What is the most important thing you need to be doing when bootstrapping a project

I’ve worked in distributed teams for most of my professional career. For the last 6 years I was in a position to cooperate with people living up side down - there’s from 8 to 10 hours of difference between us (depending on DST).

The communication window is so narrow it’s impossible to keep up face to face. To ease our life we had to communicate asynchronously for the most of the time and the most important thing I learned to do to succeed is to over-communicate.

I think it’s the single thing that influences whether you are successful or a failure in a relationship like that.

Master your writing, master your thinking, be precise, be easy to understand and leave out ambiguity, state your intentions, expectations, write down your assumptions. It’s like trying to document your thinking process. Try to predict follow up questions and answer them before they are asked.

I know it’s a lot of work but think how much time you will lose if you have to wait for an answer at least 10 hours and then you get an answer to the wrong question :-)

Then spending an hour or two writing a letter is nothing, you really safe your time!

Photo Macostones Megaphone by Katie Lips on Flickr.