[_lex]

Hi Soneca - thanks for your feedback and for giving it a shot.

I think your hesitation about sharing may be linked to the fact that sharing the brainstorm feels like it's real-time, so to share with your coworkers would involve breaking their flow and dragging them into your current brainstorm. That explanation seems to fit with you not wanting to change the mood - am I correct in this assumption?

I'm really glad you liked your nudges - we were initially not sure people would "get" them. We're a little worried about async brainstorming, because a lot of the real value from brainstorming comes from stealing your coworkers' ideas and building on them - so you make their ideas better. Async makes this more difficult.

I love your idea about email being the conduit. I think i'd like to build on that :), and that with tools like mailgun, it's not going to be terribly hard. Thanks a lot for this 3rd paragraph - a lot of actionable ideas here.

Thanks for your support - we hope to make it into something awesome too :).

[soneca]

Your first assumption is partially correct. But I think the problem is there are two invitations at a time: i) please join me at my brainstorming and ii) please use this tool for it.

The invitation i) is inherent of the purpouse, altough is totally acceptable only with coworkers. If I want to brainstorm a startup idea with random friends, this invitation may bother my friends - even if they get that they don't need to answer immediately.

The invitation ii) is not inherent, is marketing. It is a barrier to share. You must have good, cool, smart way to introduce the invited people to the tool. Your copywriting will make a lot of differencehere.

You can note that both problems are solved if the tool is already a feature inside a team management tool - only coworkers and using a tool they already know.

ABout the nudges, I guess you have to find just the right time to use them, and also work hard in making it attractive to users, so they want to "play with it".

And about the "async", actually I used the word wrongly. What I am, the tool must keep the chronological order of a brainstorm, in order to one improve each other idea. But the advantage here is that it allows people do it remotely and free from a time restriction. I will read all the ideas there are coming, but I will send mine whenever I choose to. It still a conversation, but it allows more intermissions than a face-to-face meeting.

[_lex]

Interesting.

We're targeting business problems and coworkers since workers have better incentives to contribute (compared to friends), and businesses can see tangible cash value from being more creative.

The thought was that if a coworker sent you an invite/email saying - "I want your ideas on this", it'd be hard for you to not contribute. But I'm hearing that it breaks the work flow too much to expect people to leave email and their current task management tool to use our tool whenever they want to brainstorm. Is that because it feels like they're spamming their friends/coworkers, or because their friends/coworkers don't necessarily want to learn to use another gadget/app? Would it be different if we emailed your coworkers on your behalf saying "soneca just brainstormed x" - want to add your ideas and help her?

I think integrating into a team management tool is a great idea - or maybe directly into gmail like streak (www.streak.com).

Async definitely was what we were going for - busy people want to brainstorm with you and contribute ideas, but it's impossible to get 5 of them in a room at the same time. MonsterLumen should help with that.

[soneca]

I like the way you worded the email here "soneca just...". I think you will have to test a lot your copywriting, it looks to me that this will make all the differece in the world for your product.

When/if you implement it using email tell me, I would love to try it on a real world situation.

[_lex]

We definitely will.