Our remote team stack after scaling from 6 to 35 across 9 countries

Two years ago we were 6 people in one Slack channel and a Google Sheet. Now we’re 35 across 9 countries. Made most of the operational mistakes you can make getting here. Figured I’d write down what we landed on in case it saves someone else the same year of weekends.

Tools matter less than process but nevertheless they play a significant part in the workflow.

Hiring. LinkedIn for senior roles, Indeed for volume, referrals for everything else. Referrals consistently gave us the best hires. The job boards were hit or miss.

Document signing and storage. DocuSign for contracts with the team and with vendors. The lesson here was keeping everything in one place so nothing gets lost when someone leaves or a deal moves on. We learned that the hard way.

Contractor payments. We use Finboo now. The reason we moved is we wanted payments, contracts, invoices, closing docs and the compliance paperwork in one platform instead of glued together. Started on Wise Business plus Payoneer with documents handled separately and it just stopped working at our volume. Deel, Remote, Multiplier and Oyster do similar things, worth comparing on price and country coverage for wherever your people actually are.

Time tracking. Toggl for the handful of client-billable people. Nothing for everyone else. Tried Hubstaff early and the team hated it, felt like surveillance. We care about output not hours.

Project management. Notion, Asana and Miro depending on the team and what they’re doing.

Communication. Slack for most things. Honestly though a fair amount of our day to day still happens in Telegram.

Financial accounting and P&L. Google Sheets. Not glamorous but everyone on the team can actually read it.

HR ops (onboarding, time off, people stuff). Mix of Google Sheets, Notion and Miro. Nothing dedicated. This has been enough so far.

If I could go back I’d sort out the documents/payments/compliance layer at around 10 people instead of 20. Pushed it a year too long and paid for it in accountant hours and a lot of weekends.

That’s the stack. Happy to go deeper on any of it. Curious what other people running distributed teams landed on. Feels like everyone’s reinventing the wheel there.