Shameless plug here, but this is exactly why we built Carrot ( OSS / SaaS https://carrot.io/ )
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.
My co-founder and I started building Carrot a few years ago as a result of our experiences at distributed startups. Our biggest challenge was always the same: communicating a clear direction, getting everyone aligned, and then keeping them aligned as conditions and strategy change.
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 [email protected].
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/
This is something I've never really thought about, the ethics of reference checks. Is anyone aware of a good guide or thoughtful article on the subject?
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.
We're built an open source project quite similar to Stripe Home, it's available as SaaS (https://carrot.io) or it's all OSS to host your own (MPL V2 License). Check it out if you'd like: https://github.com/open-company
It's interesting, we've talked to a LOT of companies about this as customer research for our SaaS product (https://carrot.io) and 150 is actually where this problem become unbearable. We see this problem first come up consistently at 30 people, become a major problem at ~100 people that starts to get lots of attention inside the company, and becoming a real hindrance and burning issue if not addressed at ~150+.
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.
This is an important original post, and I wish the Slack community were having these conversations more often and openly.
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/