Show HN: Flat – a minimalist teamwork app that protects focus (live demo)
After a decade of wanting a simple, lightweight teamwork tool and not finding one, we decided to build one ourselves. You can try out what we're building in a sandbox demo here: https://try.flat.app.
We’re calling it Flat, and we have two main goals:
1. Everyone can figure it out in just a few minutes, from the intern to the zero-patience CEO.
2. It doesn’t create extra work for anybody. Everything written in Flat would have been written somewhere anyway; Flat just provides an obvious, consistent place to put it.
If you check out the demo, please let us know how you think we’re doing on these goals and where we could do better. (Mobile users, there’s a video for you since Flat is desktop-only at the moment.)
Also: we think it's crazy that work communication has become so dominated by synchronous chat e.g. Slack and Teams over the past decade. It's too easy for balls to get dropped, it’s hard to get real work done, and it's hard to find things. Chat is great for some things, but we don’t think it should be the center of our work lives or the system of record. So Flat includes async discussion threads that are as quick and easy as chat but without the downsides.
You can read more about why we're building Flat at https://flat.app/why.
HN FAQ
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How baked is this? We’re still in beta, but it’s pretty darn baked.
What’s your business model? No-nonsense SaaS. We’re currently in beta and free for all teams, but you can find our future pricing on our homepage.
Does this have a proper integration with GitHub? Yes it does, because we're using Flat to build Flat!
Is this an “alternative to Jira”? Ha, no. Though… some teams have in fact migrated to Flat from Jira. So, maybe?
Is this an “opinionated” tool? Yes and no. Flat eschews complex features in favor of a small set of simple primitives (workspaces, topics, tasks, and threads). But Flat has no opinion about how you should work.
Is there a dark mode? You bet. It's in the demo, try it!
What's your stack? React, TS, PostgreSQL & Replicache (all data’s local, and Flat works offline)
Do you have a mobile app? Not yet, but we will. We've been focused on making the desktop experience great first.
Hang on, is this an Electron app? You got us! Feel free to use Flat in-browser if that offends you.