Launch HN: Patchwork (YC W24) – Team communication based on feeds, not chat

[shahflow]

Hey HN! We’re Nikki and Dhruhin, co-founders of Patchwork. We’re building a communication tool for teams that lets you stay in sync while at the same time staying in flow. It’s centered around a ranked feed instead of chat.

Edit: as requested, here are some screenshots: - Feed: https://imgur.com/a/bvH7ypQ - Post Creation: https://imgur.com/a/HENe15A, Chat: https://imgur.com/a/MVyVykY.

Over the last several years, we’ve noticed that it’s getting increasingly difficult to stay in flow. We believe it’s because chat (i.e. Slack, Teams, and similar tools) has evolved into something it wasn’t designed for. Chat originally served as a way to free us from our desk by giving us the safety that if we were needed for immediate matters, people could reach us. Now it’s become a dumping ground for all communication: daily updates, product and engineering discussions, announcements, etc. Both of us still reminisce about the days of in-office work, before Slack became mainstream, where everyone abided by the headphone rule—the unwritten pact that headphones meant someone was in deep work and not to bother them unless you really needed to. Compared to then, the onus has now shifted to be on us to determine which chats are urgent and should take us out of flow vs. which messages can be responded to later. It feels like the very tool that was meant to liberate us instead made us beholden to its pings.

Patchwork is our attempt to solve this problem by shifting the primary communication model from group chats to feeds. Posts are made in relevant groups and each team member has a home feed personalized to them.

The feed algorithm evaluates each post's relevance and urgency based on a bunch of factors, including the post’s content, user's role, ongoing projects, and recent interactions. Our goal is to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio with our feed’s algorithm so we can surface the most important information first. When you’re not in flow or in between meetings, you can check the feed to stay in sync.

There have been feed-based work communication products before, but they’ve often overlooked the fact that writing a post has more friction than writing a chat message, which is why people often revert back to doing everything over chat. We’re combating this by using LLMs to create a better writing experience (ie. generate title and tl;dr, simplify selected content, change the tone, etc.).

As a product team ourselves, we know that much of our work happens on different platforms. We’re building integrations with the likes of Github, Linear, Figma, GSuite etc. Having all of this activity from different platforms also rolling into our feeds allows us to stay in sync with all the different work being done on our team instead of having to check various sources of data.

Lastly, we do have chat on the platform, but chat looks and feels like chat. It’s meant to be used for immediate needs.

Here’s a demo of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3rmSjNjDw

Since it’s a team communication product, it's hard to use it in single player mode, so we don’t have a “try it now” link to jump straight in. But you’re welcome to email us at [e-mail] and we’ll onboard your team.

The product is still early with a basic feed, a few integrations, and simple LLM assisted post creation, but the main flow is already there, so if the message resonates with you, we’d love for you to give it a try.

More importantly, we’d love to hear your ideas about team communication and getting it back to working for people, not at them!

https://www.atpatchwork.com/

[phailhaus]

From the video:

> The homefeed is ranked specifically for me, so it shows me what it thinks is most important for my work first

How can it really know this? It feels like this could fall in the trap that social media has, where there is no common shared experience because everyone has a unique feed based on opaque rules. Not only does this lead to fractured bubbles, but it's hard to know what you're missing, why, and how to "train" the algorithm to do better.

I agree that chat solutions tend to overwhelm users, but there is a huge advantage to everyone being able to go to a channel and see the same things sorted by time. Does Patchwork still support viewing a feed chronologically?

[mks]

Add the persistent anxiety that you are missing something you should not have and you end up with constantly refreshing the feed instead of working - just like social media and exact opposite of what you want.

MS Teams cause enough headache by sorting the messages by "latest updated thread" completely obliterating the mental model of the conversations in the channel I have.

Some ideas for ideal team chat:

* Automatically build threads or tag messages by topic in threads so you can easily filter out the topics interesting to you - often there are multiple discussions intertwined that should have been in separate threads but people just reuse the threads

* Collapse the resolved discussions into a conclusion (with option to view the discussion) - when the discussion goes into shootout of messages you might be interested only in the conclusion, not how they got there

* Announcements - sometimes you really just want to announce something (on company wide scale, team scale, or just personal Tweet sort of thing) - make these separate and browsable - here the automatic feed construction sounds appropriate

* Activity digest - at last workplace I liked the Confluence digest email as it brought attention to projects and topics I was not directly involved with - nothing happened if I missed those, but was nice to keep an eye on some of the initiatives

It is super important to make a tool the people can trust - no one likes to make or hear excuses like "sorry I did not see the message".

We definitely need better tools for communication, so keeping fingers crossed for your success.

[shahflow]

You can definitely view the feed chronologically as well. There's also notifications for things that you shouldn't miss. For the algorithm, we can use a variety of signals (post's content, relationship to author, interactions with groups and related posts) to surface posts we think are valuable for you to see first but definitely agree on the difficulty of building an one-size-fits-all solution. We're thinking through how to let users adjust their feed sorting preferences.

[burnte]

Yeah, I don't like the way algorithms sort my social feeds. Focused Inbox in Outlook is the single biggest step backwards in usability since the menus that hide things in the late 90s. The LAST thing we need is some other algorithm messing with my job.

[gwbas1c]

FYI: Your voice in the video is very quiet. You really need to normalize / boost / compress it.

One thing that's easy to forget is that technology does not solve political / social problems. The big problem is that far too many people think they can run around and interrupt people at any time for any reason, and no piece of technology will solve this. If you send them to a tool that breaks their ability to interrupt, then they will figure out a way to bypass the tool.

I think it's more important to advocate publicly to be conscious of how we interrupt each other. It's very important that interrupters recognize their behavior.

[pzs]

On your point about tech not solving social problems: I fully agree. Moreover, I think that tech _aggravates_ some of these problems. Case in point: why do some people think they can run around and interrupt others at any time for any reason? I think it could be related to having tech in our pockets constantly interrupting us throughout the day, which makes us operate in a new normal, where attention span a shorter, and where it's ok to just quickly check the notifications or just send a quick message while in a personal live conversation with someone.

A Faraday cage may become an important component to taking time for relaxing.

[shahflow]

Thanks! We'll boost the voice and re-upload the video. Agreed that technology doesn't solve the social issues at play and unfortunately policing behavior is hard. We think Patchwork can at least help the problem by having an alternative form of communicating rather than just chat. Then at least people can point interruptors to the tool and nudge them to use it.

[stevage]

How do you bypass a tool like this for a remote worker?

There is literally no way anyone can interrupt me when I'm working, unless they are already in my house.

[timwis]

One of the best ideas I’ve heard for having Slack without the pressure to keep up with it is to configure it to delete messages after a short time period. This lets you keep the live chat going with those who are around, but people know to put important notices they want others to read into some other outlet.

[shahflow]

Some larger companies are doing this with their chats (though for longer than 30 days) and it has forced people to put more things in docs. Unfortunately, the docs aren't easy to find later either.

[stevage]

Yeah it's a weird benefit of the free plan for low traffic teams. You can't use slack as the primary communication because some people may never see it.

[toddmorey]

Oh that’s very smart & as a bonus, the free plan does exactly that (only 30-day history)

[Brajeshwar]

Ideas seem to come when their time has come, irrespective of who conjures them and/or executes them. The new waves of Team Chat evolution are interesting to watch.

Recently, Manish and his team introduced Struct[1] in their Show HN, which was a breath of fresh air in a forum-ish avatar. It is modern, sensible, and appropriate for today.

Things will eventually change, and we will move on to the next. PatchWork looks interesting. Have you thought of your pricing plan? Best of luck to the team.

While I'm in an ideation mode, I think team chats might be more effective if treated as ephemeral, just like Text or WhatsApp. They are either to be acted on or moved to a more permanent format if they deserve to be. There was a video-conferencing tool that does just that: fire up a specific URL for a room and invite whoever you want and talk, then bye-bye. But right now, team chats are trying harder and harder to replicate how people converse in person, like in a meeting.

I do hope these new waves succeed; people like to use it and use it -- I usually can get used to any tooling or patterns that the others are comfortable with.

1. https://struct.ai

[shahflow]

Thanks for the support. Communication models definitely come in waves. Chat and the ability to instantly access someone no matter where they were was an extremely powerful tool when it came out. Now that its being overladen with all types of communication, it feels like people are ready for the next wave and it seems like feeds are definitely on the rise with struct.ai as well. Agree on chat being more an ephemeral form of communication and interesting to think about if we should start treating it as such.

[allanmacgregor]

This sounds a lot like google wave, and it failed spectacularly due to complexity and user interface, and as result a lot of friction for adoption.

How do you compare patchwork to google wave and what do you think you are doing differently?

[shahflow]

Google wave definitely got a lot of things right but we agree the UI was confusing and they tried to do a lot all at once. For Patchwork, we've definitely kept in mind ease of use and standard paradigms as we've built the product and also really utilizing LLMs where they're helpful (i.e. summarizations for catching new people up).

[rashidae]

I’ve been involved in the product development of inbox and chat interfaces, and I’m having a hard time imagining the applications of this product.

Though, I’d like to comment that there are two separate ideas that I will reflect on which are:

1) How LLM’s can be implemented to create more complex forms of content, with little to none human input. (Automatically adding context like title, summary, hashtags, images…)

2) The ranking, or algorithmic idea of changing “chat” to “posts” thus it’s concept development can evolve towards a Feed…

I wish you the best, thank you for sharing the demo and images. The UI looks great.

[burnte]

> Chat originally served as a way to free us from our desk by giving us the safety that if we were needed for immediate matters, people could reach us.

No, that was email. Chat was made as an ephemeral but real time medium for low-lag async communication in place of phone calls and texts. It works great for that.

> We believe it’s because chat (i.e. Slack, Teams, and similar tools) has evolved into something it wasn’t designed for.

Very true. They took chat and tried to make it email and sharepoint, but worse.

> Now it’s become a dumping ground for all communication: daily updates, product and engineering discussions, announcements, etc.

THIS is why it's bad now, not because it doesn't have enough features, but people people decided to shove everything into chat and it was never meant to do that.

> Patchwork is our attempt to solve this problem by shifting the primary communication model from group chats to feeds. Posts are made in relevant groups and each team member has a home feed personalized to them.

Sharepoint does this I'd be astounded if those features were used by even 10% of sharepoint users. No one does it because no one wants to blog at work, they want to work.

> There have been feed-based work communication products before, but they’ve often overlooked the fact that writing a post has more friction than writing a chat message, which is why people often revert back to doing everything over chat.

No, they overlooked that no one wanted to do it in the beginning. No one went to their boss and said, "Boss, I love working with my team, but I really want to BLOG at them too."

> Lastly, we do have chat on the platform, but chat looks and feels like chat. It’s meant to be used for immediate needs.

So you took out all the stuff that shouldn't be in chat and just... did that. So your chat client is smoother because you took all the crap and put it elsewhere.

I'm sorry, I could be totally wrong, but as someone outside of SV, working in companies that use these products, I don't think you have a large market. My heartfelt advice is have someone who spends a day a week looking at pivot opportunities.

[frankdenbow]

I like the vision around changing how companies communicate, webpage could give more of the theory side of things as you develop the product. Didn't fully understand the typical user flow or what kinds of posts are expected (i.e how it would differ from what you put on slack or a task tracker). More thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qkpg-Bg85k

[csmeyer]

We recently replaced slack on our team with Github discussions and phone calls/texts for really timely P0 type stuff.

This seems like a similar idea with a nicer UI. I don’t really see a huge upside on the “feed” aspect, but this would probably be an improvement over slack.

After getting rid of slack I feel this huge weight lifted off me, and there are far fewer distractions for stupid shitposts and little status updates that frankly just aren’t important to look at more than once a day.

[eightnoteight]

people who need to monitor a lot of channels are usually in senior/leadership layer, but one technique usually they follow is focus on a specific problem and consequently some set of specific channels for few weeks or a month and shift focus as the project/task changes

how are you thinking about capturing such dynamic decisions to choose focus area, happening outside the communication tool - like zoom or meetings etc,... algorithm can be real-time but even with data points from meetings etc,... can it be made in such a real-time?

instagram feed algo is pretty real-time but the number of unique behaviours or behaviours to people ratio is quite low. but I'm guessing in a work environment that ratio or the unique behaviours would be too high for the algo to react quickly, right?

[yellow_lead]

It seems like an oversight to have no screenshots on your landing page.

I resonate with what you said about deep work, but going do-not-disturb for a bit mostly solves this problem for me on Slack.

[shahflow]

Agreed, we've been heads down on building product; we'll update our landing page with screenshots.

Focus blocks are a must for getting focus time. Do not disturb on Slack is definitely one way to do it.

[shahflow]

We added screenshots to both the post and landing page. Thanks for the feedback!

[akho]

Why name a communication app the same word a long-standing other communication app is named.

[diggan]

Are you talking about SSB Patchwork that is a relatively small project that is also unmaintained and archived since ~2 years ago?

[rglullis]

Yeah, it's going to very confusing for all the 14 people using SSB.

[myself248]

Came here to say this, I was quite surprised to see the old Scuttlebutt app on the front page. Oh, it's not that, it's a different communication app with the same name.

[causal]

Congrats on the launch but I'm skeptical of the claims. Slack is distracting because talking to people is distracting, but also necessary. This just seems to rearrange where that happens.

[krageon]

Fundamentally too much communication interferes with doing real work. No amount of technical solution will fix what is essentially a social problem. The original post states the headphone rule: This is not a rule generally respected very well within actual offices, because people overestimate their own importance and the importance of their problems.

Fundamentally, other people and their communication should be ignored and regimented to specific parts of your day or week (depending on your role). You can do this with slack, email, phones, this tool. Simply turn off the notifications. Within the office you can only do this by having a door that can be locked, which is generally not available.

[shahflow]

Thanks! Agreed that talking to people is on a whole distracting but necessary. We think the problem is that not all daily updates, design and eng discussions and announcements need to be immediately talked about. The problem with chat is it's a time/recency based system. Patchwork attempts to separate out immediate discussions vs async instead of all of it being in chat.

[allanrbo]

Is it similar to Yammer?

[shahflow]

It's similar to Yammer in that the core communication component is a feed. However, Patchwork is centered on how teams get work done and not just community discussions which can be seen in both our workflows and our integrations with github, calendar, linear, figma, etc.

[jn31415]

Do you happen to be hiring for customer service roles?

[mattlondon]

A screenshot would be useful. I don't understand what a "ranked feed" means - who goes to lunch first? A picture speaks a thousand words.

[shahflow]

Agreed. It was an oversight and we're adding that in. We do have a demo on the HN Launch if you're interested in seeing more.

[dang]

We added a few to the text above. Thanks!

[MaximumMadness]

Congrats on the launch! A couple small things: When you toggle between light and dark mode the hero section on the homepage ends up selected. Also the padding on the home icon at the top is a little funky. It looks out of line with the rest the titles

More broadly - interesting idea! I worry about there not being much utility in the space that lives between full-fledged documents and quick messages on chat. Including a demo, walkthrough or screenshots on the site would help make that gap more digestable for me.

[shahflow]

Thanks for the feedback on the website. We'll definitely take a look and add screenshots and demos to that as well. There's a demo in the HN post if you're interested.

[sirtimbly]

Your design is very friendly and approachable. I appreciate the attempt to take another swing at this problem. I've been using Teams for a year now, and they are trying to do some of this same stuff, but what they missed was the key of the composing experience, being too high-stakes. Like you point out:

> they’ve often overlooked the fact that writing a post has more friction than writing a chat message, which is why people often revert back to doing everything over chat

Anyway, you have a really good idea with the LLM generated title and TLDR. I worry about not having trust in an algorithmically ranked timeline, so you might want to make that feature optional, or do a top-level tab like they did on twitter. Or give users ability to influence the rankings.

[shahflow]

Thanks! We really think a key part is driving down the cost of creating high value information content. LLMs can help with removing friction in creation in many ways but also improve readability for consumption! That's a fair point on getting the algorithm right for what everyone wants. We definitely will have the ability to switch to chronological but it's important we think through other ways to sort and filter through that information.

[usernamed7]

I believe Struct.ai works on a similar feeds idea

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39557188

[shahflow]

It's great to see other people are seeing the problem too. Definitely validates the space. We're a bit different in that we see Patchwork's home page as the overview of everything going on in your team both on and off platform.

[oooyay]

Would it be disingenuous to suggest this reminds me of a changelog with an API? I do think there's room for that, especially with taking changelog notes and turning them into something public. The product feels a little less focused in that vein though, so I'm not sure.

[shahflow]

Not at all. Patchwork should be the home page to what's going on in your team. All of the changes and progress should role up into it and we should be able to help you see the ones most important to you. That's a lot of what the integrations are for.

[gjvc]

"It feels like the very tool that was meant to liberate us instead made us beholden to its pings."

same as it ever was. email is still abused as an notification system, for example. chat was destined to repeat some of those mistakes.

[colordrops]

I believe Google Wave was a similar product.

[dhruhin]

Definitely, we think Google Wave got a lot right but was too early.

[mihaichiorean]

or like https://www.workplace.com/ from a company called Meta

[ergocoder]

The team must be stellar to be able to get fund with this kind of ideas...

[esafak]

Try to be constructive; what's bad or good?