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Flow — Beautiful team chat with tightly integrated task management
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My team switch to Flow a few months ago and we've been really enjoying it. Coming from Trello after it got a little bloated with all our process on top of the simple lists, this was just enough organisation on top to get things going again. I really recommend it for small teams.
Pros:More organised than Trello, MUCH lighter than Asana/Jira/etc
Cons:You need to know which parts to use, e.g. we tried the "Workspace" feature but that's clearly designed for bigger teams, not us.
During my last meeting, I switched between Trello & Slack every 30 seconds. There's an undeniable use case here.
@kkdub Hey Kelly -- absolutely! And we're going to make Flow's connection between chat and tasks even tighter over the coming weeks.
Can you guys elaborate on the thinking behind your pricing? It feels like one of those things where I'm looking for the fine print gotcha moment, so any additional clarity would be awesome
@jmsuth Hi Jon -- we don't believe that a 30-day trial is always sufficient time for bringing teams onto a new platform, so we've extended the trial duration to 'indefinite'. Flow is not feature-limited in any way -- and you can invite as many people to use it as you like -- but when it's clear that your team is really leaning on Flow for having discussions, planning projects, etc., we'll ask you to move to a paid plan. But only when it's obvious that you're getting value from Flow.
@userhue until you explained it like that, I was very confused by your "free" language: "Flow is free until you know it’s right, without any limits."
@andrewwarner But doesn't @slack integrate with task applications through their API? Not sure how it works, but I thought maybe there was a way.
I like it! It reminds me first version of Asana combined with Trello (cards FTW!:). Looking forward to try it on my next project.
I must be one of the few that don't switch task management apps easily (as neat as the app looks), and for that reason it's hard for me to see any challengers succeed without any sort of integration with existing tools.
Personally, Slack/Trello integration is a must. I could live without Slack, but I'm not switching off of Trello anytime soon (couldn't even if I wanted to as I work on many teams that use it).
I predict Slack will add task management and then it will be all over (you can even get simple task management using the slackbot/private channels and snippets). Or even better if they officially open up their app to third parties like Trello just did.
Glip (https://glip.com/) already does the same thing? I am not sure whats the difference other than the design. @awilkinson
As a long time user of Trello (and now Slack), look forward to seeing this in action.
Going to have my team take this for a spin.
I have been a long time Flow user, and was a bit surprised by the Chat release. I can see how in the long term this is a direction Flow would take with the app, but for now I wish the focus was on building an even better and more seamless task manager (offline use, 5day - calendar view on ipad, set up task time in day view, integration options).
Slack is great at what it does, and flow at what it does - I am hard pressed to find a reason to uproot our team from slack and onto flow chat. I cant imagine Flow will be able to compete with Slack as they continue to roll out new features, while also developing the task manager. I would have preferred to see a great slack integration if over time there were limits to that integration Flow could always develop its own native solution.
I still love what you all are creating with Flow and have no plans on leaving, just was a bit surprised and was hoping the new release would have been an calendar update, integrations or offline for the task manager.
Keep up the great work and thanks for all that you do, Dave
Wow, looks like I'm going to start a bright discussion about our use of Slack at the office. Awesome UI, awesome idea.
At my company we've been using the 'old' Flow for a while to create todo lists & tasks for the commercial team, but stopped using it because 70% of our team is technical and they prefer JIRA for full sprint/scrum/agile planning.
Always wanted to ask what type of team (commercial vs. tech in this case) is the 'use case' for Flow? (given that devs ask for a little more than just a short 'todo')
@jaapvannes Great question, Jaap. We can't be everything to every type of team. And we certainly have categories of teams that are more attracted to and remain with Flow: creative/design, marketing, sales, IT teams are all a nice fit. We've intentionally left out specific kinds of functionality from Flow, which automatically puts us out of the running for specific kinds of teams -- which is a good thing. Trying to force a poor match between product and people is a path to failure...
Congrats guys for a great launch and a great product!
I've tried to reach your numbers with nugget ( http://www.producthunt.com/tech/... ) but had no chance.
You're clearly today's PH winners :-D
We're now #4 behind PayPal and Nest.. hard to compete with them, but I guess you did. So congrats again!
@ovinegrean A very nice run, Ovi. We've been watching your votes climb all day. :-) Nugget looks terrific... lots of really positive comments, too. Continued success with it!!
@d4nyll Thanks, Daniel! We observed how people use Flow (and other task managers) and saw that there's plenty of discussion that occurs before a task or project is created. Those conversations were happening in email and meetings -- and in team chat tools.
For that last group, while having discussions in a chat tool was a time saver, there was still a noticeable amount of friction... created by having to constantly switch apps. We saw that people were having discussions but relying on someone to transfer/transcribe the chat outcome into the task manager... which didn't always happen.
And so we wanted to eliminate that friction and make it a no-brainer to have productive (and some non-productive!) conversations -- but know that the talk is easily turned into action.
It looks beautiful! Every pixel well-placed. And you can't really say "No" to the pricing scheme..
Can I ask how Metalab's work on Slack has influenced the decision process here? And do you see the chat part totally taking over the rest of the workflow?
@mmariansky Hey Matty. Great question ☺️
We've used a ton of chat products over the years—all the big ones—and while we found that they made us feel great, and super connected, we noticed that we actually got less done. We found that using chat was a little like having a manic brainstorming session. You leave a messy whiteboard and walk out feeling super energized, but then when you meet a couple weeks later you haven't actually moved the ball forward. We realized that if we didn't convert our big, messy conversations into next steps, nothing got done.
Of course, we used Flow for this, but we kept thinking "man, it sure would be nice if we could create tasks as we're talking" yada, yada, yada, 10 months later: Flow Chat! 😎✌️
@awilkinson Thanks, but to be more precise - other task/project managers chose to build a Slack/Hipchat integration, but you guys built a whole new Slack (and a very nice looking one).
I strongly believe that a lot of Slack's success comes from the early work done by Metalab, and I'm very very curious to see where this will go next
@mmariansky An integration didn't feel like a very elegant solution, and our customers kept asking us to add Chat to Flow. We'd much rather say "hey, we solved your problem" instead of "hey, we solved your problem, but go over there and pay more money for this other product".
WOW! 100% free until you feel it is right? Well..@awilkinson you definitely baited me to at least give it a try. ha
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