Writing and structuring knowledge: BloomJoy's basis for collaboration

Part of the Y Combinator batch Winter 2018, BloomJoy launched in February. Currently a team of 12, BloomJoy is a content syndication and creation platform that turns social media influencers into multimedia brands. Read on to hear about how Jason, founder, and CEO:

• Builds a distributed team and works with freelance creatives from all over the world
• Creates a knowledge base capable of scaling with his team

A distributed team in sync

The BloomJoy team is split between the product, organization, and creative side. They're also literally distributed across the US, working in different cities and time zones.

Distributed does not mean scattered in the way they work. Entirely the opposite actually: they maintain team cohesion by seeing each other once a month, having weekly meetings and Jason has weekly office hours to stay available to everyone when needed.

Most of all, Jason explained that one of their core values is collaborative decision-making: "We believe that you should always think about how what you do impacts the rest of the team. No one pushes things independently: everyone is involved in every decision-making process."This works because everyone is in the know about what's happening and what actions are about to take place."

Building an internal wiki: the basis of their collaboration

One of the main things that's essential to make remote collaboration efficient and ensure everyone actually is in the know is to write things down, quite simply. "As a founder, I'm always coming up with loads of ideas. Having the habit of writing them down for the rest of the team makes it much more digestible," explains Jason. More generally, collaborating in a place that focuses on the essential your team needs is a huge must according to Jason: "I have an issue with Slack because things get lost in feeds, there's lots of chit-chat and knowledge becomes easily missable."

So when Jason found Slite, it felt like the perfect place to keep his team's internal knowledge base updated. In fact, when I asked him why he believes being a remote team works, his first answer was "having a wiki for educating and keeping everyone on the same page."

As a product, the Bloomjoy team finds it more accessible to navigate across content than in Google Docs and the interface much more user-friendly than Evernote. The easy formatting in Slite means they have their internal wiki in Slite but also their task lists, client meetings notes, and it's also where they build their brand bible to share publicly with the freelancers they work with.

"Slite makes it easy to see what's not relevant anymore to your team and archive it. The interface is not overwhelming for your team and ensures that your knowledge base is always up to date," concluded Jason when I asked him what Slite is for his team, in a nutshell.

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