Launch HN: Café (YC S21) – Find the best days to go to the office

[TomNguy]

Hey HN, we're Arthur and Tom, 2 brothers from France and founders of Café (https://at.cafe/). Our app lets you decide where to work, depending on who’ll be at the office or working remotely.

The world is going hybrid (mixing remote and office) faster than expected. Companies are using spreadsheets to see who’s at the offices and who’s not. People want to see each other, but they never know when and where to meet.

We were employees in the same French company during Covid lockdown. When going back to the office (June 2020) we struggled to see our team. We were only a team of 8 people and it was a mess to coordinate everyone because we had no visibility over each other's calendar. We were doing Slack polls for every day in the upcoming week. We couldn't make a decision because we had no data! We started talking to other companies (up to 200 interviews) and everyone was struggling with spreadsheets... We thought there was a better way and launched our MVP (a simple mobile app) in private beta in September with 5 companies.

Our mobile and web app shows you who's at the office, how many seats are available, and who's working from another location. You are invited to set your status for the current week and next week (10 days of visibility) and it's done in 10 clicks. You decide where to work from based on who’s where.

We're making it easy and flexible—you can customize the whole experience (name/emoji of status), set only half days, and specify the city you're working remotely from. Our solution is as engaging as possible so people actually input their plans.

Most companies are using Café to make decisions with data when it comes to their office (should they move out? keep it?) and save money. Some have used it to organize events (e.g. pick the days where there's the most people to do team building). Some are using it to better onboard new employees in their hybrid team.

We’re not a desk-booking tool. We're focused on engagement and hybrid employee experience. Our software isn't only about what’s happening between the 4 walls of the office, that’s why we include remote folks in the experience to enable meet-ups inside and outside the office.

You can use Café on desktop and web mobile or directly through mobile apps to declare where you'll be working from. We integrate with many tools, like Slack where your status is automatically synchronized, or with HR tools where your days off and paid leaves are synced without having to do anything. Here are quick demos to see how it works: 1-minute demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOGPCXSIB8 and 3-minute demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSQu3e0LzzA

To sign up (https://app.at.cafe/), you only need to have a valid business email. We offer a free plan for up to 50 users. Like Slack, our Premium plan only charges based on usage (for active users), starting at $5 / user / month.

We know the Hacker News community has a lot of remote-first people and we look forward to reading all of your feedback. Many thanks!

[pimlottc]

First impressions from the landing page: it took me a while to realize what the product was. It’s basically a real-time location status dashboard for hybrid and remote teams? With an admin side that lets you set policies for remote schedules?

The initial messaging wasn’t super clear and it takes a while to get specific:

> Figure out where to work from.

Okay, it’s a tool to find remote working spaces? Like cafes and coworking spaces?

> A simple and flexible tool for hybrid teams.

Okay, it’s a tool, but what does it do?

> Essential to your hybrid workforce

Puffery, still vague.

> Spreadsheet aren't a suitable solution for organizations. Café was designed as a foundational tool for any hybrid team.

Spreadsheets? What spreadsheets are we talking about? And more vague and flowery words about how great it is.

> Help people decide where they work from.

> [diagram of two working spaces with user avatars]

Okay, again sounds like it’s going to help me find working spaces?

> Engaging & simple to use

I get it, the tool is awesome and easy to use…

> Set your schedule in seconds and see who's where today and in the future.

Ahhhh, okay, so this about sharing information about where people are. And the way I used it is by setting my own schedule.

[TomNguy]

Wow, thanks for the details in your feedback.

We'll rework the wording & landing page based on all the feedback, it's awesome, thanks again!

[avree]

Lol, thanks for this comment, I glanced at this and thought it was a search engine for finding remote working spaces (like coffee shops).

The header is literally "Figure out where to work from." but it's really "Decide if you want to work from home", as far as I understand.

[handrous]

"An easy[0] way for hybrid teams to see who's going to work where, to better coordinate shared work and foster team interaction"

[0] "delightful", "charming", substitute to one's taste for startupy-language.

[edit] improved significantly.

[mrkurt]

This is super interesting and I have an immediate feature request. If we could use this to coordinate travel we'd be all over it. We're geographically disbursed and getting people together in the same city is valuable, but a pain.

[TomNguy]

We're actually working on a 2 dimensions Map (localization and time) so you can view who's going to be in which city in the future.

That map will meet another feature (Events) where people can create an Event at a specific location (in or out the office) and specific date!

Would love to send you some screenshots of how it looks to see if it would answer your pain

[ianlevesque]

Super cool! Have you considered also being able to avoid specific people? I don't mean this antisocially, but more for sharing a desk or parking.

[TomNguy]

We thought about that feature, it would be "subscribe to someone" and being able to see your "highlights" as well are your team. I would answer your parking problem I guesss!

[Raed667]

I built an internal app for my company that is a less polished version of this.

My most liked feature was an interactive seating map of the office. So you can be assured that your desk won't be surrounded.

Glad to have some validation and see someone take this concept and make a product out of it. Best of luck!

[TomNguy]

We've also talked to someone from Sqreen (acquired by Datadog) who did the same, a simple app for internal purposes

Would love to have your feedback & impression on the product if you're down for a quick call

[mettamage]

My thoughts / feedback:

Maybe it's because I'm Dutch, but we use the English cally.com or the Dutch datumprikker.nl for these type of situations. To be fair, it's more a generalized version of "I want to pick a date with a group, but when can everyone be there?"

It's not as specific as the idea presented here. So I find it interesting to compare. I'm immediately noticing that the UI/UX helps to solve this problem. What would I'd like to see is a quick video with the happy path of user stories, so I can see how it works. Though perhaps that's better, because now I feel the need to create an account in order to see how it works.

[TomNguy]

Here's a quick video (1min) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOGPCXSIB8

And a longer video (3min) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSQu3e0LzzA

[908B64B197]

A few comments

> Our mobile and web app shows you who's at the office, how many seats are available, and who's working from another location. You are invited to set your status for the current week and next week (10 days of visibility) and it's done in 10 clicks. You decide where to work from based on who’s where.

If I say I'm working from home this week but decide to go to the office one day, can Café correct my status?

Also, can it auto-book conference rooms based on the number of participants whose location is known?

Is there a way to set status as "away" or "vacation time"?

Other than that, looks good!

[TomNguy]

1. Café can't "automatically correct" your status, but if you're using the Slack integration, you'll see that what's displayed isn't right.

2. We're working on the Calendar integrations (Google Calendar and MS Outlook) to crack that topic

3. Yup, it's even linked with the company's HR system to automatically sync your paid leaves in Café!

[whall6]

Absolutely love this. I don’t know much but my spidey senses tell me this is the next big thing.

One issue though with pricing: most teams I know are less than 20 people. I work in product with two tech teams. Outside of that I don’t really care who’s in the office. I wonder if most people will just create their own accounts for their own teams even though you might have 100s of people across the same enterprise using your product. Just a thought.

Keep up the good work! Really intuitive UI and took me seconds to set myself up.

[TomNguy]

Hope your spidey senses are working fine!

We offer a free plan up to 50 seats for team that want to use Café with their own team indeed. The most value comes when the whole company is on the product though.

Thanks for the support

[MattGaiser]

> Monitor your hybrid policy

A lot of us would rather HR have to march around and guess at this :)

That being said, this would do a lot better job than BambooHR, which is the current tool we are using for this.

[TomNguy]

BambooHR is great for holidays, that's why we're integrating with them to get paid-leaves from people and sync them directly in Café. It's easier and it makes the data live within Slack

[swapsCAPS]

Really like the look and feel. Good job! I feel like this could be expanded to a more social level. Meet up with friends at the cafe (eyyy), students at the library, gym buddy's at the gym, etc. I saw datumprikker being mentioned already, Café could indeed be a more ad hoc version of that. Not really "planning" anything, but just nice to know some buddies of yours will be somewhere. Best of luck with the launch!

[TomNguy]

Thanks, really appreciate!

We plan to focus on the Social experience between people (from the same company at first, then we'll see!)

[deanclatworthy]

We have a simple way of doing this for our one office of about 70 people. A message to slack the day before asking if you’ll be at the office the next fag and a hand up emoji if you’re going to be there.

The main problem with this is people forgetting to do it or not paying attention to it. There have been a few days I’ve gone in to find far more people than I’m comfortable with. How do you solve this problem?

[TomNguy]

Every admin can set the max office capacity (nb of seats) and when reaching that limit, people need to double confirm they want to go to the office while there's an over capacity.

If there's an over capacity, we give the information to everyone (users & admins) and let admins resolve this conflict with a dataset of info (like the position in the queue or the teams)

In your case, if people don't pay attention to the "booking system" then they can't complain about not getting access to your office though

[prakhar897]

How will you convert this to a billion dollar company. From my perspective you could never have a better lockin than slack. Because all employees use slack and when they roll out this product as a feature then you will have a difficult time convincing others that they should use a separate app for communicating their work location.

[TomNguy]

We only use Slack as a display channel because our value is in the agenda visibility.

If Slack rolls out a "work location status" it'll be mostly for the "right now" moment (like our integration) and if they plan to extend this feature in an agenda, it'll be very difficult to make it exist within all the other features that are for "live communication"

[Fraaaank]

> "Help your team, set your status"

Not being able to skip this step is incredibly confusing and annoying

[TomNguy]

Thanks for the feedback! We'll find a better way to make this step optional

[landemva]

For traditional companies, this functionality in MS Office calendar could be useful. Then sell subscription to 100+ person companies.

My approach was to make my MS Office calendar fully visible to my boss. Communication via documentation of my calendar.

[TomNguy]

We're adding the MS Office Calendar integration this week! Companies we're serving are starting at 100 people, you're 100% right!

[benguild]

Reminds me of our Café Wifi project https://benguild.com/contents/#Caf%C3%A9%20Wifi

[Kaze404]

That sounds like an incredibly useful platform. Why was it discontinued, if you don't mind sharing? Is there anything like it that's still active?

[rubyfan]

Am I alone in thinking pricing seems too high at $60/year per user for any reasonably large organization?

[quadcore]

we look forward reading all your feedbacks

Let me propose my humble (and free) help for the anglish: zero sept sixsixsix 809 65, Ill send you my email address by sms / whatsapp.

[TomNguy]

Thx for the help :)

[captainmisery]

2 typos on the frontpage:

- Spreadsheet should be spreadsheets

- Quickly onboard your people on any devices. Should be device.

I don't like the term "your people". They are not your people.

[TomNguy]

Many thanks, we're going to update that right away!

[Invictus0]

Looks like a cute app, but why are you taking VC money? By my napkin math, for this to be a billion dollar company, you need at least 3 million paying MAU.

[arcturus17]

Are you questioning whether the total addressable market for this is 3 million MAU?

Is that really outside of the realm of possibility if they become absolute leaders in this space and entrench themselves in a quasi-monopoly?

[f6v]

> but why are you taking VC money

I heard money is cheap and abundant, so people take it. I can relate, it gives you confidence. And let’s be honest, without a “big vision” and VC money this is just a $2k MRR business.

[mrkurt]

If you can get seed funding in 2021, it's almost silly not to take it. Especially if you're building a self service, pay per user business.

[TomNguy]

Thanks!

We want to build the hybrid tool that's improving Culture and Socialization through companies, not just a quick feature like Slack statuses

[dabeeeenster]

Getting invalid client_id when connecting with Slack

[qloo]

How does this compare to Officely?

[TomNguy]

Officely's a Slack app (where Café is a iOS+Android+Web app)

Also, Officely have more restrictive features (you can't do everything within Slack)