Realizing the dream of good workplace software · Camping

After their last episode on “The Impossible Dream of Good Workplace Software,” I sent a messier version of this email to [email protected]. You can listen and read more about the episode here The edge.

Hello Nilay and David,

I cried because your workplace software episode covered the reasons why Brian Lovin and I co-founded camping.com.

Small text box, small ideas.

I led engineering teams at GitHub for a few years, and our Slack was a mess. We had over 2,500 employees working on Slack and we had three channels for long-form writing in other apps. But thanks to Slack’s design, these ideas got lost in the everyday chatter.

By the time I left GitHub, I spent more time switching channels and chasing DMs than doing deep work.

I blame Slack’s product design, specifically the little text input that trains people to talk to colleagues as if they were DMing a group chat.

I’ve been reading We Don’t Sell Saddles Here by Stewart Butterfield and recently this thread from a Slack employee about how they use it internally.

Cemre’s answer sums up my feelings:

This drives me crazy. Like Slack should are used for more thoughtful, integrated communications, why isn’t it designed that way?

Presence

A formative moment for me was during my last startup mid-COVID with a remote team. My colleagues were experienced and had their own in-depth projects.

Our Slack was so lonely!

Despite a water cooler channel for side conversations, everyone had their heads down most of the time. I wondered, “What is everyone doing?” I had to trust that everyone was focused, but the feeling of isolation didn’t go away.

Slack feels bad without constant chatter, but that chatter takes time away from deep work. There has to be a better way.

Patrick Collison tweeted about workplace distractions:

I completely agree. Slack is like a buzzing fly around your head; a constant sound of activity that draws you in and forces context switching every few minutes.

Rebundling

David mentioned a trend where companies are getting tired of managing 50 custom apps for their workforce, and I couldn’t agree more.

In the early days of Campsite, we used Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, Notion, Linear, GitHub, and many other services for a five-person startup. The proliferation of tools is worse at larger companies.

Supplier lock-in is real. One of our biggest challenges at Camping is the Slack Connect ditch. Or as one of my favorite PMF guides puts it, Slack is a “hard fact”:

You take a pain point that is universally accepted as a given in life and see that it is just a difficult problem that your product solves for the customer. Your customers have resigned themselves to living with the problem. They are not urgently trying to solve it. The status quo is what it is, and change does not seem to be an option.

It hurts me every time we lose a customer who says, “We hate Slack and the Camping app is great. We simply cannot cope with the switching costs at this time.”

—

This Decoder episode was great. I’m excited to continue building and ultimately want to convince The Verge staff to switch to Camping without a mutiny.

We believe that messaging is the superior standard for team communication. They’re the sweet spot between documents and chat: lightweight for quick discussions, but big enough to encourage full thoughts and thoughtful comments.

If you want to collaborate more deeply with your team without sacrificing presence and social connection, you should try Campsite.

-ryan