Hi HN,
I'm Jeff, co-founder and CEO of PingPong (https://getpingpong.com), where we help remote teams collaborate and stay connected by exchanging video, voice, and screen recordings asynchronously. Think of it as Marco Polo or Snapchat (sans ephemerality) for globally-distributed product teams.
We got the idea from our own experience on a different startup. Murphy, the co-founder and CTO, lives in Nigeria, and I live in the US (Utah). We had five other team members spread across three countries and four time zones. The problem for me as a team leader was how to share my ideas, feelings, and updates in a way that felt authentic and conveyed energy. I felt like I was spending my entire life either typing in Slack or scheduling Zoom calls at terrible hours. I had been kicking around the idea for our product in my head for months. At some point, I began thinking more about how to improve communication for distributed teams than what I was working on. In February 2020, after my second child was born, Murphy and I planned to slowly build a solution to these problems on the side. Then, the COVID situation exploded, and we knew it was time to go all-in. We pivoted our focus entirely. When we first started, our name was Girbil. The first version of the site is laughable: https://www.girbil.com/.
In synchronous work cultures, people expect contextual understanding in their interactions because it's assumed that everyone absorbs that context by osmosis in meetings, informal chats, and channels. Workers are used to having large portions of their day plugged into a flow of just-in-time information like a network. With asynchronous cultures, it's better to assume little or no prior contextual knowledge in every communication. Context is given by referring to documentation or by laying it out specifically. Workers are used to having large swaths of uninterrupted time to work deeply. Because we lived across continents, most of our work and communication had to be asynchronous.
We felt that current chat tools (e.g., Slack, Teams) are built for synchronous teams. You can see this in many of these products’ design decisions. For example, pressing enter sends a message instead of line-breaking, encouraging short-form messages that provide minimal context. Furthermore, the lack of a message workflow encourages a constant stream of low-value messages. By default, instant notifications are sent for every short message—even when the recipient is in do-not-disturb, the sender has the power to override. All these design decisions promote a constant flow of shallow, quickly-scanned information demanding immediate responses.
We want to build a communication product that better meets the needs of distributed product teams like ours—designed first for asynchronous teams across multiple time zones where it can be hard to get face time. We decided to start with video. We felt the medium itself, though not perfect, addresses a lot of the issues we experienced. With video, you tend to record only when you have something important to say. Most creators want to "sound good," so they put thought into what they're saying. Additionally, the listener can't "skim" the messages, and they receive a richer message in terms of intent, tone, and energy. Sharing an asset while screen recording adds another layer of depth and efficiency. But we're still trying to figure out how to maximize the above strengths of async video while mitigating its downsides (e.g., its linear nature). For example, we've limited face and voice recordings to two minutes to encourage succinctness (though screen-share recordings can be 10 minutes). We'd love to hear your ideas here. We've also made some design decisions to help teams focus. For example, instead of channels, we've built conversations. These are designed to be started with a specific goal and are very easy to leave, close, and end. Users can have multiple workspaces, but they’re hidden instead of ever-present.
We hope to ultimately build a Slack/Teams alternative designed for rich, asynchronous human interactions that encourages deep work. We still have a lot to build before we achieve this goal, and we'll need to incorporate text and file attachments at some point. Today, we use PingPong for 50-75% of our team communication. When we have to send a file or structured text, we use Slack. We love using our own product to collaborate as we work on it together.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and ideas—particularly if you'd like to share any limitations or frustrations you experience with Slack or Teams as we did. Thanks for reading!
All I can say is keep going. I've been feeling the absence of this for a while, and have taken to making occasional videos on Loom to supplement live meetings and Slack messages. But it's a disjointed experience, and Loom is not trying to be a collaboration tool at all. It would be great to have a solution that does the whole thing end-to-end, with a focus on being more async-friendly than Slack.
By the way, I downloaded the PingPong app, and it seems great. Are you selling subscriptions, or just putting the free version out there for now?
P.S. If you haven't read this article on Figma's growth strategy, I'd take a look. There are some parallels with what you're doing -- i.e. SaaS, collaboration-focused, and attempting to dislodge incumbents with a similar list of features, but less focus on collaboration pain points. https://kwokchain.com/2020/06/19/why-figma-wins/