Ask HN: Review our startup, Focus (for Slack)
We are a team of three that are looking for feedback on our product Focus (for Slack).
We created Focus because we love Slack and think it's a huge improvement over internal e-mail, but we found that it was hurting our productivity. We were spending just as much (or more) time managing our Slack communications as we used to spend on e-mail.
Slack has alert and notification options but there is no way to configure it to give us what we wanted: To be notified when something we care about was being discussed and to be left alone the rest of the time. (And to not have to worry about constantly clearing another red alert bubble every time we aren't engaged with Slack for two seconds!)
When we spoke to other Slack users these pain points where echoed. So we built Focus. We started where Slack stops and built a bot that will let you subscribe to whatever keywords you want and then will notify you whenever those keywords are mentioned in any public channel (even if you are not a member).
Our high-level goal is to build tools that liberate us from the information overload that seems inevitable in this modern digital age. Focus is just one small step in that direction but we wanted to get feedback early and often, so please, check it out and let us know what you think!
http://www.focusforslack.com/