Yonder Sunset

By: Jeff Robbins

In 2013, I started Yonder as a conference for leaders of distributed companies to come together and talk about best practices for remote work. In 2016, Yonder stepped out from under the Lullabot umbrella and became a company of its own. I hired a few people and we started publishing articles and a podcast to advocate for remote work by helping company leaders understand the unique needs of remote teams.

We didn’t talk about how to find freelance remote work so you can work from the beach in Bali, dangling a carrot out for those wanting to find employment nirvana. Instead, we talked pragmatically about how to create jobs and expand the job market for all remote workers. Yonder was mission-based right from the beginning – built on the magical experience I’d had building a remote team at Lullabot. Remote work is better work. It requires more communication, trust, respect, empathy, and intentionality than we expect of conventional workplaces. But these are good things to have –  building stronger, more connected company cultures with better employee retention and job satisfaction.

As a company, Yonder started with a mission. I figured that we would come up with a business model as we went along. Advertising? Job boards? Consulting? More conferences? We experimented with all of them. Some were promising. Some were appealing. But in the venn diagram, there was not a lot of overlap between the two. We built a mailing list. I talked to a LOT of great people on the podcast. We ran an in-person conference. We ran an online conference. A lot of it was good. But none of it quite had that spark that it needed to blossom into something great.

The intrinsic motivation (aka the mission) was there. But the extrinsic ones just never came along.

Then COVID hit. All of a sudden, there was a split. On the one hand, the entire world needed information about remote work. On the other, Yonder’s mission and advocacy now seemed a bit naive. Remote work pundits came out of the woodwork. While once I’d struggled to find experts to interview on the podcast, now we were inundated by hundreds of PR people representing thousands of remote work “experts” who wanted to be heard. The world of remote work became a cacophony and I didn’t much see the point in trying to yell over everyone.

So just like that the intrinsic motivation was gone too.

Meanwhile, since my Lullabot exit I have been building my business coaching practice and it is very rewarding. I can tell that I’m helping people. There’s a proper exchange of commerce for services. I’ve got both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators!

So in August, I put Yonder on hold. We stopped posting new content to the website and the mailing list. And I haven’t missed it much. I feel like we did some great things with Yonder. But since putting it on hold, I feel like I’m onto even greater things.

We’re leaving all of our content up for the foreseeable future. We’re getting better traffic than we’ve ever seen. I still love talking about remote work. And who knows, maybe the planets will align for a working venn diagram in the future. But for now, I’m onto other things!

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