4x founder, 3 exits — currently building Podia, an OG in the creator economy since 2014, AMA!

[akash (Akash Sharma)]

Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing the inner workings of the much-admired Podia playbook, @spencerfry! There’s a contagious clarity to these responses that we can all take a page from.

[akash (Akash Sharma)]

And thanks, as ever, to Relay founders, @trappology, @TomG, @jamesgill, @Deepika, and @aditi1002, for joining us today with some great questions, equally informed by openness and ardor!

[spencerfry]

Thanks for having me!

[Krish (Krish Subramanian)]

Thanks Spencer!

That makes perfect sense. The B2C scale one can reach with community and brand efforts certainly has the potential to offset churn risk. And I love your crisp, zig-when-they-zag stance on competition.

[rajaraman (Rajaraman Santhanam)]

@spencerfry

I’m curious to learn, what are some of the org-wide, cultural practices and rituals that emphasize the written word and how have those helped you scale so efficiently with such a lean team. Especially significant given the rise and growing acceptance of remote work.

Great question!

Excellent communication and written documentation are two of our most important principles. Those extend to everything we do. Here are a few examples:

1. We use Slab for internal documentation and every time anything significant happens that we’ll want to look back at, we’ll create a new entry. That’s anything from an incident report from a downed server to documenting how we work as a team .
2. Every project leader (we call them Champions) writes a Friday update documenting their team’s progress for the week.
3. I write a weekly summary email on Saturdays that highlights all of our projects and everything happening across the company (support, marketing, hiring, etc.)
4. We are really great at keeping all long discussions out of Slack and into Basecamp. That way, people are taking their time to write out their thoughts rather than just blurting it out in Slack.

These seem like some great practices to instil a calmer, async operating cadence.

Thanks for taking the time, Spencer!