[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Patchwork (YC W24) - Team communication b...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Patchwork (YC W24) - Team communication based on feeds,
not chat
Hey HN! We're Nikki and Dhruhin, co-founders of Patchwork. We're
building a communication tool for teams that lets you stay in sync
while at the same time staying in flow. It's centered around a
ranked feed instead of chat. Edit: as requested, here are some
screenshots: - Feed: https://imgur.com/a/bvH7ypQ - Post Creation:
https://imgur.com/a/HENe15A, Chat: https://imgur.com/a/MVyVykY.
Over the last several years, we've noticed that it's getting
increasingly difficult to stay in flow. We believe it's because
chat (i.e. Slack, Teams, and similar tools) has evolved into
something it wasn't designed for. 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. Now it's
become a dumping ground for all communication: daily updates,
product and engineering discussions, announcements, etc. Both of us
still reminisce about the days of in-office work, before Slack
became mainstream, where everyone abided by the headphone rule--the
unwritten pact that headphones meant someone was in deep work and
not to bother them unless you really needed to. Compared to then,
the onus has now shifted to be on us to determine which chats are
urgent and should take us out of flow vs. which messages can be
responded to later. It feels like the very tool that was meant to
liberate us instead made us beholden to its pings. 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. The feed algorithm evaluates each post's relevance and
urgency based on a bunch of factors, including the post's content,
user's role, ongoing projects, and recent interactions. Our goal is
to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio with our feed's algorithm
so we can surface the most important information first. When you're
not in flow or in between meetings, you can check the feed to stay
in sync. 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. We're combating
this by using LLMs to create a better writing experience (ie.
generate title and tl;dr, simplify selected content, change the
tone, etc.). As a product team ourselves, we know that much of our
work happens on different platforms. We're building integrations
with the likes of Github, Linear, Figma, GSuite etc. Having all of
this activity from different platforms also rolling into our feeds
allows us to stay in sync with all the different work being done on
our team instead of having to check various sources of data.
Lastly, we do have chat on the platform, but chat looks and feels
like chat. It's meant to be used for immediate needs. Here's a
demo of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3rmSjNjDw
Since it's a team communication product, it's hard to use it in
single player mode, so we don't have a "try it now" link to jump
straight in. But you're welcome to email us at
hackernews@atpatchwork.com and we'll onboard your team. The
product is still early with a basic feed, a few integrations, and
simple LLM assisted post creation, but the main flow is already
there, so if the message resonates with you, we'd love for you to
give it a try. More importantly, we'd love to hear your ideas
about team communication and getting it back to working _for_
people, not _at_ them! https://www.atpatchwork.com/
Author : shahflow
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-03-27 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
| colordrops wrote:
| I believe Google Wave was a similar product.
| dhruhin wrote:
| Definitely, we think Google Wave got a lot right but was too
| early.
| mihaichiorean wrote:
| or like https://www.workplace.com/ from a company called Meta
| dhruhin wrote:
| Nikki and I actually met at Meta and we really enjoyed using
| Workplace. When we tried using it with just us two, it fell
| short and wasn't built for small product teams (ie. newsfeed
| ranking, integrations with tools in our workflow).
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| That's very interesting since right away after looking at
| the demo I thought about how it reminded me of workplace in
| mechanics. I'm wondering what exactly you see as a value
| proposition of Patchwork over Workplace since for teams
| under a certain small size both are probably overkill but
| otherwise i see they solve a similar problem in a similar
| way :))
| shahflow wrote:
| We both still think Workplace was a magical product.
| Unfortunately, because it was a direct fork of Facebook's
| codebase, it was never really built from the beginning
| with work in mind and is very much built for very large
| companies. Patchwork was built from the beginning with
| product teams in mind, so you'll see everything from our
| integrations to builtin workflows are much more geared
| towards that.
| toddmorey wrote:
| I've always wondered how this product was doing & if there
| was any traction. I've yet to meet a (non-meta) org using it.
| shahflow wrote:
| I believe they have some very large companies running on it
| like McDonalds. Statsig also runs on Workplace if I'm not
| mistaken
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| I was at a company that used it and it was pretty fine.
| Especially since it has the same patterns as regular
| facebook it was fairly easy to use for a lot of newcomers.
|
| I think it might have been dropped for being too expensive,
| the per seat cost was significant.
|
| I also have a workplace account in one nonprofit society
| and it's also pretty cool to be used there.
| sirtimbly wrote:
| 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.
| shahflow wrote:
| Thanks! We really think a key part is driving down the cost of
| creating high value information content. LLMs can help with
| removing friction in creation in many ways but also improve
| readability for consumption! That's a fair point on getting the
| algorithm right for what everyone wants. We definitely will
| have the ability to switch to chronological but it's important
| we think through other ways to sort and filter through that
| information.
| stevage wrote:
| I wonder if this would be useful for one team I'm in where
| most members are in Vietnam with fairly poor English. They
| seem to have very high friction for writing issues, and
| resort to chat for...almost everything.
|
| So maybe big opportunity for offshore workers?
| shahflow wrote:
| Definitely. Chat is often seen as easier communication
| because it's more forgiving but not all communication
| should be on chat. We've seen LLMs really help to have
| clearer communication for non-native english speakers which
| pushes towards not having an over reliance on chat.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| 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.
| shahflow wrote:
| Agreed, we've been heads down on building product; we'll update
| our landing page with screenshots.
|
| Focus blocks are a must for getting focus time. Do not disturb
| on Slack is definitely one way to do it.
| shahflow wrote:
| We added screenshots to both the post and landing page. Thanks
| for the feedback!
| phailhaus wrote:
| 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?
| shahflow wrote:
| You can definitely view the feed chronologically as well.
| There's also notifications for things that you shouldn't miss.
| For the algorithm, we can use a variety of signals (post's
| content, relationship to author, interactions with groups and
| related posts) to surface posts we think are valuable for you
| to see first but definitely agree on the difficulty of building
| an one-size-fits-all solution. We're thinking through how to
| let users adjust their feed sorting preferences.
| ckluis wrote:
| I'd love to talk to you about the software. ckluis [@ googles
| email].com
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| 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.
| shahflow wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback on the website. We'll definitely take a
| look and add screenshots and demos to that as well. There's a
| demo in the HN post if you're interested.
| allanmacgregor wrote:
| 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?
| shahflow wrote:
| Google wave definitely got a lot of things right but we agree
| the UI was confusing and they tried to do a lot all at once.
| For Patchwork, we've definitely kept in mind ease of use and
| standard paradigms as we've built the product and also really
| utilizing LLMs where they're helpful (i.e. summarizations for
| catching new people up).
| timwis wrote:
| 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.
| toddmorey wrote:
| Oh that's very smart & as a bonus, the free plan does exactly
| that (only 30-day history)
| shahflow wrote:
| Some larger companies are doing this with their chats (though
| for longer than 30 days) and it has forced people to put more
| things in docs. Unfortunately, the docs aren't easy to find
| later either.
| stevage wrote:
| Yeah it's a weird benefit of the free plan for low traffic
| teams. You can't use slack as the primary communication because
| some people may never see it.
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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.
| shahflow wrote:
| Agreed. It was an oversight and we're adding that in. We do
| have a demo on the HN Launch if you're interested in seeing
| more.
| dang wrote:
| We added a few to the text above. Thanks!
| usernamed7 wrote:
| I believe Struct.ai works on a similar feeds idea
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39557188
| shahflow wrote:
| It's great to see other people are seeing the problem too.
| Definitely validates the space. We're a bit different in that
| we see Patchwork's home page as the overview of everything
| going on in your team both on and off platform.
| causal wrote:
| 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.
| shahflow wrote:
| Thanks! Agreed that talking to people is on a whole distracting
| but necessary. We think the problem is that not all daily
| updates, design and eng discussions and announcements need to
| be immediately talked about. The problem with chat is it's a
| time/recency based system. Patchwork attempts to separate out
| immediate discussions vs async instead of all of it being in
| chat.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| stevage wrote:
| How do you bypass a tool like this for a remote worker?
|
| There is literally no way anyone can interrupt me when I'm
| working, unless they are already in my house.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| They claim they can't work any more, unless they get this one
| piece of crucial information from you. And your boss must
| ensure that you reply to them, when they need to. Ultimately,
| if done cleverly enough, you will look like a bad employee
| long term, unless you give in.
|
| Again, tools can help modulate the above behavior and even
| build norms. But ultimately, they only work if everyone
| agrees to the same set of social norms.
| vegas wrote:
| Enforcing said appropriate social norms is a big part of
| the reason there is management in the first place. However
| it means that 1) Management has to be technically competent
| enough to understand the things being communicated about.
| 2) Management has to be motivated to enforce appropriate
| social norms. These are both pretty difficult to achieve in
| practice.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I feel this is a key thing that makes chat work really well
| for some remote workers and terribly for others: what's the
| expectation of responsiveness to chat?
|
| For example, if you feel you need to respond to any DM
| (either implicitly due to company culture or explicitly
| because your boss has brought it up as a complaint about
| you), then slack _is_ a huge interruption. You probably feel
| the need to have intrusive notifications enabled and /or a
| bouncing dock icon indicating new messages.
|
| On the other hand, if the norm at your company is "slack is
| async so expect a response in 2-3 business hours," then yeah
| - it's rarely, if ever, interrupting.
| shahflow wrote:
| Thanks! We'll boost the voice and re-upload the video. Agreed
| that technology doesn't solve the social issues at play and
| unfortunately policing behavior is hard. We think Patchwork can
| at least help the problem by having an alternative form of
| communicating rather than just chat. Then at least people can
| point interruptors to the tool and nudge them to use it.
| oooyay wrote:
| 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.
| shahflow wrote:
| Not at all. Patchwork should be the home page to what's going
| on in your team. All of the changes and progress should role up
| into it and we should be able to help you see the ones most
| important to you. That's a lot of what the integrations are
| for.
| ergocoder wrote:
| The team must be stellar to be able to get fund with this kind of
| ideas...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-27 23:00 UTC)