My partner and I officially started our web and graphic design company, Zigflitz llc, with one very specific goal - to be able to work over the Internet from anywhere in the world. Here's how we're doing it.
My partner and I officially started our web and graphic design company, Zigflitz llc, in January 2006 with one very specific goal - to be able to do our work over the Internet from anywhere in the world. My partner and his wife had been (and still are) planning to move to Peru to take advantage of a somewhat extreme form of geographic arbitrage.
While developing a client base and in preparation for the day when we're a continent away from these clients and possibly from each other, we've tried many web apps, strategies and services to varying degrees of success. We haven't achieved the goal of being 100% Internet-based yet, but we're nearly there.
Here are a few strategies and tools that have worked for us and may work for you if you're considering a similar approach.
Mail & Calendar - Google Apps
Gmail (with chat) and Google Calendar are the components that we use the most here. I may be preaching to the choir here, but Gmail has consistently offered us the best intersection of control and simplicity in a web-based email program. Gmail's filters, labels, search, IMAP support, built-in chat and the ability to corral all of your email addresses into one smart interface make it, by far, the best email solution for us.
I also use Google Calendar extensively to make appointments with clients and with my partner(which can be sent via Gmail now!) and to schedule hard deadlines. Google really should integrate a task manager within the Calendar interface, but in the meantime, my next recommendation will take care of that.
Task Management - Todoist
Todoist is my favorite of many, many online task managers. My wife and my partner can both log-in and see what the next actions for a given project are, easily change priorities and due dates and quickly add new projects and tasks. This is not revolutionary stuff, but Todoist does it in a lean, simple way that makes sense to me.
Web Conferencing - Yugma
A fairly new addition to my trusted list of tools, Yugma lets you do web conferencing very similarly to Webex or Go2Meeting except that the basic membership is free. I've tested Yugma with a handful of clients for concept mock-up meetings and it has worked beautifully. The paid version is still very affordable (around $10/month for up to 10 simultaneous connections) and adds meeting scheduling and a bunch of other goodies.
Phones - Grand Central
Telephone messages can be handled in a very similar way to emails with Grand Central. You can mark certain numbers as SPAM, route calls based on rules that you set up to different voicemail messages or greetings. The possibilities are really endless here. You can have set up information-only messages, use 'click to call' buttons on your website, and not worry about your business cards and letterhead becoming obsolete when you move, due to the unique feature of having one number ring any number of other phones. Contact me for an invite.
VPN - Hamachi
Excellent and simple way to create a secure network over the Internet with little set-up involved. Particularly useful when your partner is in a distant location. Gina Trapani of Lifehacker.com posted really great set-up instructions here.
Accounting and Invoicing - Less Accounting
After a rough start with Quickbooks and realizing that it was not the direction we wanted to go as a web-based company, I finally stumbled onto lessaccounting.com during their beta. The team has been super-quick to contact me to discuss any suggestions or gripes I've had with the service and I can't recommend them enough. They make the process of invoicing clients and tracking money coming in and going out very, very simple.
Project Management - Basecamp
For Basecamp use to be successful you need to have buy-in from the client, otherwise any web-based project management tool like this will be inefficient. If your client becomes an enthusiastic user, though, Basecamp is a beautiful way to centralize communications, files and milestones into one place on a project-to-project basis.
A few things I'm still I'm looking for are a simple, web-based video conferencing, a better data management/syncing system to use with my remote partner (I'm going to check out BeInSync.com for this), and a better contact management system (Google - please integrate Grand Central and Google Apps with one contact manager!). Anyone have suggestions for these areas?
Let's talk about how you work remotely with a partner or with clients in the comments.
Learn more about the author, Daniel Genser.
Great list, thanks for sharing. I think I'll give Yugma a try - we've been exploring ways to do web conferencing and I haven't been thrilled with the options I've seen so far. WebX is Xpensive, and some of the others seem really complicated to use.
Be sure to write a followup article once they actually move there and let us know how it REALLY works out working that remotely.
Hi Daniel! I recently discovered Yugma too. Haven't tried it though, couldn't seem to get it to work, yikes!
In any case, I hear you about starting up your business in order to work remotely or from anywhere in the world. That was one of the reasons I started Listasaurus.com, because my husband and I want to move to St. Augustine, Florida but there's not as much work there as in Ft. Lauderdale. Now if we can just get the site to start making some money! LOL.
I will take a look at some of your tools in more detail. Some great ideas!
I also use Groove, which has been a fantastic project management/communication tool for me being that my business partners are in Chicago and Port St. Lucie, FL and we all need ways to connect and communicate. It has some amazing task management, contact management, file sharing and discussion tools that have really been a life saver!
Anyway thanks for a super article!
My partner mentioned Microsoft Groove to me last week, too. It looks great for people with a predominantly MS Office workflow.
As a graphic and web designer, though, I was hoping for fuller file sharing - like Adobe files, html/css/javascript files and the like - that has smart syncing of simultaneous changes.
Excellent list, let me add one great service to this, EarthClassMail at http://www.earthclassmail.com/
It's essentially a mail forwarding service on steroids. They'll forward packages and letters from one physical location to another, as well as scan in letters and recycle junk mail for you.
Thanks, Daniel, for a great list. And, yes, Yugma works great -- as it did when you showed me the mockups for my new web site last week. Very easy to use.
Hi Daniel. Thanks for the list, I've been using GrandCentral.com, Earthclassmail.com and Basecamp for a while now and am very happy with their services. I've heard mixed reviews about Yugma but haven't tried it myself.
I also have a goal to setup my business to be able to work from anywhere in the world and to help others do the same so I would love chat with you more about it. How soon do you think you'll be going to Peru?
Hi Ruth, Earthclassmail.com sounds extremely promising, and I think my partner and I will be using that service once we make the move.
My partner and his wife are the ones that have their eye on Peru. They're thinking Summer of 2009, I believe, as the move date. My goals are slightly more modest and a little less defined at this point. My wife and I love Vashon Island, but we also want to travel quite a bit in the next few years - for extended periods of the Tim Ferris/4 HourWorkweek variety - except I'd like to actually work from those locations because I enjoy what I do.
Also, as my partner and his wife settle into their expat lifestyle, my wife and I will be eager to know how they like it, because we're not ruling out a more permanent move either.
Terrific article and great resources. I'm going to introduce my Virtual Assistant to Todoist.
And I agree: These days, my best friends are people I've never met.
Have you tried 37 Signal's Highrise for contact management? Works great for me.
Thanks for the referral to Highrise, Ryan. I hadn't seriously looked at it - I'll check it out.
Hi Daniel,
Your suggestions are great, thank you.
I have a situation that is slightly different than yours, but conceptually the same. I conduct weekly mastermind meetings on a client by client basis and up until now, I personally attend the meetings. Now, I am about to get several clients that are out of state, which would make it very difficult for me to attend these meetings.
What do you think my best options are for conducting these meeting without me actually being there and still having some level of personal contact.
Michael Shenker Human Performance Technologies mshenker@cuzUcan.org 503.531.9502
That's a good question, Michael. It's one I've been thinking of lately too.
Ultimately, I think your remote clients will have to be OK with the fact that you're not there in the flesh. For clients that really need personal face time, I don't if there's much that will get them beyond that.
However for clients that don't need face-to-face, in-person attention, I think a mix of phone/web conferencing/video chat would work.
I've toyed with the idea of purchasing a decent web cam for some of my best clients and offering to install it and show them how to use it to get them set up for web-based meetings, but I haven't found a killer web-based video conferencing solution yet.
Has anyone else? I'd like to find one.
In the meantime, Michael, I think just being responsive by phone and email and staying ahead of the needs of your clients will go a long way towards building up your client's trust enough that they don't feel they need you there in person to know you're working hard for them.
Thanks for your thoughts Daniel.
Kind wishes,
Michael
Daniel,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful article. This couldn't have come at a better time for me, as I am in the beginning stages of plotting an overseas move without losing all of my clients or my ability to earn income while I wait for work visas, etc. I knew of many of these services, but had no experience with them. I am currently bidding for a big, out of state project and I think I'll put some of these to use!
Cheers,
`sra
Thank you for the links in your article- and thanks to the good comments on here. I've been using iChat for years as a video conference tool. I don't usually have to talk to more than 3 people in separate locations at a time. It works great as long as everyone is on a fast connection. I prefer to vidchat with one person at a time- easier to concentrate, especially when there is more than one language involved. I'm also preparing to conduct more work from location and someday I'll know where I want my next home-base.
Thanks for your comment Joanne. Unfortunately, iChat isn't much of an option on my end, as I work in a Windows-based environment. I'm not anti-Mac by any means. I used to own a G4 iBook, but it didn't have a built-in webcam.
My current laptop, a Sony Vaio, has a built-in webcam that works pretty well.
Anybody know of any good iChat alternatives?
Hello: Daniel
Great job...........you do it.
I start working Online nine years ago and I m still selling my herbals Peruvian products to the world.
I m based in Miraflores, Lima Peru.
If you return, just give me a call
Congratulations.,
JERUBIN
Hi Daniel:
Excellent and useful article. Thanks for sharing it with us!
Regarding iChat alternatives, you might give Skype Video Chat a trial run. I've had reasonably good luck with it, though as with all things Skype, there can be the occasional "drop" and depredation of sound quality. Otherwise, pretty good for shorter conferences and the price cannot be beat :-)
For webcam, I currently use a Logitech QuickCam Orbit AF, which produces decent results for basic video and easily moves between multiple computer systems in the office or on the road.
One other suggestion for your list: Surveymonkey.com. I'm a huge believer in targeted polling and surveys for all businesses, and Surveymonkey is the best all-around tool for a low price point. I've found their free option to be more than adequate for many of our needs and have referred them to other clients as well.
Best regards,
-Corbin Links / Linksbusinessgroup.com
Thanks for the great article! This will be very helpful.
I'd like to add one more thing - something for an online backup - I'm trying Carbonite and Mozy right now, and am pretty happy with the backup process with both - haven't tried restoring yet though :-)
Amazon Web Services also has some interesting stuff, including very cheap online storage that you can map to a network drive using a utility called JungleDisk - I've set that up and it seems nice to far - haven't done much with it yet though.
If you have any more Grand Central invites, I'd love to have one!
Thanks again!
Michelle
To change the dimension slightly - how do you handle clients that struggle with technology? Getting some of my clients to successfully use an Instant Messenger is a great feat in itself! I have used a few of the tools you mentioned, but opted to customize my own from tools available through open source.
Hi Laura:
Great question! I work with a number of clients in "traditional" businesses such financial services and utility companies that are....shall we say....'digitally challenged." For these clients, nothing can really replace "analog" technologies such as picking up the telephone or having a face-to-face meeting.
But...since face-to-face is not always possible, especially for the mobile inclined among us, we do a lot of teleconferences. Two services I have used for this (but there are many many others,) are ureach and Gotomeeting. Gotomeeting has a nice record feature to dump all audio and screen activity into a file for later use. As you mention Open Source, there are probably a number of freely available tools which do something similar. I'm personally partial to Gotomeeting because:
1)It is really fast, and allows for almost seamless handoff off of keyboard and mouse among large numbers of participants. Great for demonstrations, troubleshooting, slides, etc. When working with most mid-to-large companies, 95+% of the install base uses Microsoft Windows of one flavor or another, so it is easy for them to quickly install and join a meeting
2)It scales well to 15 participants, or more if screens are shared
3)Integrates well with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, which have large client install bases -- which I find to be very important in working with larger companies. The ability to "get on their calendar" is huge!
4)Even the most non-technical user can click the meeting link, install the software, and be in the meeting in minutes
5)Each meeting created with Gotomeeting automatically creates a conference phone number that can be used
Another thing we often do, is take either captured Gotomeeting sessions, or recorded audio from Telecasts and package them as mp3 with a url. We can then send these to clients and just say "click here when you want a refresher, and call us if you have any questions."
(In case anyone is wondering, I do not work for, with, or receive any paid compensation for endorsing Gotomeeting. I just do so because it works! :-)
Ureach has a number of interesting features as well, and is very user-friendly for non-technical people.
As for keeping in touch, I generally try for two 1-hour phone meetings per week (at a minimum) per client.
Regarding IM, I personally stay well away from it. Not only are there a number of legal issues with some larger companies to consider, but it can be an interruptive productivity drain.
Then of course, there's Skype and Net2phone for calling anyone, anywhere, anytime. I find that Net2phone has a bit better sound quality (they've been around longer than Skype,) but Skype has a lot of great voice recording options.
I have yet to personally try setting up video-enabled chat with non-technical users.
While we're on this great subject, I would be interested to get other Biznik perspective on effectively managing multiple channels of communication such as voice, IM, email, snail mail,etc. This is always a challenge for me anyway, especially in larger accounts where they like to use all of the methods all the time!
Best regards, -Corbin Links Linksbusinessgroup.com
Hi Laura and Corbin, Thanks for your comments!
Corbin, managing multiple channels of communication is a challenge for everyone here, I'm sure. I think it comes down to choosing the right tool for the right task. I use phone/fax/email/IM but I try to manage expectations for each.
For instance, email is by far my favored form of communication - it's searchable, archivable, and ascynchronous.
For quick back and forth communication, especially among project members I love IM (especially the Gmail flavored IM - it's archivable and searchable within the Gmail interface).
For intense conversations, though, there's usually a point at which the best possible IM response is simply "Call me". I most often use IM with my project partners. I don't push IM on clients unless they ask.
For phones, as the article mentions, I use Grand Central to centralize my office phone and cell phone. I also get email messages when there's a voicemail.
I try to gently steer clients away from phone calls for non-urgent matters by responding to them with an email instead of a phone call unless they've specifically asked for a return call.
As much as I wish fax would go away, for getting contracts and proposals signed by non-tech clients, nothing beats it.
I use the fax-to-email solution offered byFaxaway. They provide a free fax number, unlimited free incoming faxes delivered as PDF or TIFF. Outgoing fax prices depend on the country you send to, but for the US it's .11/minute, with a minimum of 1 minute per fax, along with a $1/month account charge. Their support team is top-notch too and ultra-responsive.
I have almost no use for snail mail anymore except for receiving checks from clients who don't want to pay by credit card. In fact, as soon as we make our move we will probably be taking advantage of one of those mail filtering companies that scan your email and deliver it as PDFs and then recycle the dead trees.
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