FYI: Your voice in the video is very quiet. You really need to normalize / boost / compress it.
One thing that's easy to forget is that technology does not solve political / social problems. The big problem is that far too many people think they can run around and interrupt people at any time for any reason, and no piece of technology will solve this. If you send them to a tool that breaks their ability to interrupt, then they will figure out a way to bypass the tool.
I think it's more important to advocate publicly to be conscious of how we interrupt each other. It's very important that interrupters recognize their behavior.
One of the best ideas I’ve heard for having Slack without the pressure to keep up with it is to configure it to delete messages after a short time period. This lets you keep the live chat going with those who are around, but people know to put important notices they want others to read into some other outlet.
Ideas seem to come when their time has come, irrespective of who conjures them and/or executes them. The new waves of Team Chat evolution are interesting to watch.
Recently, Manish and his team introduced Struct[1] in their Show HN, which was a breath of fresh air in a forum-ish avatar. It is modern, sensible, and appropriate for today.
Things will eventually change, and we will move on to the next. PatchWork looks interesting. Have you thought of your pricing plan? Best of luck to the team.
While I'm in an ideation mode, I think team chats might be more effective if treated as ephemeral, just like Text or WhatsApp. They are either to be acted on or moved to a more permanent format if they deserve to be. There was a video-conferencing tool that does just that: fire up a specific URL for a room and invite whoever you want and talk, then bye-bye. But right now, team chats are trying harder and harder to replicate how people converse in person, like in a meeting.
I do hope these new waves succeed; people like to use it and use it -- I usually can get used to any tooling or patterns that the others are comfortable with.
This sounds a lot like google wave, and it failed spectacularly due to complexity and user interface, and as result a lot of friction for adoption.
How do you compare patchwork to google wave and what do you think you are doing differently?
I’ve been involved in the product development of inbox and chat interfaces, and I’m having a hard time imagining the applications of this product.
Though, I’d like to comment that there are two separate ideas that I will reflect on which are:
1) How LLM’s can be implemented to create more complex forms of content, with little to none human input. (Automatically adding context like title, summary, hashtags, images…)
2) The ranking, or algorithmic idea of changing “chat” to “posts” thus it’s concept development can evolve towards a Feed…
I wish you the best, thank you for sharing the demo and images. The UI looks great.
> Chat originally served as a way to free us from our desk by giving us the safety that if we were needed for immediate matters, people could reach us.
No, that was email. Chat was made as an ephemeral but real time medium for low-lag async communication in place of phone calls and texts. It works great for that.
> We believe it’s because chat (i.e. Slack, Teams, and similar tools) has evolved into something it wasn’t designed for.
Very true. They took chat and tried to make it email and sharepoint, but worse.
> Now it’s become a dumping ground for all communication: daily updates, product and engineering discussions, announcements, etc.
THIS is why it's bad now, not because it doesn't have enough features, but people people decided to shove everything into chat and it was never meant to do that.
> Patchwork is our attempt to solve this problem by shifting the primary communication model from group chats to feeds. Posts are made in relevant groups and each team member has a home feed personalized to them.
Sharepoint does this I'd be astounded if those features were used by even 10% of sharepoint users. No one does it because no one wants to blog at work, they want to work.
> There have been feed-based work communication products before, but they’ve often overlooked the fact that writing a post has more friction than writing a chat message, which is why people often revert back to doing everything over chat.
No, they overlooked that no one wanted to do it in the beginning. No one went to their boss and said, "Boss, I love working with my team, but I really want to BLOG at them too."
> Lastly, we do have chat on the platform, but chat looks and feels like chat. It’s meant to be used for immediate needs.
So you took out all the stuff that shouldn't be in chat and just... did that. So your chat client is smoother because you took all the crap and put it elsewhere.
I'm sorry, I could be totally wrong, but as someone outside of SV, working in companies that use these products, I don't think you have a large market. My heartfelt advice is have someone who spends a day a week looking at pivot opportunities.
I like the vision around changing how companies communicate, webpage could give more of the theory side of things as you develop the product. Didn't fully understand the typical user flow or what kinds of posts are expected (i.e how it would differ from what you put on slack or a task tracker). More thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qkpg-Bg85k
We recently replaced slack on our team with Github discussions and phone calls/texts for really timely P0 type stuff.
This seems like a similar idea with a nicer UI. I don’t really see a huge upside on the “feed” aspect, but this would probably be an improvement over slack.
After getting rid of slack I feel this huge weight lifted off me, and there are far fewer distractions for stupid shitposts and little status updates that frankly just aren’t important to look at more than once a day.
people who need to monitor a lot of channels are usually in senior/leadership layer, but one technique usually they follow is focus on a specific problem and consequently some set of specific channels for few weeks or a month and shift focus as the project/task changes
how are you thinking about capturing such dynamic decisions to choose focus area, happening outside the communication tool - like zoom or meetings etc,... algorithm can be real-time but even with data points from meetings etc,... can it be made in such a real-time?
instagram feed algo is pretty real-time but the number of unique behaviours or behaviours to people ratio is quite low. but I'm guessing in a work environment that ratio or the unique behaviours would be too high for the algo to react quickly, right?
It seems like an oversight to have no screenshots on your landing page.
I resonate with what you said about deep work, but going do-not-disturb for a bit mostly solves this problem for me on Slack.
Why name a communication app the same word a long-standing other communication app is named.
Congrats on the launch but I'm skeptical of the claims. Slack is distracting because talking to people is distracting, but also necessary. This just seems to rearrange where that happens.
Is it similar to Yammer?
Do you happen to be hiring for customer service roles?
A screenshot would be useful. I don't understand what a "ranked feed" means - who goes to lunch first? A picture speaks a thousand words.
Congrats on the launch! A couple small things: When you toggle between light and dark mode the hero section on the homepage ends up selected. Also the padding on the home icon at the top is a little funky. It looks out of line with the rest the titles
More broadly - interesting idea! I worry about there not being much utility in the space that lives between full-fledged documents and quick messages on chat. Including a demo, walkthrough or screenshots on the site would help make that gap more digestable for me.
Your design is very friendly and approachable. I appreciate the attempt to take another swing at this problem. I've been using Teams for a year now, and they are trying to do some of this same stuff, but what they missed was the key of the composing experience, being too high-stakes. Like you point out:
> they’ve often overlooked the fact that writing a post has more friction than writing a chat message, which is why people often revert back to doing everything over chat
Anyway, you have a really good idea with the LLM generated title and TLDR. I worry about not having trust in an algorithmically ranked timeline, so you might want to make that feature optional, or do a top-level tab like they did on twitter. Or give users ability to influence the rankings.
I believe Struct.ai works on a similar feeds idea
Would it be disingenuous to suggest this reminds me of a changelog with an API? I do think there's room for that, especially with taking changelog notes and turning them into something public. The product feels a little less focused in that vein though, so I'm not sure.
"It feels like the very tool that was meant to liberate us instead made us beholden to its pings."
same as it ever was. email is still abused as an notification system, for example. chat was destined to repeat some of those mistakes.
I believe Google Wave was a similar product.
The team must be stellar to be able to get fund with this kind of ideas...
From the video:
> The homefeed is ranked specifically for me, so it shows me what it thinks is most important for my work first
How can it really know this? It feels like this could fall in the trap that social media has, where there is no common shared experience because everyone has a unique feed based on opaque rules. Not only does this lead to fractured bubbles, but it's hard to know what you're missing, why, and how to "train" the algorithm to do better.
I agree that chat solutions tend to overwhelm users, but there is a huge advantage to everyone being able to go to a channel and see the same things sorted by time. Does Patchwork still support viewing a feed chronologically?