Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

The idea of a distributed team sends a chill down many founders' spines.

They envision stalled progress, inefficient collaboration, and fragile lines of communication.

And in the early stages, that's often the reality. There's a steep learning curve when it comes to working across time zones.

But with the right structure and clarity, that same system can become a huge advantage. You can build a company that never stops working—even when you sleep.

Let me show you how I do it (and how you can, too). 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

How to Build a 24-Hour Business

A framework for making a distributed team your company's competitive advantage.

There's no sugar coating it: When you first start building a distributed team, time zones will work against you.

You send a message at 4 p.m. Eastern, and your engineer in Europe is already asleep. By the time they respond the next morning, you've moved on to something else.

The whole cycle repeats, and progress suffers because of it.

Pretty soon, you're dreaming about the continuous back-and-forth you had when everyone sat in the same room.

But think about this like paying your distributed work dues. It sucks early on, but the cost is front-loaded. It only gets better from here.

From Constraint to Catalyst

As your company grows, time zones stop being a constraint and become a catalyst for growth.

The key to this transformation is identifying your "dead zones."

For most U.S. companies, this is the time from around 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern. It's 7 hours where nothing moves unless someone pulls an all-nighter.

The solution? Find talent in time zones that cover those hours. Australia works perfectly for this window.

But this only works if you design for it. You can't just hire someone in Sydney and expect them to figure it out.

The Talent Standard

Global hiring isn't an excuse to chase cheaper labor. Done right, it's an incredible talent unlock.

To build a genuinely great company, you need top 0.01% engineers. These are the kind of people you can hand something to and know it will get done right.

But when you're hiring in your small hometown, you're limited to a handful of people who might be great. And chances are they're already doing something else.

A distributed model unlocks a literal world of potential candidates.

But quantity does not necessarily lead to quality. This structure only works if everyone meets a higher standard of autonomy and communication.

You Can't Manage the World Yourself

Here's where many founders go wrong: they try to manage a global team themselves.

I hate to break it to you, but that's never going to work.

I'm an early morning person—like, really early morning. I often get started at around 3 a.m. But that means by 4 p.m., I'm totally spent. I'm ready to log off, and I physically can't be the one communicating with someone whose workday is just starting.

Here's where a management layer with overlapping hours comes in.

This is someone who can receive the baton, clarify next steps, and keep the work moving forward.

The handoff shouldn't be a formal meeting or a comprehensive report. No one has time for that. You need to get together and brain dump just enough context for the next person to pick up where you're leaving off.

Now, your communication has to be freaking on point for this to work. If it's not, things will unravel fast.

But when you build these handoffs into the fabric of how your company operates, they become habitual—and incredibly powerful.

Your Digital Office

Just like an in-person team needs office space, distributed teams need a digital office.

For us, it's Slack. For others, it's Basecamp.

The tool doesn't matter as much as treating it like the primary workspace where everything important happens—and hiring people talented enough to use it that way.

Everything lives there. Yes, that means status updates. But also the reasoning and context behind decisions. It should be a one-stop shop for the people who need to pick up your work 8 hours later.

Remember, someone on another continent needs to be able to see what you did AND why.

It may sound challenging, but when you set up this environment correctly, communicating across the world is no more complicated than communicating across an office.

What This Looks Like When You Get It Right

The most gratifying part of building a system like this is stepping back and watching it run.

I recently led a 9-month software project for a client in the oil and gas space.

We built their entire application vision into reality, and I wrote 0 lines of code.

The team that did the work was distributed across Europe and South America. Each person owned their part of the cycle and communicated seamlessly with the rest of the team.

Of course, I did some early design work and checked in periodically to make sure everything stayed on track. But the actual building? That happened without me touching any code.

The product was delivered on time and production-ready.

I couldn't have been prouder.

BEFORE YOU GO…

It takes discipline, documentation, and exceptional clarity to make this "24-hour business" work.

But once it's running, you've created something rare: a business that never sleeps.

As someone who's been in your shoes and gotten to the other side, trust me.

It's worth the effort.

Talk soon,

Chris.