How Remote Tools Built a Community Hub for Remote Workers

Who built it, and what they built

Hrishikesh Pardeshi co-founded Remote Tools with Suvansh and Karthik. The business is based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, started in October 2018, and has a team of five.

Remote Tools serves remote workers who want to discuss, learn, and grow. It combines several standalone pieces: a front page where makers post remote-first products, a weekly newsletter called The Remote Weekly, a Remote Working Hub with original stories and podcasts, and an invite-only community space.

Where the idea came from

The idea came out of Flexiple, where the founders' tech team was geographically distributed. Each time they hit a remote-work challenge, they searched for tools to solve it, and found the process exhausting because no central, reviewed directory existed for distributed teams.

They built the first version themselves: a repository of more than 100 handpicked tools and resources across more than 20 categories. It was well received and revealed what else the remote community wanted, so a second version followed where makers could share and market their products to a relevant audience.

How they built the first version

The first version was content-heavy by design. The team manually analysed and reviewed over 100 tools across over 20 categories, organising the data in Google Sheets before turning it into a static site with an interactive sidebar and a category-tile homepage.