It's time to build the common ground between remote teams. The only place to truly work together across roles without juggling many tools. Allo is your first remote workspace.
Hi Hunters! 👋
I'm Ray, Co-founder of Allo (formerly BeeCanvas).
November last year, we rolled out BeeCanvas on Product Hunt. And, we have learned a lot from our users over the past four months.
We built a best-in-class online whiteboard for real-time brainstorming or ideation but we realized we could solve a bigger problem. As it turns out, our users loved using us to communicate with their team asynchronously with our visual and interactive docs. So, the concept of 'online whiteboard' wasn't enough to describe what we built, and we've decided to rebrand our product to help users perceive our fundamental value.
Today, I'm thrilled to introduce our new name, Allo. Allo is the space where you work when you are not in the office. With Allo, you can work confidently with a team whenever or wherever you work.
All of us are having a difficult time due to COVID-19. We no longer commute to our workspaces; now, instead, we do meetings using video conference software like Zoom. For me, aside from the Zoom fatigue, it was harder to convey my ideas without the context surrounding in-person meetings— that's where Allo kicked in.
In retrospect, without Allo, I couldn't have worked with the distributed teams in SF and Seoul. Allo has been a virtual office for our team, not just an online whiteboard. The fundamental value of Allo is helping us overcome the difficulties we face due to the timezone, location, cultural and language differences. We use Allo every day for discussing our ideas, initiatives, design, and plans. I promise we will develop Allo even more, with our true north of solving distributed teams' problems. We are also actively developing our mobile apps with the same standard of excellence to ship next month.
The Product Hunt community has helped us reveal our new vision.
Thank you all, and Ryan!
TL;DR: We are rebranding the product to deliver our core value clearly and the idea came from our users. BeeCanvas is now Allo. I'm delighted to announce we are launching the Allo desktop app.
Why you should download the Allo desktop app
-Fast performance and reliability
-Desktop notifications
-Seamless and excellent video chat
-More features made exclusive for the desktop app will be updated soon
Next up
-iOS, Android apps
-Better experience for iPad
-Custom template builder and template gallery.
-Integration with your daily apps
Free 3-month Team trial for Product Hunt: Normally, the Team plan is priced at $12/user, but for the next 72 hours only, it'll be complimentary for the next 3 months when you sign up using the link: http://bit.ly/allo-for-desktop
We're so grateful for your support. Without you, this wouldn't be possible.
Ray
Co-founder of Allo
@raymond_hong Downloaded and played around a little. It honestly looks very well built!
Some things that I like:
- Presentation mode - this looks really good if say I want to present the work to the team, I can present the whole screen with greater focus on the presented info.
- Ability to draw - Not many collaboration platforms allow this.
- Segregating information into segmented pages - this may be quite underrated in my opinion, as it allows us to organize our information and thoughts better. Without this, I think I'd tend to just have an information diarrhea.
Do you intend to create a web app for this in the future?
All the best!!
@raymond_hong I could relate the challenges, yesterday i was trying to create a wireframe using figma and today quarterly updates all in different platforms.
I do see real use cases. Looking forward to try out.
Suggestion: I was on 'Whats new" page and i was unable to go back to home page unless i hit a back button. I would suggest to change the logo url(blog.allo) to homepage url.
I've used this before it was rebranded (BeeCanvas). I think the whiteboard-based workplace by the BeeCanvas was kinda first-ever introduced at that time, and now many of famous services like Google Meet copy the feature. I'm so excited to see this huge update and the rebranded version, ALLO. Great job 💪
@andrew_cho hi Younghwi - thanks for your comment! It’s always nice to hear from our user like you and this is such a great compliment! Look forward to hearing your feedback. :)
As a current Allo (and former BeeCanvas) user, I can say that @raymond_hong's product has made a massive impact on our team's velocity. By taking the best parts of our favorite tools and combining them into one, we can brainstorm, prototype, and leave feedback all in a single place. It's our source of truth for anything visual. Highly recommend checking it out.
@ryochiba Hi Ryo, thanks for giving us feedback about our product. I'm glad that Allo can help you collaborate with you team efficiently. Look forward to receiving more feedback from you!
@eugenehp Hi Eugene, thanks and we do have a really cool logo & mascot. Our product's features & functions can cover up the ones you mentions but it doesn't necessarily indicate that we are completing with them now. We'll continue to strive to live up to our users needs and will do our best to focus on building our product for our users.
Cool product! I have been looking for a solid product to reduce back-and-forths in remote teams. How did you come from BeeCanvas to Allo? Pretty "drastic" change in name, but I like it.
@sarahxjo Hi Sarah, thanks for your comment! We've built a product that helps teams reduce back and forths and increase efficiency 10x while working remote. We love both names BeeCanvas and ALLO, and I think we got really hooked when we first thought about the name!
I think this tool has even more strength in the K12 market! There is no tool that combines collaboration, video, and visual navigation. DM if you want to chat
Hey @raymond_hong, kudos for the rebranding! Good job! I'm wondering, is redirecting hunters from PH to downloading the desktop app is in line with reaching setup moment? Or is it more like an anchor - the user is more likely to reach an AHA moment and develop the habit within the app, not in the web? I'm just curious :) Good job out there!
Hi Przemek, That's a good question. Actually, We built a desktop app using electron. (So, I can say It's technically a web app) We've launched a desktop app to unlock desktop-only features such as native notification and multi-window video chat. Also, It's way faster than Allo web version.
Good job, Ray.
Congratulations.
1-It would be great if you explain how to use it in detail with a few videos.
2-Calendar feature is not very efficient. You can improve a little more.
3-It would be very good in a plain visual to remove the complexity.
4-It looks a lot like Trello. There may be some criticism about this. At this point, a different visuality can be obtained.
5-If the number of ready-made templates is as high as the notion, it will be much more appropriate. People are tired of creating templates.
6-This criticism is not just for you. Many new applications make this name mistake. Craft, notes, click, chunk, pomodoro etc. Dozens of apps are starting out with previously used names. This is a serious mistake. When people search by this name, they go to different companies. Serious waste of time. A name used in Allo.
It would be much better if you could choose a different name.
7-The price is too high. It's really noisy.
Many people constantly make monthly payments for different applications.
Like Netflix, adobe, rescuetime, excel, apple, things / todoist (yearly) ... Your price is a very high price. New applications-initiatives miss this point. The financial situation of people is not very good. It is very difficult to leave previous subscriptions and move to a new location.
At this point, the price issue may cause some trouble for you.
8-Despite everything, it is a good project. Cleverly thought out. It is very suitable for development. We can talk a lot about that. But I don't want to take much of your time.
I wish you success.
@son_nun Hi Son Nun, appreciate it! This is a very helpful comment/feedback and great insights. We'll share this within our team for the product's next iterations. Thanks again for your time and feedback.
Congrats to all of you. I'm really excited to use it. On the other hand, I also wonder why you are making a desktop app instead of the web app. It is really a brave decision.
@kdrnp Hi Kadir - thanks for the great question! We actually launched our web app a few months ago, and today we subsequently launched our desktop app to broaden the spectrum of use and strengthen the user experience. Your feedback would be much appreciated!
@alxvok Hi Alex, thanks for your comment and yes - we built this to support the teams like yours. It eliminates time and effort to work together in both real-time and async situations. Our product covers the functionalities of project management and whiteboarding that Miro & Trello could do, so you will have a lot fewer back-and-forths between the platforms.
@ahussan_official hey Ahbab - thank you so much for swing by our post and appreciate your comment! We’ll do our best. Hope you like our desktop version and look forward to hearing your feedback.
This is a game changer! Even with a very small team, we need to juggle tens of tools to achieve what Allo provides in a single space. Congrats on the launch, will definitely sign up for a trial!
CookieJar