#245 - Sarah Hawley, CEO Growmotely - on running a remote-first business

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to redefine how we experience work. My guest is Sarah Hawley, CEO of Growmotely. Leave a comment or a question for Sarah or Ton. Sarah Hawley is a serial entrepreneur and investor in startups, having founded eight companies since 2009. She's personally fueled by a passion for challenging the status quo of how we work, conscious culture and leadership, community, diversity, and equality, and living life on one's own terms.  She's recognized as the IFA Thought Leader of the Year. Sarah was also named as one of Melbourne’s Top 100 most influential, inspiring, and creative citizens by The Age and listed in the Top 50 Female Entrepreneurs under 40 by Shoestring. She has completed the Entrepreneurial Master Program at MIT and holds a Bachelor of Business and several diplomas. In August 2020, in the middle of the Pandemic, she founded Growmotely, an All-in-one platform for growing your remote-first company. Its mission: Redefining how we experience work by bringing culture-first companies and professionals together across the world to do great things.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Sarah to my podcast. We explore what's broken in getting remote work to work. Sarah share's her vision about what it's really like to create a remote-first business - and what needs to happen for it to come to fruition. She elaborates on the product strategy lessons she learned and what it took to bring her solution to the market in order to gain traction and start a movement. Last but not least, she explains why she dropped the idea of being venture-backed. Here's one quote from her I see it all the time people reach out to me. I see it on LinkedIn, where there's just a high level of frustration because companies are advertising remote jobs, and people are applying for them only to find out that it's remote, but you have to live in this country or this city. And so it's actually excluding most of the world from applying for that job. And people are frustrated because those of us who really are for remote work and really understand it in the context that I am talking about here today is: It's anywhere work. And it's equal opportunity for anyone in the world to access employment opportunities. And that's the world that I want to create. During this interview, you will learn four things: What's needed beyond a strong vision to start a movement?  Why she opted to focus on organic growth through word of mouth instead of outbound sales? What she did differently to achieve a 48% referral rate (and growing) Why she pulled her business back to the mission and away from too much focus on growth numbers For more information about the guest from this week: Sarah Hawley Website Growmotely Leave a comment or a question for Sarah or Ton. Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Get my free, 2 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices