Show HN: Ginger: Better Team Discussions | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ginger: Better Team Discussions

26 pointsipmb9 comments

Hi everyone, we (Lincoln Loop) are a development/consulting shop launching our first product, Ginger.

Our team is spread across many time zones and has an aversion to disruptive/ineffective meetings. We've been looking for a tool that can help us have discussions and share information without interrupting our developers while they are in the flow. Email, Basecamp, Google Wave, and IRC all came close, but always fell short in some critical manner. We built Ginger to scratch our own itch hoping it scratches some of yours too.

https://gingerhq.com

Sign up is 1-click (Google/Facebook) or just a couple of fields to enter and no credit card is required to take it for a spin. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it all!

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We've been using this for several months at &yet and it's been a surprisingly valuable tool. At first, my thought was honestly, "So what? It's a threaded message board." until we actually started using it.

It's actually the feature restraint that makes it so remarkably useful and powerful.

Here's what we do. Every day, we start a new thread and each person on our team posts a daily checkin "rating" their day and then writes any comments on what they worked on, what they learned, what frustrated them, etc. Super simple stuff, for sure, but it's been one of the most valuable things we've done for creating a strong sense of team and togetherness.

What's been most surprising about this is that most of our team of 15+ work within feet from each other in our office, but our team's connectedness feels better than ever as a result of Ginger.

Clickable: https://gingerhq.com

When I click \\Pricing// I am scrolled to seeing the green text ''Eliminate Meetings , Get a Pulse , Never Forget''. It tells me nothing of price. So I look for largest text closest to middle. There I see ''What do our Customers Say?''. Also totally irrelevant to what I want, the price.

Please make sure that bottom item scrolls high enough. I know that this is partially because my screen is 1900x1200, so just pad the last item.

Thanks for the feedback, we'll get that fixed today.

I've been using Ginger for ~ 6 months (I work for Lincoln Loop), and it's appeal is difficult to describe.

It doesn't really _do_ anything, there's no clever features, yet as a team we've been having these intelligent thoughtful discussions since we started using it. Somehow those discussions just didn't happen with the other tools we tried.

We've been enjoying it a lot at &yet. We use it for daily checkins and developer discussions. Like a private mailing list... without the mail :)

It's helped pull our team together and give a better sense of how people are feeling about their work and progress.

That's been huge for us.

Looks very interesting.

Will it integrate with external apps?

My product, Review19.com , offers collaborative decision making and project tracking for teams and a messaging system ( similar to GingerHQ) built in would be pretty useful.

We have a (undocumented) public API to let you do everything you can do on the site.

We have mentioned embedding discussions on other sites a couple times the past, but haven't come to any conclusions there. Is that what you have in mind?

we've been using it within our team for a few months, it's pretty great. it's easy to use for the non-dev folks on the team, and i think probably the thing i like about it most is it's basically a team forum where people feel comfortable talking about whatever and it DOESN'T have all the other project management stuff and so forth.

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