sorich87

Orbit | Remote | US and Europe timezones | Full-time | https://orbit.love

Orbit is hiring multiple roles in engineering, product, and beyond! We're helping organizations build enthusiastic communities of technology adopters. Our community experience platform helps companies identify, measure, and improve their community members’ engagement, all while focusing on creating value instead of merely capturing it.

We are former developer advocates and community builders ourselves, and now we’re creating the tools we wished we had so that others can build highly engaged communities of their own. We're backed by an amazing group of angels and investors including Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Heavybit, and Harrison Metal.

We are a remote-first company operating between UTC-7 and UTC+3. Bonus points for being in France, US, or UK, but as long as you're in that time zone range, we're happy to talk.

We're growing very fast and hiring across more than 10 roles, including but not limited to:

* Software Engineer (Rails)

* Engineering Manager

* Solutions Engineer

* Data Analyst

* Community Advocate - Developer Communities

List of open positions: https://careers.orbit.love Learn more about Orbit: https://orbit.love

Orbit | Remote | US and Europe timezones | Full-time | https://orbit.love

Orbit is hiring multiple roles in engineering, product, and beyond! We're helping organizations build enthusiastic communities of technology adopters. Our community experience platform helps companies identify, measure, and improve their community members’ engagement, all while focusing on creating value instead of merely capturing it.

We are former developer advocates and community builders ourselves, and now we’re creating the tools we wished we had so that others can build highly engaged communities of their own. We're backed by an amazing group of angels and investors including Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Heavybit, and Harrison Metal.

We are a remote-first company operating between UTC-7 and UTC+3. Bonus points for being in France, US, or UK, but as long as you're in that time zone range, we're happy to talk.

We're growing very fast and hiring across more than 10 roles, including but not limited to:

* Software Engineer (Rails)

* Engineering Manager

* Solutions Engineer

* Data Analyst

* Community Advocate - Developer Communities

List of open positions: https://careers.orbit.love Learn more about Orbit: https://orbit.love

Hello HN! We released this week a free version of our solution for small teams.

OKRs and 1-on-1s have become a very important part of a manager toolbox, but it can be difficult to justify the cost of paying for another productivity solution.

We think every manager should be able to communicate well with their team members and keep them engaged. And every employee deserves a great manager!

That's why we switched to a freemium model with full access to our OKRs and 1-on-1 features. We have additional features (analytics, reviews, surveys, etc.) under the paid plan.

If you're a manager and you wish it was easier to manage your OKRs and 1-on-1s, please try Happierco free plan and let us know your feedback. We hope you like it! :)

We have a mobile app on our roadmap.

26% of our daily users are on mobile, but we're not yet happy about how it works on mobile browsers. We should have an update next week that focuses on making it more mobile friendly.

Hello HN.

We would really love to get your feedback on this.

We started months ago as an employee engagement solution. We got customers coming from some of our competitors, trying to implement OKRs, CPM, pulse surveys and other systems du jour. They were not only having issues with the complexity of existing tools, but also the employee engagement activities were not actually “engaging” to employees. Employees felt like they had to use these systems to please the company leadership. So, that wasn’t helping at all in terms of employee happiness.

Let’s be honest, OKRs and other performance management systems can be hard to do, and are usually badly implemented in companies, which is hurtful for culture and morale.

So we made this new version of Happierco. A team communication solution that keeps employees happy and productive.

Happierco gives each employee and team a profile where they share their current goals and progress, receive feedback and recognition from colleagues and managers. Team members can reach out to each other to create personal connections. They can also answer surveys about their workplace or organize around specific topics impacting their work.

Data about employees’ work and performance is usually scattered across multiple tools. Happierco makes it easy to integrate with other productivity software to pull the data into teams and users profiles.

We want to make it part of day to day work, and useful to everyone, instead of building a tool that is only useful for People Operations, HR and company leadership.

Please take a look and let us know what you think. Any feedback, even the harshest critics, are welcome!

I think what you're against are the sync daily standups, not the async, usually written, ones.

If I was an employee, I would prefer you to let me self-manage my work however I feel comfortable using whatever tool suits me and my team, instead of constantly interrupting on Jira, Trello, etc. And I'll keep you updated at a frequency we agreed on (daily or weekly).

It's also great to read daily updates of others on the team, and even other teams, to learn about what they're working on without having to check at multiple places or interrupt their work. It's usually a great way to discuss, give and receive feedback, asynchronously.

Also, it's strange that you're suggesting "reach out on Slack" as an alternative. Doesn't that promote the "incessant messaging that Slack allows" you're decrying at the start of the article?

Disclaimer: I'm cofounder of the team communication tool https://www.happierco.com

I think clearly defined goals are one way to effectively measure productivity. There are methods like OKRs which help when used right. So any company with a good goal setting process can afford to give employees not only flexible hours but also any other flexibility that makes them more autonomous in doing their work. Employee will be happier and more productive.

Did you try the "New Jira"[1]? It has been pretty decent for us.

[1] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/the-new-jira-be...

Definitely agreed with that. We've found that "underperforming" is most likely than not the fault of company management and/or culture.

Hope you've recovered from the burn out!

Thanks! We'll definitely stick to "they" in the future!

Thanks! Not sure how we missed that.

Thanks! That's much appreciated.

Sorry about that. Where in the article did we assume the gender? Looking and I'm not seeing. Not native english speakers though so there may be something we're missing.

Hi HN,

I’m Ulrich, co-founder of Happierco. We’re building the first employee-centric performance management solution.

We help our users turn their company culture into a competitive advantage by enabling the empowerment of rank-and-file employees to drive business growth and effect change in the company.

The numerous solutions in the market all see performance management from the lenses of managers and are just trying to build better tools for managers to collect information.

With Happierco, we want to go further. We are bringing more value by increasing positive interactions between the employees, enabling transparency and faster employee development, which in turn benefits the company as a whole.

Performance management is frequently a source of frustration for employees across every industry, especially creative ones. So I guess it’ll be a subject of great interest here on HN. I am looking forward to the discussion!

I didn't discuss your point about slavery. I don't even want to think about agreeing or not since everyone will always have different opinions about it. That's why I started my first comment with "some corrections." Just wanted to correct a few things that were not.

Although I find it jaw-dropping that 20% of the slave trade came from such a tiny place! ;)

Abomey

Some corrections: The place was wrongly called Dahomey, that's why it was changed to Benin. Also the actual place that performed the raids on their neighbors was less than 10% of modern-day Benin. Most of the area of the kingdom (some 1/4 of modern-day Benin), were vassals who would provide slaves as tribute.

Source: born there, lives there.

How is that different from colonization?

I've been using Slack and Trello most recently but I've found it difficult to keep track of communication between several tools.

So I've been building Seat (https://www.useseat.com) to bring the best of Slack and Trello together in addition to document management.

It's Automattic, WordPress parent company. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14536410

I'm working on one https://www.frontseat.pro. It's still in beta. It would be great to read your feedback.

I'm not the GP but we would totally be open to putting a badge!

We got 3 months free from Founderskit (via Startup School). Is there a better discount than that? If yes, that would be helpful!

No, please read the full thread. The scenario is the following:

There are currently hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages which receive dozens of customer support questions every day via Messenger.

My point is that a bot can be used reply instantly to frequently asked questions and leave more sophisticated questions to humans. I'm not defending any fancy use of bots. Just simple use cases like this.

> Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent?

Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.

> You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.

I'm actually advocating for bots with no interface, no IRC-like commands. The customer sends the question via chat. If the bot understands it replies instantly, if not a support person replies. Simple. No "type X for whatever" or "sorry I didn't understand your request".

> I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.

We're definitely on the same page. :)

Often times, it really means you hire less since there's less support load. E.g. we have a customer which support requests are more than 90% frequently asked questions. Adding a bot to their Facebook page decreased their support load from full time to at most 1h a day. :)

But as you mentioned, when using a bot, the goal should be customer happiness, not cutting costs.

When you have a very active Facebook page with thousands of fans, you'll get dozen of questions every day via Messenger. A bot can help with that.

And I agree with you. If you weren't using Facebook to reach customers in the past, there's no point building a Messenger bot.

Look at Wikipedia definition of bot (or other definitions on the first page when searching Google) "Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone."

I think "instant answers to frequently asked questions and surveys and polls over chat" (with some NLP to make it better) surely match that definition, no?

I don't understand why everyone is so fixated on the AI/conversation aspect. :)

With the current state of the technology, companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.

As a owner of a bot building platform (https://www.botamp.com), it's very disappointing to read articles like this. All the hype around chatbots, the high expectations that will obviously never be met (at least not with current technology) are hurting adoption of these very useful tools.

Actually, for this very reason we don't even have the word "chatbot" on our homepage.

When people say things like "stay in contact with everyone who clicked on the ad to open a conversation with the bot", "Discovery is the biggest challenge", it shows that they just don't get it.

No customer, ever, will open their Messenger just to hold a conversation with your chatbot. Customers don't actually want to "discover" your bot so that they can chat with it. Why would they want that? They have more important things to do with their lives. :)

What customers want when they write to you on Messenger is finding information or performing a transaction. When you understand that, you can quickly see the benefit.

E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response).

When you have a chatbot which can replies to more than 30% of customer queries (for some of our users, we've seen bots reply to more than 90% of questions), it'll save plenty of money and time for your business.

About discoverability, well, how did your customers find your Facebook page in the past? Why do we need a special way to "discover" now? Maybe for "game and entertainment chatbots" a bot store would work, but I just don't see how it would work for serious businesses.

How can a business leverage bots right now?

  - quick data collection
  - instant answers to frequently asked questions
  - surveys and polls over chat
  - lead nurturing via Messenger (engagement rates > 70% compared to low read rate of email)

You can use Convox https://convox.com to easily (almost as easy as Heroku) manage deployments on AWS

Not sure when you tried Convox – maybe they have improved since then – but my experience with it last week has been amazing (migrated our application from Heroku).

It was almost as easy and quick to setup as Heroku. All the docker and AWS config was automatically done by Convox. The only issue I had was with Docker: an old Docker Toolbox installation left some environment variables preventing Docker for Mac from starting.

Granted, I have some previous experience managing deployment on AWS via AWS CLI and dashboard so maybe that's what made me quickly understand Convox concepts.

My only regret is I didn't setup with Convox from the start. :)