. As an added bonus, you can use the code build it for a discount. Again, that’s creatorcourses.com/Gutenberg. Well, with that out of the way, I think there’s only one thing left to do, so on with the show.
Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks how did you build that? Today,