180: Marissa Goldberg — Running a Remote-First Business

**Arvid Kahl** (0:13)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I'm talking to Marissa Goldberg. She's an expert in remote work and guides companies and founders alike towards a future-proof workplace. We'll talk about productivity, best practices for going remote, and setting up a remote team of all sizes. Here's Marissa.
I found this amazing tweet of yours, that is essentially your pinned tweet, where you talk about having a successful company that allows you to wake up whenever you want to wake up in the morning. You only have two days in a week where you have meetings. So I assume this is one of those days. So thank you for sharing your time with me today. And you work a four-day work week. Now, to me, this is almost a pinnacle of what an indie founder, a solopreneur, or an indie hacker can reach.
You have an amazing story about your company, how you build a business.
And I would like to talk to you about everything today. Both that story and what you do professionally. So from my vantage point is you have a really firm grasp on remote work, what that means for companies, what that means for employees and employers. You have a very firm grasp on how an introvert can navigate both remote work and entrepreneurship. And I want to talk about all these things with you today in the kind of confines of the indie hacking space.
I would assume that you do a lot of consulting and a lot of work with larger enterprise companies. Today, I want to talk to you about how somebody who has zero employees at this point, somebody with maybe a really small team, and who wants to go into a remote work culture, who wants to bring remote work into their company because they need to grow or they want to grow, how they can go about it, what the pitfalls are, and how to do this in a way that is actually human-centric instead of just following some odd metric along the way. So thank you for being on today. Yeah, let's get started. What is the business that you run, and how did you get to be involved in remote work so much?

**Marissa Goldberg** (2:21)
Yeah, so my business is Remote Work Prep. We offer fractional head of remote coaching for a variety of different clients. So not just big clients, but also seed stage. And then we also offer products that help people become better managers and better remote workers. We encourage using remote work to create a better life. And I got started in this because my background is actually in software engineering and product management. And I was in a very toxic in-person tech job back in 2015, and I almost left tech. I thought this just isn't the field for me.
And then I said, I'm going to apply to one more place and do one more job. And if it's just as bad, then I can leave knowing that I tried everything I could.
But if not, hopefully, I could stay in, because I love tech. And the job just happened to be a remote work job back in 2015 when it wasn't all that common. And I fell in love with it. You had control over your space, your time. I could construct my own work day. I could work with people all around the world. It was amazing. And so back then, there wasn't a ton of resources out there on how to do it correctly, so I got a ton of things wrong. The company that I was working for got a ton of things wrong, and it really just ignited this passion in me to figure out how do I do this right? How do I make sure that the engineers I'm leading aren't in meetings all day? How do I make sure that I manage in a way that's people first while being remote first and juggling all these things? And in 2018, some fellow managers came to me and they're like, hey, how are you not in meetings all day? How are you going about this?
And I was like, oh, you know, I could just start some coaching on the side. It'll just be this side project. So in 2018, I started remote work prep, was never supposed to be anything big, never supposed to be my full-time thing.
And then 2020 happened and things flew up. And yeah, so now it's my full-time thing and I love my job.

**Arvid Kahl** (4:18)
I love that story too, because there's nothing better than a side project that just happened to happen, becoming something that is so meaningful and impactful, like in your case, that you're actually helping a whole generation of businesses of all sizes to figure out how to apply this thing that everybody else is doing badly in a better way. I remember too, in 2012, I worked for a company in San Francisco, and I was German. So I was in Germany working remotely for a company that was nine hours behind, I guess. Like it was a whole lot of time difference.