142 karma · joined May 30, 2010
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.
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/
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.
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.
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/
Note: I too wish Datomic was OSS, just disagree that price isn't the issue. It is.
I opened an issue for that: https://github.com/SnootyMonkey/posthere.io/issues/4
(Disclosure: I wrote it)
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.
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.
Sound interesting?