It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) It's based on how I saw collab work at a unicorn I worked at that was doing remote work well pre-pandemic, and that I've seen replicated elsewhere.
However, it feels very foreign to people who haven't experienced that. What I've seen is you don't really "get" it until you try it, and getting people to try it is really hard.
I suspect there's some correct way I can talk about it that helps people see the value more quickly, but I haven't figured it out yet.
> It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.)
This doesn’t really tell me anything. Can you provide a real-world example of how it would work on a project? Is there a ~10 second video or gif of it in action? Or even more basic, what specifically made you angry enough with existing tools that you felt the need to create this? What did you want to do that you couldn’t? (And please avoid the term async in your explanation - it will help you be clearer).
The app has a list of topics that anyone can add to. Each topic has a due date so you know when it is wrapping up, and they also have an explicit context and outcome; the topic creator sets the context, and the outcome is the bit that everyone collaborates on by editing together/using the discussion thread. Once the topic is done and a decision made, you lock the topic, saving the context, decision, and the discussion thread for later reference.
It's better than Slack because it lets you engage with discussions more mindfully and across time zones, rather than as they come up in easy to miss and fragmented threads, and ensures that the decision is self-documenting when it's done. It's also better than something like Notion, an Issue, or Google Doc because it has better embedded conversation threads, and comes with the structure for separating context and decision.
Everything else we tried was too free form, this brought just enough structure to get everyone on the same page and make decisions/discuss topics without getting in the way, while having some consistency to finding them and how the conversations were structured.
Does this help? There is a video up at https://asyncgo.com, but it suffers from how hard it has been to figure out how to talk about the app clearly.
Some more feedback, after watching the video and taking a quick look at the site:
- I think I really like the idea but I didn’t see how you get from comments to a conclusion. Somebody reads the comments and edits the Description and Outcome fields? In which case, what does the audit trail look like?
- I get that you think this will reduce the need for meetings, but: 1) I think suggesting “no meetings” sounds faddish/unrealistic and 2) the calculator is cheesy, it’s both obviously not what real meetings cost and also accurate to the penny…
- In my last BigCorp job, the thing to sell against would be Slack and Jira, IMO the two worst technologies in most dev orgs today. Good that you mention them but maybe give some examples of why using AsyncGo is better, especially vs. Jira.
- The pricing seems a little odd. It seems like this would target remote startups but then maybe they never pay you (5 users free). But it’s not freemium because “all features unlocked.” And from 6-50 users it’s the same price. I’m no pricing expert but if I can’t see you you’d make money on me, I’d worry about committing to the product.
- We all want money but selling your consulting service in the same place as your product makes it look like you don’t believe in the product. And does anybody really hire this kind of consultant based on a website? Seems far fetched, I would stick to the product on the website.
- For many people lock-in is a dealbreaker especially if the company might not stick around. How do I get my data out?
- Browser extensions are nice but is it for all/most browsers?
- Update the Blog! I see this a lot: you start a blog because it seems like a good marketing trick then you don’t keep up with it. Post at least monthly, or take it down, because a stagnant blog implies a stagnant product, and here you have all these HN eyeballs ready to read your blog! Not every post has to be about the product directly, you can talk about adjacent things, blog about the tech stack, about remote work culture, etc.
Good luck with it! Again, I think I like the idea, it reminds me a bit of early Basecamp, but it could use some more explanation to get people to try it.
- From the website it is not clear how users use your product. The only screenshot is on an iPad. Does that mean your product is a mobile app? The video shows a website. Does that mean your product can be used as both a website and an app, or just a website? Your website should make it clear how your users can access your product.
- You mention in the video that there's a chrome extension, but this is not mentioned on the website. Most users will not even watch your video unless they are sufficiently interested from what they read on your website. If there are other integrations your support you should mention them as well.
- In your video you claim that using AsyncGo has allowed you to avoid having _any_ work meetings, but I'm not convinced from the video that I could replicate this on my team. It would be interesting to hear details about the kind of work meetings you used to have, and how AsyncGo has replaced them. It would also be interesting to hear details about how other collaboration platforms fall short. Ex: why not use slack?
- IMO the example in your video is too abstract and not relatable (at least for me). At work I don't think i have ever scheduled a meeting to discuss some internet article. Usually people just post a link in slack and start a discussion there. If there is some outcome, maybe we create a ticket in our bug tracker. I feel like it would be better if you used a more realistic example from your experience using AsyncGo. I would be interested to see the kind of comments people leave and how people tend to use features like search, up/down votes, labels, etc.
Edit: I see you added a link! It _is_ cool. Great idea, I like the name too. I can see this being very useful and will give it a try the next time I need an outcome.
Added a link above to the current site/video that I have. If you have any feedback (even if you don't use it) I'd love to hear from you, my email is in my bio here.
Ok cool. So if I had to sum it up elevator pitch style based on what you’ve provided so far, I would call it a collaborative project management tool that uses threaded discussions for deliverables and decision making.
Is your target and experience to replace existing PM tools like kanban boards or work alongside them?
To work along side them, we are really just thinking about the collaborative decision making bit. We do have document editing built-in (WYSIWYG markdown editing), but issue trackers for example, backlogs, kanbans would still be in place for _doing_ work.
I can imagine replacing Slack, for the right team. We are a small team, but internally we use our own app (all the time) plus Google Chat (rarely, for quick pings).
Have you considered recording a video of you using it?
Have a rough landing page. Add the video. Post a Show HN. How I would consider marketing it after that is through "content marketing". Ie: start a blog/insta/twitter/youtube channel where you post relevant stuff for people trying to solve or improve remote collaboration. You can show your solution, or talk about common problems you've seen, etc.
I would probably focus on "Remote decision making" as that seems to be the key thing setting you apart from other solutions (imo). At least, it is the key element that attracts my attention :)
