Howdy PH! Founder of pingpong here. We built pingpong to prioritize long periods of uninterrupted work – or "deep work" to use the in vogue phrase – so your team can be more productive. We've combined the best parts of chat and email to enable a better, calmer way of getting things done with your teammates. While we liked some of the things that came with real-time chat apps like Slack, we realized that it largely decreased our ability to focus and raised anxiety levels with things like the barrage of notifications for messages that aren't urgent, intermixed conversations, fear of missing out on a conversation, and the green, "presence" dot (aka hey everyone, I'm available to be interrupted). We liked the asynchronous nature of email, but email threads can become a nightmare. We found we preferred the clean separation of keeping email for external communications. Overall, we came to the conclusion that nothing out in the market quite fit what we were looking for – especially as a distributed, remote team – so we scratched our own itch. A few distinctions about pingpong that I think are helpful to highlight: 1) All conversations are threaded by default. Context ftw! 2) Conversations you're already participating in are separated from new conversations. 3) There are 2 ways to mention someone: 1) when you need them urgently, you can "ping" them 2) when you want to make sure someone sees a message but it's not urgent, you can "lob" a message 4) We got rid of the "presence" icon :) We’d love for you to give pingpong a spin and give us some feedback. I'm happy to answer any questions!

My team has been part of the beta and we love it so far! It's really nice coming from other messaging apps where I feel like I'm constantly interrupted or there's a pressure to always be "on" the app so people know I'm there. pingpong allows me to really focus on my work and get things done because I know I'll receive message interruptions if they're necessary, but otherwise I can do my own work and read the other stuff later.

Pros:

easy to use, messages are organized and threaded, I'm not interrupted from my work unless it's really necessary

Cons:

So far so good! Since I was using the beta, I think there are more features to come, so I'm excited to see where it goes.

NA

Pros:

This is a breath of fresh air from slack

Cons:

NA