| > 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. |