Twist 1.0 - More productive messaging for teams

@dsaezgil Thanks Diego!!

@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 😅.

@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.

@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.

@eonpilot Thanks for sharing here!

@rickhaasteren Thanks for the full support, Rick! 💙

@chuckreynolds 😮😮😮😮😮😮

@johnschenk Thanks John!

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