Remote Work Life Podcast
At Remote Work Life, we spotlight successful location-independent entrepreneurs and established remote work professionals. Our interviews highlight their journeys and growth strategies, and their inspiring stories offer ideas for your entrepreneurial and professional ventures and reveal insights on thriving while working remotely.
Remote Work Life Podcast
$120k a year in office space to fully remote
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An empty office bill forced a hard choice: keep paying for space no one used or redirect that money to build a stronger, truly remote company. They chose the second path. Today we walk through how a hackathon project became a profitable SaaS, why closing two offices unlocked momentum, and how annual retreats replaced rent as our most effective culture investment.
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They were spending$120,000 a year on offices that nobody used, and it forced a decision that would shape everything that came next. Hey, if we haven't met, I'm Alex Wilson Campbell's AI twin. Alex is the creator and host of the Remote Work Life podcast, where we spotlight the remote companies and location-independent founders and leaders shaping the future of business and work. Alex personally researches, writes, and edits every episode you hear here. And I'm his AI voice, so you don't miss the updates, even if you can't get to the studio. Today's focus follows a pair of founders who built a global business without a headquarters and without taking a single venture dollar on the way to 3 million in annual recurring revenue. We'll move straight into the detail of how their remote first model took shape and what changed about the way their team works day to day. Slobodan Stoyanovic and Lav Krnobnya began working together in 2011 at Cloud Horizon, a mobile development agency based between Montreal and Belgrade. Vacation Tracker, the company many people now know them for, actually started as an internal hackathon project in late 2016. It wasn't positioned as a new business. It wasn't even something they expected to continue. It sat quietly on their website until one email changed everything. A potential customer reached out asking when the product would launch. That outside signal pushed them to test whether real demand existed. They decided to act on it. Cloud Horizon financed the early losses, functioning almost like an internal backer until Vacation Tracker could support itself. Although they launched publicly in late 2016, it took around nine months to welcome the first paying customer. Before 2020, the team worked in a hybrid pattern. They kept offices in Belgrade and Montreal, meeting there on Mondays and Thursdays, while leaving the rest of the week flexible. They operated with a small team at the time, growing gradually as the product gained traction. Then, during the first pandemic year, something very practical became impossible to ignore. The offices were empty, yet the annual bill continued, roughly$120,000 for that year alone. That spend, with no corresponding benefit to the team or the business, became the turning point. They chose to close the offices permanently and redirect the money into annual team retreats. The locations changed over time, including Greece, Spain, and the Serbian mountains. Alongside those retreats came a distributed hiring model. Rather than pulling talent from one place, the team expanded across six countries. Everything from engineering to marketing operates from wherever people live. As the business matured, they also shifted leadership. In September 2025, they brought in a new CEO, Martin Gordeaux, to lead the next stage of scale. Both founders remain active, with Slobodan as CTO and LAV in a senior position. Cloud Horizon, the original agency that gave them their launch pad, wound down in 2022 so they could focus entirely on the SaaS product. Inside the company, the working model is defined by goals rather than hours. The only fixed schedule applies to customer support. Everything else is anchored in outcomes, which allows people in different time zones to work without friction. They keep cameras on meetings as a non-negotiable part of their culture. That consistency helps maintain a shared sense of presence across locations. Their marketing team followed a similar pattern of organic growth. They hired a junior content leader early, someone who developed into head of marketing and content over time rather than arriving fully formed from outside. The annual retreats replaced the previous office expenses and now act as the primary moments for team connection. The details vary with each location, but the theme is the same. Create space for people who work together all year to meet in person, reset, and return to distributed work with more clarity about how they collaborate. All of this comes from two simple conditions. First, they built the business without external investment, so their decisions had to be grounded in sustainable revenue. Second, they were already working partly remotely when the pandemic made the hybrid pattern unworkable. They didn't frame remote work as an experiment, it became the most practical option, and then the foundation for their global model. For remote knowledge workers listening, the story illustrates something straightforward. When a team moves from time-oriented expectations to goal-oriented coordination, the rhythm of work changes. Decisions shift from when are you online to what did we move forward? People can design their own routines without sinking to a central building or local time zone. Hiring moves away from post-code boundaries. And the moments that matter most for alignment become intentional rather than incidental. The overall pattern is clear. Vacation Tracker functions as a distributed company without a central office, with employees across six countries and customers distributed even more widely. Their founders shaped the company gradually, adjusting where necessary and keeping the financial model simple enough to remain profitable without outside capital. That's it for today on the Remote WorkLife podcast. Before you head off alongside the podcast, Alex is building a small beta platform that pulls together senior-level, growth-focused, remote roles directly from employers' websites, not job boards. It's designed for experienced operators in sales, marketing, strategy, and finance. If you want early access as a founding member, you'll find the link in the show notes or via Alex's LinkedIn profile. You'll also get bonus content featuring founders, leaders, and CEOs from location independent and remote businesses.
