[Raised $500 million] Ep.157 - The First 100 with Marcelo Lebre, the Co-founder of Remote

let's do it let's do it broadcasting from around the world you're listening to the first 100 a podcast on how Founders acquired their first 100 paying customers here's your host Hadi Rodan good to have you on the show Marcelo how are you doing today doing good thank you for having me thank you for stopping by the podcast is very interesting what you've built especially in the remote world where I operate as well my company is fully remote we like this model but you've take it to a completely different level so I'll introduce you very quickly

Marcelo lebre is the president and co-founder of remote which is a global HR platform that helps companies hire manage and pay their entire team more effectively compete in a modern global economy where the suite of products now you have payroll International employment contractor management and much more and you've raised to do that around 500 million from notable investors such as Exel seoa index Ventures General Catalyst and a few others Marcelo welcome to the show did Young Marcelo ever exhibit any signs of Entrepreneurship early in your career I don't know I parents used to complain a

lot that I would take everything apart and then not be super able to put them back together or I would but then then there would be spare parts at the end I think I've always been an anxious person I wanted to see things happening and moving and in coming to life on my own I always hated to wait for others to do something I remember in school was a big of a problem because I would have to get something done and I was never much of a student but I like to get with things faster

is there anything you tinkered on early on your in your life that was a think is a an entrepreneur would do well I think there are two things that led me to be what I am today one is I had you know my grandfather he would he was very techsavvy he had a lot of and everything electronic he would take things apart build pcbs and things like that and he had a computer had a spectrum I remember looking at it and S of marveling and he introduced me to it he gave me the first manual

and of course it it was in English I didn't know what I was reading but I was triing and out and experimenting and drawing things making sounds somewhat programming in a way in a way and form it I remember the day that I started playing with it I was so in love with that thing there was a birthday anniversary of a birthday party in a family I remember everyone was there and I I took the book The with me and was sitting in the corner just reading it because I love the idea that something could

I could program something to do more for me things for so that was one and the second bar is more of the fact that I wanted to be an Astron as so many kids do and people telling and they tell the story quite often it was more because I like to do things out of spite and I remember it that people you know I think when I said you know I want to be an astronaut the answer was like they laughed and I said well you can't like what why can't I and then the answer

was not because I was not smart enough or strong enough or whatever it was because Portugal didn't have an astronaut program so there was no way for me to learn and apply those things and I was like oh that sucks like just because I was born in this country I don't have the same opportunities anyone else and you know that is part of the impetus that led me to build what we build today where you should do what you're really passionate and about and have the skills for maybe I could have been a great astronaut

who knows I don't believe in if so you never know but um yeah that was it that's a great story so bring us forward into the present where you've built remote back in 2019 how was remote born the remote was born out of two things one is yob and I my co-founder were friends for 12 years and we always were passionate quite about making sure that people love could do what they loved I had many thoughts we built many projects across the years together we never sold because we didn't want to spend time selling we

want to spend time building and working together and that was always fun we would do it on the side as a gig and it was a awesome and so it brought us together and always with the same topic and all the things that we built across the many years was always the same topic something that would bring people together about around the things that they're passionate about and we had multiple shots at this space the space of bridging talent and opportunity and then we came to this realization where we amounted and amassed enough information knowledge

knowhow and people Network that we could really make a dent in the world and that's what we did we started by thinking through what was the best bridge to get talent and an opportunity together how could we build it and of course we realize that that was through payroll in allowing companies and people to meet even if they're not in the same continent alone country and and that started all the whole crazy Journey we've been in Amazing Story I think before the co times selling the idea of being remote was very hard even convincing you

know the HRS that hey you could hire people from a different continent because they're talented enough and you can utilize them it was very hard to sell how did you validate early on this value proposition before Co because when Co happens it's easy right everyone went remote but before that were there any signs that this is going to be very successful yeah so this remote way of working this distributive way of working is not new it's something that you may be hearing about for the past 15 years it's like it started as the digital Nomads

those people that would take pictures of uh a laptop and Margarita at the beach then they would post it on social media and say hey this I'm doing my job and everyone's like grumbling and like oh get a real job uh get a life and then it started to evolve and it was always there especially people starting their business you know you start an idea you usually start from home or from a co-working office and then you get another person to join you and then another and sometimes you know you not both at the office

it's easier and it's more relaxed and that is already distributed because you're finding a way to work on something but you're not really in the same space but eventually it would always evolve into everyone just joining into the office but until for the good part of the last 15 years people started to take that on a bit more seriously why because you start to get more a better internet connection better equipment lighter easier to travel better apps better tools that would allow you to manage your time communicate with others and exchange information and so that

was obvious and then you started to see companies a lot of startups just embracing it you had gitlab you had automatic all these kinds of companies that embraced early on this distribution a distributed way of working and honestly I remember talking to investors even before starting remote and it would dismiss companies that were remote even today there are a few people that dismissed the idea that a remote company can work but that endured and if something endures cross time there's something to it where there's smoke there's usual usually fire not always but in many cases

and that persevered through time that people didn't really want to go to an office to work and honestly I've worked in office all my life in P remote I have I every single day I dreaded going into the commute and start the commute and end the commute it was awful was always off and so the signs were all there and I was friends with many companies that were remote and and so the thing was there and also it's not just remote it's also distributed organizations companies that start in an office but all of a sudden

have to hire one% of this country on another and another and another and another and this is distributed work in the same model that remote work is it just didn't have a name for it and the end of 2019 helped the world to put a name to the thing and to make it part of put a number to the Lane let's call it that amazing do you remember your early customers and how did you convince them to uh use remote I do and they're still customers it was a mix of two things one was people

just hearing about us when we started remote what we did was like we wrote a short blog post and we wrote um post it on social media and people started to wonder was this thing what is this new business model and how does it benefit because it didn't exist what we building didn't exist there were some incumbents yes still exist today but very clunky they operate based on other entities other companies uh they offer a clunky disconnected offering makes no sense that's literally why we start a remote and what we brought to market for the

first time ever was this ability to have a clean process end to end very simple very straightforward but highly flexible and tailored where you could just say I want to hire this person with these conditions want to change the contract in that way and I want to run it through this platform and I don't want to think about it I just want to run my business and work with my employees and this resonated very much I think what worked really well looking back was how simple and straightforward the messaging was there was no long spiel

to explain explain what the product was it's like this one s sentence can work from anywhere can be employed from anywhere and you get it paid from anywhere that's it it is so simple was so so powerful and I think of often we fall in a trap on our own trap of trying to make things complex more complex than they should be Simplicity always wins in every case a riser so part of as I said I was saying part of our customers came because the messaging was very simple was very straightforward and then the second

part was us reaching out to customers and we did quite a lot still do quite a lot that's how you run a business and it's the same thing actually it's a very simple process and you went through having great product and excellent service and that's it ultimately when things are simple and they're a straight line in our case one of things that propelled the Y and ey to take on this challenge was how hard this was we didn't take the same approach as the incumbents that have had been around 5 10 years we built something

from scratch we took uh we still how take that approach we took apart what means to run payroll in every single country we have a teams of experts and legal in compliance in payroll and HR that look at every single law and article and understand how can we work with it how can we build then the several layers that enable our customers to be to do something more much more simple and so we do the work so that others don't and that ability it was so hard and we saw that no one else did it

and still today no one else does it because of that and that was is part of our success because we take the heart route and we rebuild from scratch and the mark that proves you that if there's a pain that is so big and affects so many people then people are willing to pay for it and that is the key often we start with journey um and I see many projects starting this way where people have high Ambitions and of course they think that you know everyone thinks their project is the best and most successful

is going to be the most successful but if there is not enough pain around the world now people won't pay for it and so you could have the simplest the best thing ever uh with the simplest explanation but if there's not enough need on the other side or either it doesn't exist or they don't know that they have it and that's also something that we included in a way that we addressed customers that they often don't know they have this problem even today it's something that wins US tremendous amount of deals is that using a

competitor often our customers have problems they don't even know about from compliance from product from experience from service they don't even know they have it but just assume that was the way to do things until you show them that there's a completely different way of doing things and that is part of the gamechanging sort of mentality that gets you going makes a lot of sense if you go back to your early days you know at the beginning any brand doesn't have enough power to get the inbound leads in you have to go out as you

said Outreach what channels worked for you the most and what was effective about increasing your conversion rate we're very unique for one we have a very kickass domain remote.com hard to beat but something it works super well and still today Word of Mouth super powerful it's one of the most powerful things get one customer happy if they're happy they're going to talk to others about you and that is still the way to win I think it's actually the primordial way anything you can do well you can throw a lot of money in paid and paid

search and optimize your engines you can also use Outreach tools that in allow you to blast people email buy mailing list you can know that at all today people are more sophisticated the filtering tools are more sophisticated all the mail providers are starting to block all that kind of stuff you have to be vocal of course using a really good messaging makes a huge difference within your social media your social networks but having a very strong word of mouth and very happy customers initial set if you focus on making the initial customers really happy it's

literally the best invest you can possibly make what do you feel was your biggest Catalyst in terms of acquisition other than the co where did you see like the channel that helped you a lot to progress faster I know word of mouth is very sticky but you also probably raised 500 million so you've been growing much much faster than just word of mouse W absolutely inbound was always very strong remote still today and it's due to the fact that when people have need they will look for it and pay for it you also have to

learn to listen you know you need to know where to listen to and who is your bu and that enables you to channel the conferences the places you should be the people you should meet and talk to and of course you know PID search is massive you can do it in so many different ways and have been it's been studied it evolves it changes now something that is critical is that everything that we did even the company's just 5 years of age and we we're only selling for like four years because the first year we

we sold we're just building it's all outdated today you have so many automated tools based on AI that do all the things that we did manually and and so there's really no Playbook that can be used because it is all being Rewritten as we speak you have to always have the fundamentals as I said happy customers have a great product have a great service have a single simple way to talk about what you do and then you grab that and you replicate it across the different channels be it word of the mouth referrals referrals today

of course is massive due to the network effects and also all the paid engines and also fundamentally being out there talking about what you do um being vocal meeting people that today's like honestly there's no magic it's just about how you meet a need with a product amazing thank you for sharing this what's principle that you live by that has served you well on your journey I call it the rule of three I'm not sure it's a really thing I just as time passed I started to put pieces together actually there are two things that

I live by as a manager and I started as CTO and I became coo and then today president I don't really know what I do anymore but I have these two things it's like two personal Frameworks one is a rule of three rule of three tells me that of all the people you manage and today remote is is500 people across the world if you as a manager can identify three people that are your critical players if those three people can also identify there three people so on so forth this will equate to somewhere around 20

30% of your organization those 30% are the absolute core to your success the absolute core it is not okay to to be going around and telling people that they are part of the three or that is a thing that's not okay it's elitism it's going to lead to inequity bias and also people change but you have to understand that there's always a pillar of the organization a core of the organization that is responsible for making you leap the rest of the organization they're great people they will continue to make you run they will continue to

allow you to run your organization but there 's always a core of people that will make make the most absolute difference in a day-to-day of every company and need to know who they are hug them in a way not literally but make them happy so this is first rule then the second rule is what I called I'll made this up it's called single responsibility principle and I apply this from engineering days to management which is in every case that I don't know I try to unlock what I don't know what that I don't know and

I do that by trying to measure my universe and I measure my universe through doing measuring three things speed capacity and efficiency I don't know what they are but I tend to think about a pipeline of work efficiency how many things do you put on one end that come out on the other end well done speed how fast does that happen and then capacity how many can you do in parallel and so in every area be it engineering operations payroll legal sales I will look at my my universe and I'll try to measure what are

the top three speed capacity efficiency metrics that can show me how my system is running and I will evaluate my system based on that and once I know what is not working well I will only focus on that thing and once you solve that metric you replace it with the second worst metric and so you're always focusing on the top three problems that you have to solve for and once those three are solved for you'll go on to the next three and that hyper prioritizes how you do but in any system once you get rid

of the waste the system by itself is in average optimized and so I use those two things rule three and SLE responsibility princip great principles will definitely put those in the show notes on a speed of execution what's your take at remote when it comes to speed of execution is it as a priority up there or does it come after certain specific things because we've seen specifically in your Market that a lot of the competitors have raised so much money and they are attacking the market quite aggressively and at this space you need to be

fast enough so that you they don't keep compete or beat you to the client so how would you look at that approach when it comes to speed of execution direction is more important than speed always always is the hair versus The Tortoise story always it never fails it doesn't matter how fast you go it really doesn't if that's your number one value I think you got it wrong no one cares also we're in the HR space no one wants to be the hero no one wants to no one wants to show up with a newest

tool on the Block that does this faster or come on this is people's livelihood this is compliance this is legal you have to do it well you have to do it great and you have to do it in a way that represents what the future of work looks like that is what I live by Direction Over spe not speed amazing one last question what's next for remote so many things I wish I could answer this in with like an amazing road map we do have it but we've learned to grow with our customers quite a

lot we learn to grow with the market and also the funny interesting thing about the future of work that there's a lot that we don't know and so we've been very happy and fortunate to work with government institutions across the world to keep building towards that not just building but helping the world understand what the future of work looks like the future for remote as a company is continuing this growth trajectory we want to keep building the HR backbone of organizations giving the opportunity to people across the world getting them paid no matter how getting

them the best suit of tools that they can use to do their job and to managers and admins just take the load of their plate make their lives easier extend their needs and keep building and then as time progresses the future is about expansion verical but I'll leave at that for now exciting times we wish you the best of luck on your journey how can people reach you and are you hiring always hiring always very easy my name is Marcel Le I think there's another person that shares this name with me on internet and I'm

better looking or I'd like to think so but anyway very easy to reach on Twitter Marcel Li and Linkedin as well and you can always email Marcel remote.com it's very easy amazing we'll put all of these in the show notes Marcel thank you for stopping by have a great evening thank you thanks for having me thank you so much for listening to the first 100 we hope it inspired you in your your journey if you're enjoying the podcast please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes Stitcher Google play or Spotify and share it with a

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