5 Years Without Meetings

My company Paperbell was launched in spring 2020 (aww pandemic baby!) which makes 2025 our 5 year anniversary.

It also means I’m five years into this crazy experiment of working completely a-sync with no meetings, no managers, no 1:1s and a lot of other unorthodox ways of working.

Has it been a success? For me, the answer is a huge yes. Last year we crossed the million dollar ARR mark, the business is growing and profitable, and I love this style of work. (The rest of the team loves it too!)

But of course, it has its pros and cons.

So let’s dive into how in the world we’ve operated with no meetings for five years, and why.

Why I Went From Real-Time Remote to Completely Asynchronous

My last company, MeetEdgar, was always remote. But we did “real-time remote”. We were all in the US and we had regular live meetings. We had a weekly company wide all-hands, weekly team meetings, weekly leadership team meeting, lots of 1:1s, and team daily standups. All of this was done live on zoom.

Basically, we operated like a “regular” offline company but moved the work online.

Then, I heard a conversation with Matt Mullenweg and Sam Harris about the five different levels of remote work. Wordpress is one of the oldest all-remote companies out there, and Matt laid the idea out in a blog post here.

One idea from the podcast struck me like a lightning bolt: by trying to replicate traditional office structure in remote work, we’re missing the point entirely.

Remote work offers new and different benefits that in-person doesn’t, like new levels of autonomy and efficiency. Trying to recreate an in-person office online focuses on the drawbacks of remote work instead of embracing the benefits.

I started to understand some of my frustrations with the ways we had set up my “real time remote” company. We tried to make sure the team had trust and bonding, but it always felt really forced and awkward online. And no matter how hard to tried to make our meetings short and relevant, we still seemed to spend an awful lot of time in unnecessary meetings instead of just getting on with our work.

In an in-person office you have lunch and coffee with you coworkers every day, you chat with them and learn about their lives. This is natural and it’s great and work becomes a healthy social outlet. I think when we all started working online it felt creepy NOT to do with with our online coworkers, so we tried to replicate the same thing.

But what if working online looked very different than working offline — what if working remotely meant that we just showed up at work to work, having rich and fulfilling social lives out in the real world?

So when I started Paperbell I decided to try something different — what if I ran my online business in a completely different way, eliminating everything that I found tedious or unnecessary about the way I’d worked before?

Your Business Is Your Utopia

A quote I revisit often comes from Derek Sivers’ book Anything You Want: Your business is your utopia.

The joy of being a bootstrapped founder is that we get to create the rules and do it however the hell we want! So I decided to really think about what my utopia company looked like. Here are some of the themes that came up for me:

Less Chatting About Work Instead of Doing Work

I’ve spent a huuuuge amount of time as a founder in meetings talking about work instead of just doing work. And I’ve found that setting this time aside to talk about work (in regular meetings, one-on-ones, and topic-specific meetings) tend to spin off MORE time in conversations about work.

Here’s one common pattern I saw: I have a weekly 1:1 with someone on the team. We spend the time chatting about ideas for the business —sounds great! Some good ideas are emerging! But these are almost never high-priority ideas. (Because we’ve already had different planning meetings and figured those out.)

But now the ideas are in the meeting notes and “in the system”. Now we spend time and effort deciding if we’re going to do them, or another project goes off track trying to incorporate these ideas. Sometimes I had to eliminate the idea and have a tough conversation with the person about why we aren’t doing their idea.

But often no one even cared about this idea in the first place or thought it really needed to be done, we were just making conversation!

These endless conversations lead to an endless amount of low-priority, nice-to-have type of work. It’s fine. It’s not terrible. But why? Why introduce this unneeded element to the business?

Freelancers Instead of Employees

At MeetEdgar, we didn’t rely on freelancers much at all. We had a strong preference for hiring W2 full-time employees that were completely devoted to the business.

But gradually I started to notice something — the freelancer relationships I’d had in the past felt more clean, clear and direct than the employee relationships.

Surprisingly, I find its often easier to get clearly-scoped work delivered regularly from freelancers than employees. A freelancer usually has a black-and-white directive: we need 10 blog posts written by this date. They write them and get paid. Done.

Employees are usually juggling a lot more inputs, including the endless meetings mentioned above! So the deadline you agreed on keeps slipping and slipping as other things come up. Meanwhile, the freelancer would have had it all done by now!

Particularly as an American company, I also came to resent the “babysitting” aspects of running a company. We were responsible for people’s health insurance and 401k and I personally believe these basic rights should be provided by the government, not tied to your employer.

Hiring freelancers feels much more fair and even — they are running their own practice and I’m their client. If they want to raise their rate, or change their hours, or work more or less that’s a mutual agreement between us intstead of something the employer dictates.

Individual Contributor Instead of a Manager

I want to be a wrecking-ball founder. I want to rewrite our homepage whenever I feel like it, I want to change our email strategy on a whim, I want to go into canva and randomly create and launch a bunch of new ads.

I’ve run online business for 20 years and I’ve put a lot of thought into the work I love to do. Being the manager ain’t it. I love diving into the marketing and getting my hands dirty.

I’ve created situations in the past where I wasn’t “allowed” to do this stuff and for good reason — we had teams of people whose job it was to create the marketing, while I sat in the CEO seat. But I’ve found this is not my favorite role. So in my business utopia I need a situation where I’m playing with marketing.

The New Remote Vision

These ideas came together to form a larger vision of what Matt Mullenweg refers to as “Level 5: Nirvana” . Here’s how he describes it:

This is when you consistently perform better than any in-person organization could. You’re effortlessly effective. It’s when everyone in the company has time for wellness and mental health, when people bring their best selves and highest levels of creativity to do the best work of their careers, and just have fun.

Another book that was highly influential on me is Trevor Blake’s Three Simple Steps (as well as Secrets to a Successful Startup). In these books he describes running a business solely through agency/vendor partners. This idea clicked into place with a Forbes article I had read about Kylie Cosmetics. Here’s the important part:

Her near-billion-dollar empire consists of just seven full-time and five part-time employees. Manufacturing and packaging? Outsourced to Seed Beauty, a private-label producer in nearby Oxnard, California. Sales and fulfillment? Outsourced to the online outlet Shopify. Finance and PR? Her shrewd mother, Kris, handles the actual business stuff, in exchange for the 10% management cut she takes from all her children. As ultralight startups go, Jenner’s operation is essentially air.

A software business doesn’t need a manufacturing partner or a huge media buying agency. But if real businesses had created huge success with tiny teams, why couldn’t I do the same?

I’ve also learned a lot from Christine Carillo who writes about running tech startups with tiny teams and outsized results.

I had a vision of a company whose work got done by a few subject matter experts who didn’t need management or one-on-ones, who knew exactly how to do their work with excellence on day one and loved what they did.

Another part of my vision was ultimate efficiency — a company that truly eliminated any work that wasn’t important. I wanted to spend a few hours only doing the very most important things. (This has also lead to the approach of nearly everyone at the company, including myself and my cofounder, being part-time.) Zero busywork, and swift elimination of anything that didn’t create business results.

What Impact Would This Have on MRR?

As a SaaS, our core metric is MRR (monthly recurring revenue). For your company maybe you’re using profit instead of MRR, or annual growth depending on what your goals are.

The most useful filter question I’ve found is very simple:

What impact would adding this have on MRR?

or, EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY

What impact would ELIMINATING this have on MRR?

Shit.

When I looked at how I’d been running things, using all the “best practices”, the playbooks from Scaling Up and Traction, the meetings, the OKRs, and on and on . . . a huge amount of it would have NO IMPACT ON MRR if it was removed.

None.

In fact, the harsh truth is most businesses find entire roles that can be removed with no impact on MRR. (Yes, you do not want to start this out as a team exercise because it gets very awkward very quickly.)

This filter question has been hugely helpful in continuing to refine my Utopia business model.

And Now For The How

All of this is important to set the stage for how we achieve a super-functional, efficient company without meetings.

We aren’t just taking meetings away. We’re building a company from the ground up that makes meetings unnecessary.

Part two coming soon on exactly what we do instead: the tools, structures and working practices we use to communicate and run the company day-to-day. Please leave a comment with the questions you’d like me to answer in part two!