I had worked for 17 months at MailPoet, company focused on develop a newsletter plugin for WordPress, and this period ended in July. I’ll write a few things that I learned and did during these months.
MailPoet (formerly Wysija Newsletters) is a WordPress plugin installed in more than 200.000 websites across the world.
Send newsletters post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully. Start to capture subscribers with our widget now.
Now that you know what MailPoet is, I can talk about my experience in the company.
Remote working
MailPoet, a French company, doesn’t have a headquarter. It means that the entire team works in home offices or on coworking spaces.
Home-office is kind of a new thing for most of the companies here in Brazil, but its use is increasing quickly.
Start building your own home office is more than only a desk and a laptop.
- Laptop
- Desk
- Chair
- Internet connection
- Decoration (it’s important too)
- Phone
- Cleaning
- Coffee, coffee and more coffee
Most of startups and developers can’t handle all the required structure. So coworking spaces are great options if you don’t want to bother about building your own environment and, mainly, maintain it all by yourself.
A good website to find coworking spaces with available rooms and desks in Brazil is Deskovery.
In order to work with a remote team you need commitment and the right tools:
- Slack: An awesome chat service
- Github: Code review and collaboration
- Trello: Manage tasks visually
- Google Calendar: Manage all meetings and end dates
- Google Docs: Create documents with the team in real time
- Google Hangout: Meetings
If you have never worked remotely before, you should talk about it with your staff. You should also read the benefits and challenges of remote working.
Timezone
As I explained before, MailPoet doesn’t have a headquarter, besides that, the 13 people staff was divided across 10 countries (France, Spain, Belgium, Lithuania, Canada, Portugal, England, USA, Vietnam, and Brazil). It created a challenge when we needed to find the best time for meetings with the entire team.
You need to wake up early or work until late to be able to find your teammates.
English
I had worked as Support Guru answering emails with doubts of users from the entire globe. As I’m Brazilian, I understand that English was not their native language, but it created a few fun situations:
Sometimes it was easier to ask them to type on their native language, then translate it on Google. Yeah, sometimes automatic translation is better!
I was reading and writing in English every day, so I improved my vocabulary and, as the team was divided in 10 countries, I improved dramatically my listening skills because I had the opportunity to talk to people with extremely different accents. I’ll be forever grateful to the team for that 🙂
Events
As MailPoet is a WordPress plugin, I went to a bunch of WordCamps.
WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.
Thanks to MailPoet I had attended the WordCamps Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and San Francisco. I also talked twice about Newsletters on WordPress (in Brazilian Portuguese).
WordCamp Rio de Janeiro 2014
WordCamp Belo Horizonte 2015
In addition to that, I also mentioned MailPoet on my talk in the WordCamp São Paulo 2014:
17 months in short words
Besides everything I already explained, I also helped to create a few wireframes, created HTML templates for the new email system, reported and tested issues on Github and answered 11,415 emails to 5,283 users (more than the second and third places combined).
I worked hard and learned a lot. Thank you for all the time MailPoet 🙂
