Show HN: Pesto, a Digital Workplace | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pesto, a Digital Workplace

pesto.app

86 pointsdsaffy76 comments

This is meant to be constructive feedback: This almost looks like it's supposed to be a game for kids. I'm not seeing how it'll help me. I know it's intended to allow me to work with my remote team easier, but I don't see how exactly. I picked up something about rooms and possibly screen sharing (It gave me vibes of someone seeing my screen on demand though - I hope not?)

This "Present your authentic self" bit, showing a cartoon emoji; what is the appeal? Am I supposed to make a cartoon of myself? Do I have to?

Sorry if I could answer these myself if I read more. I suppose my feedback is that I don't want to read more because what I've seen isn't compelling enough.

Having said that, I'm glad to see work is being done in this space. Good luck pressing forward – there's a ton of progress to be made and real productivity gains to uncover.

As a counterpoint to the extremely negative commentary I'm reading in this thread, I like "the present your authentic self without turning on your camera" bit. Sometimes I don't want to wear a shirt (or pants!) at home or don't want to be surprised absently rubbing my jaw in thought or making a weird face.

I love to see innovation in the space of remote work tools and I can confidently say Slack and friends ain't it. I want a experience of serendipity-making leveraging some of the same mechanisms physical office goers make use of.

Appreciate it!

Apologies if I came off too negatively. I meant to be frank about my reaction in hopes that it might inform the people behind it how others perceive it.

I should add that I can tell the people behind it are good at their craft and the guiding principles seem like good ones. It’s mostly the marketing that has thrown me off. I also recognize that I might just be too old and crusty to get it.

I used to be with “it” and then they changed what “it” is.

I don’t get what the authentic self is though. They used to take a screenshot every couple of min with cam. I thought something like animating that would be neat and an authentic self. It allows you to do what you said and still be closer to the phrase.

A cartoon self that has limited options isn’t authentic though. It is pretty pointless for me. Note. I have used the app extensively.

I understand the cartoony feedback. We're working on improving the quality of the avatars to be more adult / work focused. We do believe in avatars - they are one of the key points in our product - because we believe that being on video all day is soul crushing, but audio-only feels disconnected. The avatar provides privacy and personality at the same time. FWIW, you can turn on video if you want it too, we just default to the avatar.

Believe me being an avatar all day is more soul crushing. Actually I cannot see how being face to face can be referred to as soul crushing. That’s a pretty said commentary on the target audience.

In your opinion. For me, I’ll always favor video-off calls, especially when they are longer than 30 mins.

I find being on video calls all day incredibly draining. I can see how a tool like this would help. Though for me the addition of an avatar adds nothing, but it is a nice middle ground.

Nice, that’s a great angle. I think you should stick with it. Thanks for responding and providing more context.

I might be a bad prospect because I’m a very literal and surface-level sensing type of person. I’m terrible at reading between lines, seeing past facades, etc. Working with avatars would probably make me feel like I’m in a cartoon, haha. This is definitely not your fault.

I know my oldest kids would love this. They don’t like the formality of things like zoom and they find mostly-text interfaces like slack stifling. By the time they’re in the workforce, if something like this was around they would likely prefer it.

Good luck with this. I’ll keep an eye on it for sure.

How does this compare with Gather? It seems fairly similar.

https://www.gather.town/

I think the style of the illustrations is maybe making this feel more kiddish than it otherwise would be

As someone who works for a remote company, I'm excited by the idea of more casual communication tools. Creating a zoom room and sending an invite just feels so.. formal.

With that said, I'd love it if there was a quick, real life demo on the site to show how this tool actually works, i'd guess that it would help more with conversion than an animated GIF.

All the best.

Thanks for the feedback.

The concept sounds on point. I do understand some of the reaction in this thread. The cutesy graphics are a bit much for me personally and may not differentiate you sufficiently from other insufficiently professional tools e.g. Discord. I am speaking as someone who has tried to bring Discord into a community organisation (non-profit) and faced resistance based on branding rather than functionality.

Looking at the GIF demo, am I correct to understand that you can view Katherine's screen by clicking a button, even if she's not voluntarily sharing? That seems to be a violation of privacy…

Hey Vincent - the GIF is supposed to show Katherine joining a room and sharing her own screen. You cannot force Katherine to share her screen.

That GIF is not clear to me either. I don't even get what the concept of a room is supposed to be? Or to to phrase it differently: how is this different than slack?

We are focused on rooms, which are audio-first spaces, not text conversations like Slack. Rooms are flexible containers that can be as simple as a traditional video conference, or more sophisticated, eg walk around on a map or listen to lofi music.

I think about this new industry a lot.

Whoever solves the problem of socializing in digital work place is going to make out like a bandit and change the world and open up new biz analytics/metrics, gamified pay structures, and more.

It is definitely coming and will be the new normal. Especially as the generation of Fortnite concerts, Halo forge custom discord game meetups, and whatever other freemium games people play get jobs.

Meta knows this as everyone laughs at the billionaire and his virtual world dream.

What you all have here looks a bit boring through that lens. I’d want to test this to see for sure, but why not make this a total blast to use? The GIF looks just like Slack and another miserable work thing.

You’re not competing with Slack. You’re competing with Xbox+Microsoft Office.

I’d shift gears and make the highest priority goal just making literally everything ‘fun’.

When Katherine joins that room it should feel exciting and rewarding and not just another page tab refresh like GIF.

Congrats and great job! Looking forward to seeing your success.

This was my immediate read of it as well, and left a bad taste in my mouth. Didn't help that the FAQ mostly addresses variations on "how do I disable the default behavior of letting people join me to meetings without asking."

Honestly I get the intent, but I think the parallel to "open door" in a physical space needs to be made more explicit. Even in meatspace it's not an acceptable practice for a group of people to walk into someone's open office and start a conversation without asking if they are free, first.

I had some friends participate in a virtual hackathon run pretty much entirely over Discord. The final demos took place in a very "room-focused" fashion - each team/product had their own Discord channel, and people could pop in and out over the course of the 90 minute demo time.

It was very successful at replicating the feel of booths in an expo hall, and opened my eyes to how much I enjoyed the "audio rooms" concept. Right away, looking at the landing page, I love the idea of having my own little virtual "office" that people could pop in and out of. That's probably the thing I miss most about in-person work: informal, extemporaneous communication (that doesn't take place over text).

I get the feeling that the right audience would absolutely love this product. Good luck, folks!

Thanks!

Looks interesting. Would be good to see:

1. How exactly it works

2. How it's different from existing remote work tooling (Slack / Zoom / Google docs / Miro / etc)

The core concept is "rooms" - like Discord voice channels, only way more flexible and built for remote workers. They can be traditional video conferencing, lofi spaces for hanging out, or 2d spaces with spatial audio.

The goal is to give teams a flexible workplace consisting of a series of rooms purpose-built for their workflows.

Too mockup heavy with no actual screenshots. No pricing.

I have no interest in my coworkers knowing I am listening to inappropriate music. I definitely don't want them freely glancing at my screen without permission.

Animated avatars don't seem to be taking off in the workplace. Hell even outside the workplace my friend group usually wants to see real faces.

You can't look at screen share without permission - this is clearly something we screwed up in the landing animation. It's supposed to show Katherine sharing her own screen.

Pricing is coming soon and will free tier + paid tier (think like Slack / Zoom pricing).

This sort of thing would have been a research project a few years ago. It's exciting to see the Web evolve. Broadcasting realtime text and video are now building blocks we can rearrange in innovative ways.

WebRTC is great for this - and has been available in building block SDK form for some time (eg Tokbox). When I last looked it had codec issues cf the client side tools eg Zoom. Not sure if these have been solved yet?

I signed up for this to check it out. It's a really amazing feat of technical execution. Congratulations for pulling it off! I hope you gain traction and evolve this into something lasting and impactful.

Is this what people actually want? To "work" with colleagues through a screen using a cartoon avatar so that you can sit in your boxers and not have to go outside?

Man, the world sure has gotten weird. It's like, I thought everyone was sort of like me. Turns out most people are a completely different species.

I don't get this from top to bottom. I feel like an 80-year-old looking at the kids in complete and utter bemusement.

> To "work" with colleagues through a screen using a cartoon avatar so that you can sit in your boxers and not have to go outside?

There's a huge difference between working remotely with colleagues and "sitting in your boxers not having to go outside". Some of us work with people who don't live in the same city as us, and tools like this make an effort to build up some of the genuine benefits of office work (and in my experience having used a similar tool for a year or so, they do so effectively)

The style may not be to your taste and that's fine, but sometimes you need to look past the presentation to understand something.

One of the most enjoyable parts of having a career is travelling to different places, so this sounds like a net negative to me over just going to the other office.

I'm at peace with the fact that I won't ever understand it, it's been two years and I'm not even in the industry any more. I'm still entitled to express that.

Visual learner here… Demo video please!

Or screenshots at least.

We had used something similar teemyco [1]. But as most of you mentioned here, I think privacy is a big thing. Also as an introvert, I do not like such solutions which might mandate to have constant online presence. 1. https://www.teemyco.com/

This looks interesting, but show me the pricing and stop with the signup, it’s free bs. If it’s now, it won’t be later. Google showed us that.

They gave a good explanation as the first FAQ

I can't imagine many companies that would rely on that - an unknowable future cost in the budget, with only a month migration warning if you can't afford it is not a reasonable proposition.

I mean, yes, pre Ramen profitability, saving every cent matters. But there are already calendars, chats, VC apps in the free space that are more likely to stay around than a startup without income.

I wish Pesto success, but I think they'd be better off setting a price soon.

Yeah I imagine they're still building and experimenting - and early adopters should treat it as such. Better to set no price rather than guess incorrectly and advertise the wrong price.

We plan on introducing a paid tier soon. Think Slack / Zoom pricing, free tier + paid tier model. We haven't totally figured it out yet.

Looks like an enterprise version of discord.

I've seen a few digital workspace/virtual or spatial room/workspace apps out there, but I couldn't imagine a less pleasant way to work. It seems to me—though I'd be curious if anyone who's not a manager feels differently—that it takes all the worst aspects of being at a physical workplace, and ruins all the best aspects of remote work

Just because you come to work dressed as an avatar doesn't make it professional attire to wear a dog on your head.

Out of all the critiques I've seen about Pesto, I think this one is probably the worst I've seen.

So should slack only limit us to having professional avatars too? Looking at my 2000+ employee organization, it's all pretty much split between "professional" and "unprofessional" avatars. And what if your startup is something like Chewy? Then coming to work with a dog hat is probably pretty professional actually.

I'm reasonably certain the comment you are replying to is a joke.

I like the cutsey style.

Surprised to see Japanese and a Producthunt Leaderboard.

We have a lot of Japanese users (organically, over 25% of our users) so we internationalized.

ProductHunt leaderboard was a weekend project for me... I won't lie, there's not much connection, just some fun.

This looks really good. I don't have a use for it since I don't work remote, but it could be a cool alternative to Discord for small groups.

How did they make that animated screenshot gif thing. Is their some cool tool I can use to do that? I don't want to program css animations for it.

They're probably using SVG animations. CSS animations here would be masochistic. There are slews of programs for doing SVG animations.

what would you say are your top 2-3 choices of tools?

We used Lottie

How is this any different from existing solutions?

More animations and drawings to make it look cool and exciting and hip. lol.

We've been using Pesto since it was pragli

Works well but there is no message history search, it is worth using since it's free

Hey there - there is a search button that allows you to search messages. Is that not working for you? Reach out to us via the Pesto team chat in the app for support on this.

I love the LoFi Room. Would be cool to be able to set any kind of music there!

I think it looks nice.

I like the gather.town concept more just judging by their websites. Does anyone have experience with both and can share how they compare?

I'd also appreciate a rundown between these two or others in the same vein. I'm shopping around for a solution that's more digitally "present" than Teams for our company.

None of this stuff speaks to me, just looking at your website. Yeah its cute and it's on-par with trends but just give it to me straight in the first sentence- im busy, and already in my workplace so lets start there.

If it's chat with a bupbupbup attached, then tell me its a chat with a bupbupbup attached, if you're trying to do 'its a discord, but for programmers and startuppy types' then say that directly.

Shoot me straight next time, today you lost me.

There are parallels to Discord; the HN audience knows Discord well and so if we were only trying to appeal to this audience we would probably market it that way. A large chunk (possibly the majority) of our existing users don't know about Discord though and it doesn't make sense to purely market it in relation to that.

There are also some noticeable differences, particularly: - integrations are focused on work products, eg calendar, rather than what games you are playing etc - rooms (similar to Discord voice channel) can be shared on a calendar for guests - we prioritize different things in screenshare (quality over FPS, since it's for work not gaming)

I'm sensing that I'm speaking to the person that wrote the overly verbose copy I lamented above. Please hear my cries, just get to the point ok? I'm not trying to be mean or angry or anything like that, but I'm a person with money who buys things, often just to support them. Your website actively thwarted my attempts to support it by the laborious interface. Had this been 3 or 4 years ago, sure I'd be captivated by the design long enough to stick around and try and suss out what the marketing speak and round edges are telling me, but right now in 2022 it looks like everything else out there. If you don't be different, then at least get to the point about why being different doesn't matter.

I had to come to the HN comments to find out what this actually is, I was completely baffled by the website.

I am the author. FWIW I totally understand where you are coming from; I'm not happy with our explanation of "What is Pesto?". We will take our own pass on refining this, and I'd also appreciate if you tried it and gave me your thoughts on it. Right now "digital workplace" is the best we have.

So it's Teams, but without office 365?

What the heck is a "bupbupbup?"

lmao this guy doesn't know a bupbupbup

i think that's the mcdonald's theme, ya know "bupbupbup i'm lovin it"

Parent just means "chat plus X", I think. Chat plus video. Chat plus rooms. Chat plus bupbupbup.

This is the meaning that was intended, thanks.

>but just give it to me straight

Like pear cider that's made from 100% pears?

Why's everything moving and jiggling? No thanks.

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