How we started Kipwise as remote co-founders

Remote co-founders are a reasonable bet when three things are already true: the founders have worked together for years, at least one of them has run a remote setup before, and being apart gives you something you can name, such as being close to customers or investors. We were three co-founders 7,852 km apart when we started Kipwise. This is how we decided, and what investors asked us about it.

When I introduced our co-founder team, the most frequent response was a surprised face 😮

“What? Your co-founder is based in Estonia?”

A co-founder in Estonia is not the surprising part, since Estonia is a well-known tech hub. The surprising part is that two of us were in Hong Kong. Charlie (CTO) and I (CMO) lived there, and Kwun (CEO) was in Estonia.

Remote teams are common, but many people are still skeptical about remote co-founders. Try googling “remote co-founders”: there are tonnes of questions like “Do you think a startup can succeed with a remote founder?” and “Does having a remote co-founder affect the aspect of raising funds?”

When we wrote this, Kipwise was still young and we did not know whether it would become a success. We started it in May 2018, got into Techstars in July 2018, and then closed a seed round from Icebreaker.vc and two angel investors from Germany.

How we ended up working apart

Kwun, Charlie and I met in 2012, as three of the first five employees at another startup in Hong Kong. We worked together there for almost four years, which built a strong bond, so when Kwun left that company and went to Estonia on an adventure, we stayed in close touch.

We often discussed the pain points we met at work and which ideas might solve them. From those discussions and some side projects to test our assumptions, Kipwise was born. After some initial traction we decided to go full time, and a question came up: should Kwun stay in Estonia while Charlie and I stayed in Hong Kong?

Why we decided to stay apart

After some discussion we all agreed to go remote. We had four reasons.

1. Stay closer to target customers

Kipwise is a team knowledge management tool built on Slack that helps teams share and organize useful team knowledge in a more automated and collaborative way. From our experience of working in and with companies in Asia and Europe, the culture of team knowledge management was much stronger in Europe than in Hong Kong.

With Kwun in Europe, customer development was much easier, and it is a very important part of an early startup’s success. In our experience it works better face to face, because people express more and you can read their reactions more easily.

2. Stay closer to potential investors

Kwun being in Europe also made it easier to talk to investors interested in the knowledge management software market, because the B2B SaaS market was much less mature in Hong Kong than in Europe. We got into the Techstars London 2018 summer program and were funded by Icebreaker VC, based in Finland, together with angel investors from Germany.

3. Keeping burn rate low

If our customers and investors were both more likely to be in Europe, why didn’t all three of us move there? One reason was to keep the burn rate low. In Hong Kong, our hometown, Charlie and I could live with our families, which kept expenses down, and working remotely saved on office rent and commuting.

4. Exposure to a global talent network

With a remote setup from the start, we were ready to add teammates from other regions instead of one city, at a time when most major cities were suffering from a talent shortage.

Being remote also forced us to build a communication process and an internal team knowledge base right at the beginning, to avoid the problems of not sharing an office. We also had a founders’ dinner every other Monday, each of us eating in front of our computers with the webcams on 😂

We recommend writing down how the founders work together before you hire anyone: who decides what, when you meet and where decisions are recorded. A remote founding team has to do this anyway, and the first hire then joins a process that exists on paper instead of a habit that lives in three heads. When this was written, we had two teammates besides the three co-founders, from Taiwan and Brazil, and we did not face significant problems onboarding them, because most of the processes were already in place when there were only founders.

Will working as remote co-founders work for you?

1. Do you have strong bonding and trust between co-founders?

Most people are skeptical about remote co-founders because of the communication and culture issues that might arise, and we agree this can be a huge problem if the founders have never worked closely together. We had worked together for more than four years, building a startup from scratch. We knew how each of us works and communicates, and we trusted each other to stay disciplined and work diligently remotely.

2. Do you have experience working remotely?

During those four years we also worked remotely for almost a year, when Kwun went to San Francisco to build up the sales team there. All of us had also worked in companies with distributed teams, so we knew the tools and processes that help a remote team collaborate. If you have no stretch like that behind you, create one before you commit: work apart on a real project for a few weeks, with your real meeting schedule, and see what breaks.

3. Do you have a legitimate reason to give investors?

Almost every investor meeting included the question of why we work remotely as a founding team, so be prepared to show that it works. Besides explaining why we chose it, we walked investors through the processes we had built to work tightly together despite the distance. A team that already works across regions is also a pitch for a global market.

Follow us if you would like to read more about our stories as an early startup, or drop us a message if you are also working remotely as co-founders and have an interesting story to share.