Stedman Blake Hood

Dispatch - Priority inbox for Slack

Do you spend hours a day in Slack?

With Dispatch priority inbox you can...
✔ Stop missing messages
✔ Focus on your top priorities
✔ Prioritize messages based on sender, channel, message content, and more

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Stedman Blake Hood
Hello hunters! @cathy_chen, @danielde, and I are super excited to share that as of today Dispatch is out of private beta. This means anyone can sign up and start using Dispatch as their priority inbox for Slack! How we got here: We started building Dispatch after experiencing the "always on" chaotic culture of modern work at our last jobs. We were constantly juggling messages, to-dos, and tickets. We wanted to focus on our top priorities without risking things slipping through the cracks. In a flood of messages, we struggled to answer the question: "What's the most important thing that I need to see right now?" And so we built Dispatch. How it works: • Treat conversations as to-dos. Archive them when you're done to achieve inbox zero. • Noisy conversations? Mute them so you can get back in the zone. • Blocked on something? Snooze a conversation until you’re ready to take action on it. • Prioritize messages based on sender, channel, keywords, and more… so that you can focus on your highest priorities. What you can expect: ✔ Stop missing messages ✔ Focus on your top priorities ✔ Get more done in less time Promo We’re offering the PH community 10% off (forever!). Use promo code PH230216 at checkout. Thanks! Thank you to all our early users and PH community for your feedback after our last launch. We've since been working hard on improving Dispatch. We couldn’t have gotten here without y’all. ❤️ That said, we're still in the early days, and have much yet to learn. So if you live in Slack, we’d love to hear about your challenges, and how Dispatch could help. 👉 Give it a try here 👈 – macOS only – Windows coming soon!
ZHENG Haibo
@cathy_chen @danielde @stedmanblake , **Congrats on the launch** , very clear idea. I believe it's a game changer for those who use Slack heavily for community or customer management
ZHENG Haibo
BTW, can you tell me how to use rich text content in the comment? Like this one above 👆🏻
Andrew Linfoot
super excited about this!!! have been waiting for the public launch for months. now I can get my whole team onboarded 🙌 congrats!! @cathy_chen @danielde @stedmanblake 🎉
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks @andrewlinfoot! 🚀
Stedman Blake Hood
@oe_zheng gold old HTML baby!
Gray MacKenzie
I've been a daily Dispatch user for the past 4 months and it's taken my Slack game to the next level. The simple stuff (like snoozing messages to custom times + much easier than native Slack) has been so helpful for managing and properly prioritizing the hundreds of channels I'm in. At ZenPilot, we run all of our client support on Slack and Dispatch has been a key tool in the tech stack. Big congrats to @stedmanblake, @cathy_chen, & @danielde on the launch here and move out of private beta 🙌
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks so much Gray - it's been a joy to work with you and help you scale yourself at Zenpilot. Onward!! 🚀 @cathy_chen @danielde @sgraymackenzie
Alex Bass
This is one of those rare products that doesn't come about very often. I signed up about 6 months ago slightly skeptical (having tried many inbox aggregating across apps tools, even ones that include Slack), and all I can say is this one is different. It's still Slack, just 10x better for personal use or team. Infact it actually gets better with more team using it, but I'd continue using it even if my team didn't (again, rare). I use Slack as the central brain for my company, so #sales channel where new leads are flowing in, #admin for bookkeeping, #support for customers. Add in all the Slack Connect channels that everyone is moving to, and it's easy to understand how overwhelming Slack must be for most teams. Dispatch let's you prioritize your notifications, so you can get more focus work done, without missing the important messages. Want to be alerted by team DM's and only channels that contain your @username or maybe just when a customer writes into support with the word "important". Or heck, maybe only when XYZ customer writes into support. Notification triaging is so flexible, and you can have an important inbox, other, and anything in-between. Then working through the notifications, you have the quick ability to archive and snooze (anyone who has used Superhuman will immediately understand the time savings there). It's what I would have wished Slack would have built, but better, because Slack would have to totally rethink how it was built and overhaul everything to work like this. It's one of those rare apps that an API-first solution drilling into Slack is actually the best way to solve this and make Slack better. Blown away by the team at Dispatch and my team and I will for-sure be a lifetime customer (genuinely, no one on my team is willing to go back to normal Slack anymore 😅)
Cathy Chen
@alexhbass Thank you so much for all the feedback (and bug reports) you've given us these past couple months :) The product wouldn't be where it is without you.
Alex Bass
@cathy_chen 👏👏 course! Super excited for where it's headed, but also a total happy camper if it stayed the exact same way. It's so impressive and rare that your team has managed to build a product like that 🔥
Zach Gramstad
💎 Pixel perfection
Been using Dispatch for the past 6 months and loving it. Can't imagine going back to the old way of slack.
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks @zach_gramstad! It's been a pleasure 😁
Dave Fontenot
Oh wow does this work across multiple slacks? I'm in way too many rn and the notifications are so intimidating that I'm usually hesitant to even open a lot of them at this point.
Stedman Blake Hood
@davefontenot you're in good company 😅😅😅 -- and yes! With Dispatch you can connect all of your Slack workspaces into a single, unified priority inbox.
D Law
I was responsible for the customer experience (pre and post sales) for years at a large SaaS company and something we struggled with was the pull towards (broad) customer support and interactions via Slack. Not only did our customers want it, we wanted it as well and knew it was best to engage with our customers where they were at/were most comfortable but how would we do it at scale? Common concerns: * How do we prioritize channels? * Who “owns” the channels? e.g Sales? Support? CS? TAMs? * Slack interactions can fall into “hidden” work, how can interactions be tracked and analyzed to account for workload? * Gracefully transitioning asks or issues to more appropriate channels, such as ticketing or product tracking * If everyone “owns” a channel, nobody does and messages fall through the cracks * How are interactions managed when people are on calls, in the field, outside of time-zones, etc? * Having to managing cognitive workload across all of the workspaces and channels required to operate this new model and worrying about employee burnout and churn * Native client features and bots are helpful (mark unread, reminders, etc.) but highly prone to human error and sometimes beyond basic users skills Furthermore, the aforementioned needs to be considered operating this at scale for 100’s to 1000’s of prospects and customers. Not only was this a problem for us at my last company but as I spoke with more startups I learned they were falling into the trap of supporting this for their customers on day 1 and being completely overwhelmed as their business started to scale leading to the channels being "noise" and providing nearly no value to their customers. I evaluated multiple tools in this space over the years but nothing checked off all of the boxes in the way Dispatch has - it's quite literally the perfect product for my use case. I'm excited to see how this continues to evolve.
Stedman Blake Hood
Really appreciate this context, Dustin -- so eloquently phrased! A lot of this rhymes with the notion: "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."[0] Dispatch takes the utter lack of "system" and wraps structure around it, so that the systems can prop up teams to reach their goals. I'm humbled that you've found Dispatch to be the perfect solution to your problems - and grateful to have you in our corner! 💪 @d_law Onward! 🚀 [0] James Clear, Atomic Habits https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/jan...
Denis Galka
Hey there! Congratulations on the recent launch of Dispatch on Product Hunt! 🎉 Looks similar to Chat Folders in Telegram where you can prioritize chats in order not to get lost in them. Am I right?
Stedman Blake Hood
@denis_galka Yep! I use Labels and custom Inboxes to organize my messages similarly to Telegram's Chat folders. https://www.dispatch.do/articles...
Umar | SaaS Guy
Congrats on the launch! It sounds like Dispatch is an innovative way to help prioritize your work. I'm curious, what are some of the biggest challenges that people face when trying to manage their inboxes? How does Dispatch help alleviate those challenges?
Stedman Blake Hood
@heyumarkhan The biggest challenges are 1/ separating the *highest priority* messages from everything else 2/ keeping track of the *status* of tasks and to-dos that come in as chat messages Dispatch solves these: *Prioritization*: creating separate inboxes for each "bucket of work" that you get in Slack. Messages from customers, DMs from teammates, and important bot notifications can all be routed to custom inboxes based on Rules. www.dispatch.do/articles/what-ar... *Keeping track of messages*: all messages stay in your inbox until you've explicitly taken action on them - marking them ✔️ Done or 🕥 Snoozing them until later
Huy Doan
Simple but very helpful! Congrats guys on the launch!
Paolo De Giglio 🚀
Congratulations on the launch @cathy_chen, @danielde! 🎉 I'm so excited to see Dispatch out of private beta. This is such an amazing feat! Thanks for all the hard work you have put in to make Dispatch available to everyone. 🙌 I'm sure many more people will benefit from it now. Wishing you all the best! 🤩
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks a ton for the kind words @paolo_degiglio!
Matthew Busel
Absolutely epic product from an incredible team. Solves a major problem. Hats off!
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks @mbusel - means a lot coming from a prolific builder like you 🙇‍♂️
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks @inaherlihy -- you've been such an amazing supporter. Grateful to have you in our corner 💪
nuric
Congrats on your launch 🚀It's really interesting because Slack comes forward to solve a problem, it does, but then creates more problems that are unique to it 🔥I love how Dispatch seems to address one of the biggest of them all. Having instant communication across a company might sound great, but my experience has definitely been more like a torrential rain flood and I think I found a solution with Dispatch as a flood barrier. I have one question, some of the features that Dispatch offers doesn't seem like a long shot for Slack to directly implement. Do you have any future ideas to keep Dispatch relevant? Perhaps cross-platform support that amalgamates emails too, or the more recent hype surrounding GPT based solutions such as summarising your incoming messages.
Stedman Blake Hood
Hey @nuric - love this! Let's dive in... > It's really interesting because Slack comes forward to solve a problem, it does, but then creates more problems Well put - and that's exactly why we exist. > some of the features that Dispatch offers doesn't seem like a long shot for Slack to directly implement. Do you have any future ideas to keep Dispatch relevant? Perhaps cross-platform support that amalgamates emails too, or the more recent hype surrounding GPT based solutions such as summarising your incoming messages. Definitely. We see the problem as broader than just Slack -- it's the explosion of SaaS. Five years ago the average company had 8 SaaS tools. Today they have 110! So we'll eventually integrate all other SaaS tools -- CRM, Task management, Ticketing, etc -- to become the "universal priority inbox" for all knowledge work.
Alfonso Gómez - Jordana
I only onboarded to the Beta of Dispatch this week, and I already can't go back to regular Slack :) Dispatch should be the default UX for Slack
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks @alfonso_gomez_jordana - it's been a pleasure working with you + the team at Crossmint 🙇‍♂️
Earl Lee
Amazing for boosting deep work and working with customers via Slack
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks @earlvlee! We couldn't agree more 🤗
Zain Memon
This is awesome! Are y'all planning on building a mobile app?
Stedman Blake Hood
Absolultely @zain! This is a popular request from our users and we're excited to get the TestFlight app in their hands later this year.
Andra Vomir
Congrats team on the launch! 🎉 For anyone who hasn't tried Dispatch yet - take it from someone who hated going into Slack, Dispatch is a HUGEE upgrade to using Slack. It's a game-changer! Before Dispatch, I felt as if I was entering a washing machine of notifications. I was barely responsive to my team. Now I feel like I have "control" over my Slack messages, can label/organize messages, snooze what doesn't need my immediate attention and archive what I am finished with (instead of re-reading the same message over and over). My team noticed I became more responsive too. 100% would say to give it a shot 🤩
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks Andra!! @avomir It's been a joy to build a product used by such kindred spirits as you and the Efficient team 🙌
Noah MacCallum
Slack has become an absolute mess, this is def needed. Stoked to give this a try!
Stedman Blake Hood
I felt your pain @noah_maccallum1! You're in good company 😅 Excited to hear your feedback :)
Henrik Lenerius
This is exactly what I've been missing about Slack! I recommend every slack user to try it out!! Finally a sane workflow in Slack 🤪
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks for the kind words Henrik! We've loved building Dispatch alongside you - and your kind words make all our hard work worth it 🤗 🙏 @henrik_lenerius
Chintan Parikh
I've been using Dispatch for the last few months! It's incredible - really has changed to game for me
Stedman Blake Hood
Thanks @chintanparikh94! Your feedback has been incredibly helpful - Dispatch would not be where it is today without you 🙇‍♂️ It's been an absolute pleasure to work with you and help streamline your Slack comms