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SnootyMonkey

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I'm Sean Johnson, a co-founder at SpecStory.

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Shameless plug here, but this is exactly why we built Carrot ( OSS / SaaS https://carrot.io/ )

We've been remote founders and employees in numerous distributed startups, and have always found the same issue, the noisy nature of chat/Slack and lossy nature of email necessitates a 3rd place to keep the important decisions, announcements and history of the company.

Lots of companies use wikis and forum software for this, and those can work, but we're betting that a dedicated solution can work better.

My co-founder and I started building Carrot a few years ago as a result of our experiences at distributed startups. Our biggest challenge was always the same: communicating a clear direction, getting everyone aligned, and then keeping them aligned as conditions and strategy change.

Good leadership requires a real effort at transparency and a commitment to consistent communication. Employees need it, they crave it, they demand it, but it’s hard to do with the tools at hand. Even when leaders want to be transparent they end up communicating in ways that aren’t. Slack is too noisy, email is ignored, and all-hands meetings are unevenly attended and hard to pull off in distributed teams.

Teams, especially distributed and remote teams, benefit from a focused tool for leadership communication. Carrot isn’t focused on the minute-by-minute “where work gets done” of Slack, or the reference minutiae of a Wiki, it’s a place to focus on the big picture, and to make sure that transparent communication about the direction of the team is happening in both directions. It’s also well integrated with Slack.

As part of our commitment to product transparency, we’ve built Carrot as an open source platform ( https://github.com/open-company ). It’s ClojureScript/React on the front-end and Clojure microservices on the back-end.

I would love to hear about your challenges in startup and team leadership! And I’d love to know if you feel like Carrot is on track with what we think are some of the most important features: focused 2-way communications, awareness of who’s seen this, video updates, and deep Slack integration. You can weigh in on our open roadmap or email me directly at sean.johnson@carrot.io.

And, if you like what you we’re trying to do, I’d really appreciate your support on our Product Hunt launch today. https://producthunt.com/

Stripe Home 8 years ago

We've got trials at https://carrot.io

It's not exactly the same as Stripe Home, which looks amazing for an internal project, but Carrot is available to everyone, it's all open source, and we're committed to solving this problem for every company that wants to be the Stripe of their industry some day.

Stripe Home 8 years ago

It's interesting, we've talked to a LOT of companies about this as customer research for our SaaS product (https://carrot.io) and 150 is actually where this problem become unbearable. We see this problem first come up consistently at 30 people, become a major problem at ~100 people that starts to get lots of attention inside the company, and becoming a real hindrance and burning issue if not addressed at ~150+.

It's not at all surprising to us that both Stripe and Square have spent a lot of time and money on this problem to support their quick growth past 1,000 people.

This is an important original post, and I wish the Slack community were having these conversations more often and openly.

The original post nails some important issues: companies really need topic focused discussions, intentional, thoughtful writing, not just chat, more asynch so there is time for deep work and time for more thoughtful discussion and replies, and much better, topic-based search.

I believe in the impact of this problem so deeply that a team of us have been working on an open source solution to it for a couple years now. https://github.com/open-company

What we're trying to build is a place for companies to have focused, asynch discussions about the things that really matter, outside the stream of chat. The UI we've come up with isn't "Reddit-like" really, but it's an attempt to supplement Slack with what's missing, and it will evolve as we learn more.

If anyone is interested in trying it out, you can sign up for early access (we'll get you in very quickly) at: https://carrot.io/

I'm sure price is still the issue. I bet for the right price Cognitect would be happy to provide the source to a customer.

Note: I too wish Datomic was OSS, just disagree that price isn't the issue. It is.

"And can be used by software on your personal device to give you extra functionality without again you having to do anything."

Without you having to do anything but pay for and power a dedicated chip. If the utility of having a tiny amount of BTC on device is so high, and the cost so low, why not just have the device manufacturer pre-load a lifetime supply on the device (purchased or mined in a giant wind powered data center)? Seems the cost of this buying this chip is much higher than just buying the BTC outright for the user.

[dead] 12 years ago

Will this be OSS? It's not clear from the website.

POSThere.io is a simple free service for developers to help debug API calls and web hooks.

When your code is POSTing to someone else’s code… or they'll be POSTing to you, it can be hard to iterate, debug and validate your code.

POSThere.io let's you see what is POSTed (or PUT or PATCHed) at any time in an easy, clear browser interface.

After POSTing, point your web browser at the same URL and you’ll see a clear history and details of all the POST requests. Neat, huh?

And it’s open source! Check the code and verify we don’t do anything nefarious, or host it yourself.

http://github.com/path/posthere.io

We are working on just such a website actually. It's why we are trying to learn more about what people are dealing with. We're hoping to put a tool into experts' hands that lets them curate, organize and sequence the wealth of information out there to best show the path for someone to gain proficiency.

Sound interesting?

Self education is not about not getting help from anyone, and learning everything from first principles. You read a book... you're getting help from the author. You don't have to be a genius and have all the time in the world to learn to juggle, or to garden, or to read Esperanto. You won't learn any of that from first principles, but you don't need to go to school and sit in a classroom either.