My mood would definitely drop if I have to answer questions about my mood while I am coding. I see this tool as more corporate-jerkery oriented instead of helping to be more productive. And I can't stop thinking this HN entry was kind of forged since the 3 out of 5 cheerful comments here were done by green created-1-hour ago users. But of course, I can be wrong.
Fair point on the distraction bit, and I hate it too! Kaapi sends two notifications a week and if your Slack notifications are off, you wont get any notification from app too :) Maybe we have some improvement areas on this topic. Will think about it more!
I do disagree on the corporate-jerkery bit. 100% of current users (454 active this week) work in tech startups. Most managers use us to get agenda points for their upcoming 1-on-1s..
On the last bit --> Yup, I sent my weekly newsletter a few minutes ago and did tell users to give us HN feedback on how we can do better! :)
I think that to succeed in your business you should poll on management, because I think every developer on earth would roll eyes (and probably hate you) when proposed insistently* into participating on giving such feedback by some wanky manager.
*should read: "participate or it will impact negatively in your performance review".
> did tell users to give us HN feedback
I am not an admin or police of this place, but be careful because it might be against the guidelines[0].
>> Can I ask people to upvote my submission?
>> No...
>> Can I ask people to comment on my submission?
>> No....
Ugh this certainly sucks. I disagree with the rule that you can’t ask for feedback on your product! But fair I guess, considering that it has lots of potentials of misuse.
Will remember this next time. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction
Creator here. I have spent a decade in startups now. Almost always, the best teams had fantastic feedback culture & systems.
So when I learned to code last year, I really wanted to build an app for this :) The Slack app checkins with your team once a week, and collects the answers for you in a simple format. You can even run daily standups! All within Slack.
Had to do some interesting hacks to make a Slack UI - it even has a bar graph using Slack formatting tips :) We have a serverless stack (AWS Lambda) and Python on backend, and Aurora database with a Psql engine for autoscaling.
I really believe that the answer to a good remote culture is surprisingly simple - listen to your people, and take action on the feedback. Trivia nights and Zoom parties come later.
Congrats on the launch! Curious about your coding journey. You mentioned that it took you 1.5 years of coding on weekends, but would you also share the courses/tools/communities you used?
Hey Aditya,
Congratulations for the launch. Glad to see you here. Been using Kaapi for a two weeks and have already filled the feedback loop I wasn't able to do for some time. Dead simple to use and works better than calls.
It was a good MVP to begin with. Slack abstracts away a lot of other head ache for us e.g. we dont have any frontend UI - we just give formatted JSON outputs to Slack API and they parse it for us!