$7.5M Business, 6 People, €30/Month Infrastructure: How La Nao Did It | Standard IT

How we actually run La Nao

By Rodrigo — Owner & CEO, La Nao

La Nao is an e-commerce company. We are six people spread across different parts of the world, sourcing and selling products across 20+ countries. Collaboration is genuinely hard at that scale — not because the work is complicated, but because coordinating across time zones, languages, and locations means information gets lost constantly if your tools let it.

We tried to solve this the normal way. BaseCamp, GitLab issues, Google Docs, a few others. Each one worked for something and failed at something else. We kept adding tools to patch the gaps, and the gaps kept moving.

At some point I stopped looking for better tools and started asking a different question: what if the problem isn't the tools, but the category of tools? That's when we switched to the setup described on this site. I want to be specific about what actually changed, because the benefits weren't always the ones I expected.

Email: our single source of context

Initially, I was skeptical that email would be the big win. It seemed too obvious. But it has been, by a wide margin, the most valuable part of the change.

The reason is search. When 99% of your company's decisions happen in email, you can find the context for anything in seconds. Not "I think someone mentioned that in Slack six months ago" but actually find it, with the full thread, who said what, and when. That alone has saved us from re-litigating decisions, from onboarding confusion, from the particular frustration of knowing a decision was made somewhere but not being able to locate it.

The other thing is ubiquity. Every person on our team uses a different device, a different operating system, and has different preferences for how they like to work. Because email is a standard, nobody is forced into a single interface. One person uses Apple Mail, another uses Thunderbird, another accesses it through a web client. They all see the same emails. No one needs to "log into the team tool."

Offline access has also mattered more than I expected. We travel a lot, and there are more situations than you'd think where connectivity is unreliable. Places like airports, boats, rural areas, early mornings in hotels with bad wifi. Having your entire company history available offline, with fast local search, is something you don't appreciate until the moment you need it and it's there.

For an e-commerce business, there's a specific benefit worth naming: all the context between internal team discussions and supplier correspondence lives in the same place. When I'm preparing for a negotiation with a manufacturer, I can search my email and see both what my team discussed internally and the entire history of our communication with that supplier, side by side. No switching between tools.

Spreadsheets: the Situation Room

We tried a lot of project management tools. Each one was good at the thing it was designed for and awkward at everything else. Spreadsheets turned out to be better at most things because they don't have opinions about how you should work.

We have a lot of sheets tracking different parts of the business. But the one that runs our day-to-day is what we call the Situation Room. The columns are simple: Date, Owner, Description, Goal Closure Date, Comments, Reference 1, Reference 2.

The reference columns are the important part. They link directly to the email threads relevant to each item. So the Situation Room is the overview, and the emails are the detail. You can look at any open item and immediately find the full context with one click. No copying information between systems, no "see Notion for details."

It sounds simple because it is. That's the point. The tool doesn't get in the way of the work.

Calendars: reminders that reach the right people

Most teams use calendars only for meetings. We use ours for reminders and notifications too, and it's changed how we handle time-sensitive items.

The setup is simple: we have a dedicated calendar just for reminders. When something needs follow-up, like a supplier deadline, a payment or a decision that needs revisiting we create an all-day event with a description that includes the subject or a link to the relevant email thread. It shows up in everyone's calendar on the right day, with context, without anyone having to remember to set a reminder manually. All using standard tools which are available everywhere.

What makes this better than reminders inside a specific app is the same thing that makes email better: it works everywhere. The calendar works on every device, offline, with whatever app each person prefers. Including outside parties.

We add suppliers as attendees on relevant reminders. If a shipment confirmation is due on a specific date, the supplier gets a calendar invite. It's the most hands-off follow-up mechanism I've found. No email to draft, no follow-up to schedule. They...