Twist 1.0 — More productive messaging for teams

@mrcalexandre @ami3k @hfauq @lucileforoni >what do you use as a watercooler, for casual chats, like "how everyone is doing",...? As a remote team, did you find another way to do it? Absolutely. We actually have a Channel called "Doist Lounge" for more async catching up and communication like what you mentioned as well as other announcements such as Out Of Office notices (where we often get to learn a lot about other cultures and their holidays as well). We also do have a chat that interestingly enough was called the Water Cooler at one point... but now it goes by "Generalist" (yeh, I know 🤣 ). The Generalist chat is more of a freestyle long-running general (anything) topic that keeps the camaraderie running all day every day.

@ami3k @hfauq @lucileforoni @odsamuels Hi, thanks for your answer Omar. It's really interesting that you switched from a sync chat to an async chat. you can be in full "deep work" mode.

@ami3k @lucileforoni @mrcalexandre Alex, you're the man! Thanks for your support and kind words. Great future ahead of you :)

@mattiheubner Thanks for beta testing! 😊 We are just about to launch an official integration with Zapier! Which lets you integrate Twist with hundreds of other apps. Check out https://zapier.com/zapbook/twist/ And we do have some internal integrations already built, e.g. with Todoist and Github. Check out https://twistapp.com/integrations We also have an open API https://api.twistapp.com -- which means that others can quickly build stuff on top of Twist. So integrations is something we are super passionated about 👍

@aleks_muse Thanks for being part of our beta testing team, Aleksandra! And we will blog a lot about how to make work deep and meaningful.

@aleks_muse Thanks, Aleksandra! It's been amazing to hear your thoughtful and constructive feedback during the whole beta phase. 💙

@chrisdolle We'll be thinking about Education and Nonprofit plans (free access or heavy discount) this summer, hopefully!

@chrisdolle I think there are a lot of reasons why tech companies don't spend resources on marketing to the education market, though a lot of them at least offer discounts for nonprofits and educational institutions (it's sorely lacking, but I've been trying to build a collection of tools with special pricing for education here: https://www.producthunt.com/@bar...). It's a difficult market to break into, and it's even more difficult to be profitable in this market. There are a lot of factors to this, but in general, education (especially higher ed) tends to be a sector of all-around low agility where change is slow to occur—much slower than an agile startup company, for instance. This affects all aspects of a university, including tech adoption, which means that unless a tech company is specifically an ed tech company, it's hard to justify spending marketing resources in this area. I'm an instructional designer and I build and maintain online courses at a university, as well as help faculty integrate tech into their instruction. I've been thinking a lot about why education is such a difficult market for tech companies lately. I've long been bothered by the fact that ed tech tends to be about 5 - 10 years behind all other tech sectors. From my personal experience working in e-learning at a couple of different universities where I've been tasked with pursuing adoption of new tools for an entire university, specific departments, and specific courses, I've been theorizing some contributing factors: - Diverse users: The diversity of the customer/client base at a university is huge. It may be one of the most diverse there is. I've found that university faculty, students, and staff run nearly the entire spectrum of technical aptitude, for starters. While some basic needs from tech are common, they're still very diverse. There's also a range of language proficiencies, discipline-specific needs (a mathematics major may need to use certain tools differently than an English or social work major)...the list goes on. Basically almost any difference there can be between people exists in the population of a university. While this is a wonderful thing, I think that creating tech that can serve such a varied audience is hard. - Legal: At my current university, any kind of large-scale tool adoption has to go through the Legal Department. There's a whole lengthy process to this that I won't get into, but it can take months or years to secure a contract for a single tool for a university. FERPA compliance needs to be evaluated, competing products need to be considered and factored into a feature-gap analysis, and the need for the specific tool has to be proven and sizable. All this info has to be collected and go through a lot of people before a purchase can even be considered, let alone made. It's a major process. - Adoption: It's incredibly hard to get faculty to adopt new tech. It's a problem at almost any university, big or small. A few tech-savvy faculty will adopt tools immediately, others may come around after the tools' value has been proven/evangelized by these tech-savvy faculty, but widespread adoption is very difficult. Faculty simply don't have to use any tools they don't want to, and it's hard to prove a tool is valuable enough for faculty to spend the time to learn and implement in their courses when they're already overburdened with instructional and academic duties. - $$: This one may be minor, but with a lot of universities, the budgets are always shifting. I've wondered if this makes universities a high-risk customer. While I'd also like more tools marketed for education, I understand any hesitancy tech companies have about this. I think that Twist could be great for education, though, as Slack is starting to make some waves with a similar use case to the one you described. Here are a few examples of faculty using Slack for courses that I think could easily translate to using Twist instead: - https://medium.com/peergrade-io/... - http://www.techrepublic.com/arti... - http://www.zachwhalen.net/posts/... Also, to your point about students answering each other's repeated questions, I've been looking into creating a chat bot for this. A few professors at other universities have used chat bots successfully in this capacity, and I think it could be a big help for faculty. Sorry this went so long! You hit on a big interest of mine 😅.

@yozzozo Twist and Todoist have two distinct jobs. One to discuss work, the other to track work. We have a guide on how to use both together: https://twist.zendesk.com/hc/en-... Adding a todo list, a calendar, gantt charts, and more to Twist would maybe take away the core value of the product: discussions with your team, on the record, on topic, in one place. We'll be creating more workflows between the tools.

@amix3k hugs to you Amir from Porto 🙌

@amix3k Beautiful app. I'm just curious about a few things. 1. You guys have been using this internally for a few years. How do you and your team decide whether a comment is better added to Twist or to Todoist. Currently the overlap is a bit confusing for me. I'm sure I'm missing something. 2) Why the choice to make threads into task in Todoist but no way to easily make individual comments into tasks in todoist?

@amix3k @therealchadhall We've got you covered, Chad! https://twist.zendesk.com/hc/en-...

@hfauq Think a few screenshots and examples would be helpful here. What would be really cool is press a link on the welcome (for team creators) That automatically puts the welcome process into Twist for your team ;)

@amix3k Hey, As a part of a remote team your apps seems to solve all my troubles. I am guessing this is sort of an alternative to Slack?

@eonpilot Thanks for sharing here!

@amix3k @oyeanuj Migrating data from Slack to Twist is a tough problem. We don't have a 1-on-1 mapping between the models. It's easy to do it for other group chat apps, but it's a bit different for us. Almost like importing your email into Slack. We'll be tracking interest and keep thinking about it though :)

@hfauq @amix3k Fair enough, but they could maybe be imported as archived channels which would atleast make them searchable.

@amix3k @oyeanuj @hfauq If a Slack has become too sprawling or grown unmanageable, then perhaps it's just as well that there's no easy import! Maybe what you'd want instead is a way to curate, vote, sort, or otherwise subset just what should come over, and then use that as a hook for making it happen.

@jodiroga Thanks so much for the thoughtful UX feedback, Jonathan! It's been really helpful

@rickhaasteren Thanks for the full support, Rick! 💙

@joe_kaz There's an adjustment period. We have a bunch of helpful articles on our Help Center at help.twistapp.com. For example, When to use threads vs messages? https://twist.zendesk.com/hc/en-... It will take a change in behavior to move from something that promotes one-line-at-a-time thinking to more thoughtful write-ups in threads. Education is challenging, but the reward is 10x.

@hfauq Thanks for the response. I suppose what I don't quite 'get' is that if you were to undertake the same education for a team of slack users (basically only add meaningful content not chit chat) then that leaves you guys with one USP. That is the ability to have defined threads within channels? Sorry if I am being critical but I am just trying to get to the value proposition. I thought it would be that the inherent structure of twist inherently lent itself to more normal conversation but this doesn't appear the case.

@dinuka_jayasuriya https://twist.zendesk.com/hc/en-... 👈

@salvafc Thank you, Sir!