Leaving the Base Camp

Ready to bootstrap your online business? Looking for growth opportunities? Learn how to enter the global marketplace on a shoestring budget from the CEO of one of the largest global remote-first companies.

The world went remote in 2020, but Ilma Tiki, co-founder and CEO of The Remote Company has been leading her remote-first company for a decade. The Remote Company includes MailerLite, MyZenTeam, Ycode, MailerSend, MailerCheck and Partnero, six companies with the shared mission of enabling ordinary people around the world to start and grow extraordinary businesses.

In Leaving the Base Camp Ilma Tiki shares her personal journey as an entrepreneur, businesswoman, and manager of a company with employees in more than forty countries who meet face-to-face only once a year. She discusses marketing without a budget, mistakes made and how to avoid them, and how creativity and a multicultural environment can position a team for growth. The company’s story began in 2010 as the co-founders headed to London to pitch their idea for a new type of email marketing company to investors. It was the year of Pinterest and Facebook, and few saw a future in email marketing. They needed a new plan. They decided to focus on investing in their clients, rather than searching for investors.

Leaving the Base Camp is an authoritative and straightforward guidebook for how The Remote Company was built into a successful global enterprise with millions of users around the world. Learn how to stay motivated and motivate your team, how to navigate the global hiring market, and how to unite a culturally diverse international staff behind a shared mission. Whether you’re just getting started or ready to scale toward IPO, this book will show you the way forward in a remote-first world.

About the author:

Ilma Tiki is co-founder and CEO of The Remote Company, a network of remote-first tech companies with a singular mission to enable ordinary people around the world to start and grow extraordinary businesses. The company began with MailerLite, an easy-to-use SAAS platform for building professional marketing campaigns. In their first year, revenue was only $1,962; three years later, they hit their first million. In 2022 the company was sold for over 90 million USD.

Ilma uses her experience from working in the international banks and art business to question how to build company culture and global businesses. She attributes her team’s success to remote working and being very intentional about building a culture of risk taking, creativity and freedom. In eight years, a team of 140 people from 30 different countries developed ways to connect remotely, communicate asynchronously, and refine team events to be meaningful and engaging.