Show Notes
Shane Evans, Co-founder & CEO of Scrapinghub, joined us on this episode of the Remote Working Show. Shane has been working in the tech industry for over two decades, of which the past decade has been spent building Scrapinghub.
Interestingly, Scrapinghub has bootstrapped its way to explosive growth and to over 150 employees. Starting it as a services company was key in ensuring that cash started to flow in, which enabled them to then build a strong product around it.
Shane discusses the entire entrepreneurial journey – the challenges, mistakes as well as the successes achieved. The insights shared in the process were very interesting – in particular, about the need to start formalising a hierarchy and adding a layer of senior management to structure growth.
Scrapinghub has been a remote company from the very beginning. It all started from the very popular open-source framework, Scrappy, which Shane himself coded. Developers who already knew were hired irrespective of geography and the company hasn’t looked back since.
Shane did mention the difficulty in managing a remote sales team though. He felt that the onboarding wasn’t easy in such a situation and they have, therefore, decided to keep the sales team co-located. This underlined the importance to not be tied to the concept of remote at all times – the needs of the company should supersede the strong push to be remote.
He also shares the initiatives and the methods that have made them a successful remote company. He mentions that ensuring initiatives are driven bottom-up has been a critical reason for their success.
Shane can be followed on LinkedIn & Twitter and reached at shane@scrapinghub.com.