Twist
p/twist
Tame chaotic teamwork with Twist
Amir Salihefendic
Twist 1.0 โ€” More productive messaging for teams
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Twist is the communication tool for teams that need to protect their time to create. It's designed to be more focused with structured channels and threads. Thereโ€™s more to work than keeping up with group chat all day.

Replies
@ChuckReynolds
So it's a forum. in an app.
Hugo Fauquenoi
@chuckreynolds ๐Ÿ˜ฎ๐Ÿ˜ฎ๐Ÿ˜ฎ๐Ÿ˜ฎ๐Ÿ˜ฎ๐Ÿ˜ฎ
Diego Saez Gil
Great work guys. Looks amazing
Amir Salihefendic
@dsaezgil Thanks Diego!!
Matti Heubner
Congrats on the launch! Already participated in the beta and loved it! Also great to see that you are open for integrations - can you share anything about upcoming ones?
Amir Salihefendic
@mattiheubner Thanks for beta testing! ๐Ÿ˜Š 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 ๐Ÿ‘
Amir Salihefendic
Hi, Hunters! I am the Founder & CEO of Doist, and I am here to answer any questions. You may know us as the makers of Todoist, but today we are unveiling Twist, a communication app for teams who believe thereโ€™s more to work than keeping up with group chat and chaotic email threads. Our team has over the last three years worked hard on this, and we are extremely excited to share it with you. We are looking forward to your feedback and please give Twist a try. If you want to know the philosophy behind Twist and why we are betting against real-time team messaging, check out my post: https://blog.doist.com/why-were-... Lots of love from Barcelona (and 23 other places -- we are a remote first team!) ๐Ÿ’™ ๐ŸŒŽ ๐ŸŒ ๐ŸŒ
Hugo Fauquenoi
@amix3k hugs to you Amir from Porto ๐Ÿ™Œ
Chad Hall
@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?
Joshua Bretag
@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 ;)
Arkin Dharawat
@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?
Jonathan L.
Iโ€™ve been on the beta for a few weeks and Iโ€™m loving it so far. This is my favorite answer to the real problems of group chat (that Doist, Basecamp and many others have pointed out really well: https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-gr...). Asynchronous FTW!
Hugo Fauquenoi
@jodiroga Thanks so much for the thoughtful UX feedback, Jonathan! It's been really helpful
Just S
@amix3k nice to see you all getting some love here on PH. I was in the beta back in February and really appreciate the UX/UI. TL;DR What about people who refuse to leave email but still need to be in the loop? What about teams/projects comprised of hundreds of third party individuals? A challenge I face (and imagine others do as well) is working in an industry where many people are "old school" and technology is often considered foreign and intimidating. These people don't want to be "onboarded", they just want a response or to respond. I believe that is why they will never leave email. I struggle with: A) a small team that is not tech savvy and is slow to move beyond any "known" tech (Office 365 is as far as they have stretched) B) a partner network with even less desire to evolve than my team. About 80% of my work involves people outside my team. Getting either set to adopt a new app/program/tool is highly unlikely. Basically, I am stuck with email users. I couldn't find a way with Doist products to bridge the gap between the people who refuse to leave email behind and the few people willing to join Twist (Slack, Ryver, Flock, Tribecube, Glip, Todoist, etc.) With some solutions such as Yammer, people can correspond in chats via email. Any plans to address this challenge? Am I the only one? The bigger challenge that I faced with Twist is the way it deals with non-team member collaboration. On any given project we have a revolving door of outside collaborators. The names and addresses on relevant emails change daily. There could be as many as 20 people on one email and 10 more on a different email. If each of the people involved in this one conversation had to be invited to Twist at $5 a pop, you can see how this quickly becomes impractical. I see Twist as being great for small teams and internal collaboration, but unless I have missed something, I haven't discovered how it can work for a business that works with shifting third parties 80%+ of the time. In Ryver we can invite an unlimited number of outside partners for any given project/conversation. Is Twist just not the right tool for us?
Griveau Adrien
Congrats for the lunch, looks very good!
Hugo Fauquenoi
@griveau Oh god, forgot about lunch ๐Ÿ Thanks so much Adrien. Stoked that you like it!
anuj
@amix3k This looks intriguing. I am curious if you allow data import from Slack so that if a team switches, their previous archives are still accessible?
Hugo Fauquenoi
@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 :)
anuj
@hfauq @amix3k Fair enough, but they could maybe be imported as archived channels which would atleast make them searchable.
David D. LaCroix
@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.
Salva Ferrando
Looks really dope, I love the idea of the threads. Good luck!
Hugo Fauquenoi
@salvafc Thank you, Sir!
Gyan Prayaga
Great product from a great team. Looking forward to using this :)
Ayush Goel
Why have two different tabs of "threads" and "messages". Don't threads have messages in them. Also, I am unable to see how this is different from a very shiny email client..
Alexandre Mouriec
Congratulations on the launch Doist Team ! ๐Ÿ‘ The Doist Team is a fantastic team that is really inspiring because they have a clear vision of what they want to do with their company and products --> "Itโ€™s focusing on building a company that can outlast you and creating something of true value. " @ami3k I am using Todoist and it's one of the best products I use on a daily basis. Personally, outside of the product itself, I am looking for other things when I choose a product. For example, company values, resources to use the product in the best way possible, the people in the team, and other important criteria... For the team, The Todoist team is a great example of a team full of people which are nice, accessible and talented (And some are ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท ๐Ÿ™Œ @hfauq @lucileforoni ) I didn't try Twist yet and I hope I will be able to try it in the future :) Slack is definitely not perfect and the importance of Deep Work in Twist is something I appreciate. @ami3k I have a question, one of the big focus of Twist is productivity so it's focused on work. But 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?
Omar D. Samuels
@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 ๐Ÿคฃ ). The Generalist chat is more of a freestyle long-running general (anything) topic that keeps the camaraderie running all day every day.
Alexandre Mouriec
@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.
Hugo Fauquenoi
@ami3k @lucileforoni @mrcalexandre Alex, you're the man! Thanks for your support and kind words. Great future ahead of you :)
Matt Samet
The concept really resonates with me. Blog post does a good job of explaining it. I agree with most of the features, I'd also offer that a centralized todo list should be a core feature. Something I can look at exclusively and be assured that absolutely everything I need to do for work, including respond to threads, is on there so I don't forget. I hate looking in multiple places and aggregating all my tasks. This task list should be optionally visible to other team members (with privacy controls) and others should be able to optionally add to my list. Since you guys are a todo app company, surprised that this isn't mentioned :)
Hugo Fauquenoi
@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.
Mehmet Perk
So no # symbols, that's all?
Rich Peterson
Great work on this! It reminds me of Unison. Would you consider adding tasks to this?
Aleksandra
Congratulations on the launch! I participated in beta testing, and I REALLY love the product. Excited about the integration with Todoist ๐Ÿ˜Ž The main thing that made a difference for me was how Twist is designed for helping teams improve communication and productivity as a result. Random and ongoing chatting is a real problem that ruins productivity (for me personally). Raising awareness about it, educating teams, and helping them improve their teamwork is what I see the Doist team is doing. Would love to see more tips and advice around mindful teamwork on the Twist blog in the future :) Good luck!
Amir Salihefendic
@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.
Hugo Fauquenoi
@aleks_muse Thanks, Aleksandra! It's been amazing to hear your thoughtful and constructive feedback during the whole beta phase. ๐Ÿ’™
chris
I've thought about this as a Todoist user for a while -- because Todoist has been so integral to my own educational organization, both as a student and teacher -- but have you given any thought to marketing toward education users at all? The tools inside of education for communication/project organization (our university uses Canvas as course management software, but the communication tools within it are terrible) are sorely lacking, and I can't begin to explain how many similar questions I get from students that MIGHT be answerable by other students in an app like this rather than case-by-case via email. Beyond that, it would allow for students to easily engage each other in group assignments (without locking them into Google Docs, which is what they primarily rely on now) and throughout the writing process in peer editing sessions or for tutoring, all while allowing instructors to easily follow progress. I guess I see such possibilities for education, but the focus in marketing products like this always seems to be commercial.
Hugo Fauquenoi
@chrisdolle We'll be thinking about Education and Nonprofit plans (free access or heavy discount) this summer, hopefully!
Jeremy Bauer
@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 occurโ€”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 ๐Ÿ˜….
Francesco D'Alessio
Congrats on the launch guys!
Hugo Fauquenoi
@francescod_ales Thanks so much, Francesco! Let's see where this marathon leads us ๐Ÿƒ
Dinuka Jay
What differentiates this from Slack and why should we switch? Congratulations on the launch
Andrรฉ J
"Asynchronous communication" ๐Ÿ‘ from theverge.com review: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/...
Hugo Fauquenoi
@eonpilot Thanks for sharing here!