Tgethr

A non-weird way to talk to your friend's girlfriend/wife - a collaboration tool

“I can email or continue a conversation with the opposite gender in the other couple without it being super weird.”

This is one of the ways we use tgethr constantly.

Now with inline replies

Most people top reply to emails. All that means is that 95% of the time when someone replies to your email they reply above all the other text that was sent to them. We use that fact to clean up your messages so you can see much better formatted messages than just repeating all the old text that’s sent to you.

But now, you can turn on a setting to allow anyone to reply inline to your groups’ messages. (This can be a temperamental feature even though we’ve been testing it for months, so we’ll leave it up to you if you need it.)

Just go to your settings link and check this box:

Here’s an example. So I have a message a created to a group of mine with 2 very important subjects.

Now if someone replies on top of this message from their email, tgethr knows automatically not to repeat all that duplicate text. For example this top reply:

Would end up like this

But now, if someone replies “inline” to your email because they want to add some specific text near where you made your point, tgethr is smart enough to know to show the entire context of your message.

So this inline reply

Would look like this

Most people don’t usually end up inline replying, but when they do it’s nice to be able to show the entire message. We also needed this feature for some other tgethr features we are working on where you’ll be able to do some document collaboration right from within an email using something like Writeboard and that will take advantage of inline replying.

Hope you find it useful. Thank you so much for using tgethr!

How old were you when you decided to start giving up?

When a 7 year old tells his mom, “Mom, I can’t do my math homework. It’s so hard. I’m no good at it”, how many parents tell their kid “You need to hire someone to do that for you”.

None.

This is a constant lament though of adults. Especially adults trying to start businesses and their own projects. In any kind of gathering of people talking about starting businesses, the odds are huge that you are going to hear someone say “I have this great idea for a software company, I just need someone to build it. How do I find a technical co-founder and build this business in a couple months?”.

First of all, the relationship between co-founders of a business is very much like that of a married couple. So that’s like asking “How can I find a wife and get married in 2 months?” Sounds ridiculous.

Secondly, why let your lack of knowledge of how to do something ever stop you from what you want to accomplish. Learning math and reading was hard at one point, but we all learned some of it. I remember arriving to math class my Freshman year in high school, and the teacher began with a review of what everyone already knew. Everyone except me. He asked everyone what FOIL stood for. Every single student knew that it was First-Outer-Inner-Last. Except me :)

I tried on my own to learn it, and failed. So I showed up for tutoring every day for about 2 weeks until some of this brand new material started to click for me. And then I was out of the starting blocks.

And most of us continue to learn something new our entire lives. So when do some of us reach this point where we start feeling “you know what, I’m too old to learn something new, and I’m going to have to watch my dream go unfulfilled unless I meet someone else to do it for me.”

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying you’ll magically get good at this skill you don’t have right now. But you can probably learn it enough to accomplish at least a baby step of your goal.

Programming is often this skill people don’t have that they need someone for.

I look at my mom. She’s almost 70. Hasn’t had a programming class or even the desire to learn to program her entire life. But she wants to sell flip flops. She has a few things she really wants like to display a slideshow of her wares. Problem is, inserting a slideshow into a Shopify page isn’t an easy task for someone like her. Where do you insert this chunk of weird bits of code? Well she figured it out. She didn’t wait around for someone to do it for her. She left some extraneous characters of course in her html :) which is then easy for someone who does know what they are doing to remove (I’ll leave it for now as an example)

I look at the example of starting Inkling. We knew we wanted to make work places more efficiently democratic, and prediction markets were a means to accomplish that. We also knew we wanted to use an algorithm to make the tool easy to use. The great part was this algorithm was out there for everyone to read. The bad part was a very smart economist wrote it.

And so I had this scientific paper laden with math describing something that I wanted to do but was pretty foreign to me. I tried to get a friend with a PhD in Math to help me out, but he was busy with his post doctoral stuff at MIT. Only one good way to make sure it gets done then. Learn it myself. Took some time. Hurt the brain a bit. Doubted myself a ton. But eventually it clicked, and we had it working, and were on our way.

Don’t get me wrong about building good teams though. I very much believe in partners and finding awesome people to collaborate with. I have people at Inkling that do many things a thousand times better than I could ever do.

But if I didn’t have them, I refuse to sit on my hands, hoping to meet someone to help me accomplish what I want to do.

Even the act of learning a new skill for the sake of accomplishing your goal, is a great way to meet that partner of yours. So your project might start off rickety because of your amateur hands, but you’ll start surrounding yourself with people either through classes, or conferences or online forums, wherever, who might just make the perfect spouse to take your seedling and grow it into a success.

If you have the resources, then by all means hire the right talent to get your projects done. But if you don’t, if I don’t, I refuse to let my dreams slip by.

tgethr now supports Pivotal Tracker

People have been really digging Pivotal Tracker as a bug/feature management tool. We just started using it and I think we concur. One thing we wanted right away though was an easy way to have an email turn into a story in Pivotal, and to turn email discussions into comments on that story. So we added it as an additional service in tgethr.

If you have a tgethr group, just go to edit it.

Click to edit, and then click to add additional services

You’ll see Pivotal Tracker as an option.

Now add Pivotal and provide a project ID for one of your projects you want to associate with the group and your API key.

Submit and you’re done. Here’s how the integration now works.

Any time you send an email to your tgethr group (or use the web interface) just add the hashtags #feature #bug #chore or #release to your message. tgethr will then go ahead and make that into a story over at Pivotal, make you the sender the requestor of the story, and that’s it.

If you want to assign it to someone you can also add #for:someone in the message. And “someone” could be the first part of their email address or their initials in Pivotal. Like #for:NK or #for:nate. Either would work for my team to assign it to me.

Tgethr will send out it’s notes with a link to your pivotal story. And we’ll also sync any more replies to this tgethr discussion back over to Pivotal so folks can just use email to talk about their bugs and tickets.

Let us know how it works for you! Thanks for using tgethr!

The Next Web reviews tgethr

Alex Wilhelm from the Next Web reviewed tgethr today:

“If you have been searching for a simple tool to help your group collaborate and communicate, tgethr just might be what you have been looking for.”

“what sets tgethr apart from its numerous competitors is well formatted email updates. If you are familiar with the ugly of Google Groups, this will feel like fresh air”

You should read the whole review here.

Thanks Alex!

Decisions are too often made in secret because decision makers are afraid of getting caught not knowing what's going on.

“It took me 4 years before my blog paid off. You can’t just sprinkle these things on top or you have a meatball sundae” - paraphrased from a talk by Seth Godin at The Business of Software 2008 conference.

A meatball sundae is this disgusting mix of two good things. Meatballs + sundae toppings.

Seth’s meatball sundae is usually a metaphor he uses to talk about how marketing has changed but often the underlying business that wants to use that marketing has not.

It’s also a great reminder why Enterprise 2.0 (or probably just better called collaboration) is a bit of a meatball sundae for too many companies.

I hate that word, Enterprise 2.0. It’s abstract, means nothing for the people that really need to know what it means the most, and is yet another meaningless version number.

I believe that for many companies and many project teams, big and small, collaboration tastes a lot like Seth Godin’s meatball sundae.

Take the smart employees and managers who bleed loyalty for their company but still work in an old guard way of management; sprinkle wikis or blogs or prediction markets or Basecamp on top. And you’ve got a great environment where collaboration and decision making is going to taste terrible.

“Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.” - The Cluetrain Manifesto

This very much includes company leaders and their employees. Cluetrain still reads as true today as it did in 1999. Again another reason I dislike 2.0. This change of “social media” was being observed back in 1999 with no mention of a version number.

But at far too many places we still find structures of command and control. Employees treated like machinery. And there are tons of secret meetings behind closed doors where decisions are made by only a few people and then expected to be carried out in a vacuum. Yet, these same places want their employees to act like business owners. But business owners who have zero input in making decisions?

We know it’s difficult to change this. We’ve spent many years in this same environment. We know some fundamental changes need to be made that have nothing to do with buying another tool. Take Microsoft Sharepoint for example.

Microsoft Sharepoint has been around since about 2001. Conceptually it’s pretty easy to understand. It’s software to help share things like conversations and documents with teams in a very web like way. Instead of all this stuff stuck in email, it’s shared in Sharepoint. In a nutshell Sharepoint is a wiki. It’s a lot more. But a wiki sums it up for a lot of people.

But we are finding companies who just now are reaping the benefits of Sharepoint. This is 10+ years after Cluetrain, 9+ years after Sharepoint 1.0 and just now some very important companies are getting that using the web to connect their employees better has great rewards. And even some of those Sharepoint projects take over almost 2 years of having the tool for people to start getting it.

My point is, it’s going to take some patience. It’s also going to take a lot more than a budget for new tools. At many places it’s going to take some rebel managers to open up and ask their employees “Hey, we can’t always predict the right decisions to make, what do you guys think we should do?”. Let go of the secrecy. Let go of the fear that employees will riot when they realize you don’t have all the answers. They’ll figure it out eventually :)

—

If you have 45 minutes to watch or listen Seth’s exceptional talk, here’s the link to his presentation.

Complaining is like a drug. We get addicted to the euphoria of self importance, but inevitably it leaves us unfulfilled.

At the risk of sounding like a self-help guru (who aren’t necessarily bad, but all too often fit a stereotype of someone selling snake oil) I thought I’d share a story.

I didn’t used to spend a lot of time thinking about positive thinking. But one day during the lunch break of the very first Y Combinator Startup School I went to visit the Harvard Book Store. I just randomly picked up a book I saw there The Attractor Factor by Joe Vitale.

The act of buying and reading this book overnight that night in Boston was actually the most poignant thing that happened to me at Startup School. No disservice to Y Combinator or Steve Wozniak :), Startup School was great. But my attitude about achieving my goals changed considerably after reading that book 4.5 years ago. And I went on to apply for Y Combinator, start a business we’ve been running ever since, and achieving almost every bullet point of a goal I wrote down back then.

Again, I need to interject. I am not whole heartedly endorsing this book. There’s probably some better versions of this type of thinking that aren’t trying to backdoor sell you some other goods. I also don’t subscribe to the thoughts that some magical mojo power of the universe thing is going on. Or that it’s only our fault when bad things happen to us.

I just fell in love with the premise of ending the habit we all have of bitching, and visualizing goals like they’ve already been accomplished.

I look at super star athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Both these guys have expressed how important visualization is to their games. I also look at how the placebo effect of medication is actually increasing today.

So I’m super interested in what the difference might be like if my mind is more positive about the things it’s involved with.

My boiled down non-secret of the universe version of this stuff is basically:

- Stop complaining, you’re wasting your breath and your time.

- Instead of keeping all your ideas in some vague space in your head, write them down.

- Now dream a bit larger and stretch those goals. Make them more audacious.

- Proceed to write a story or visualize it in your head, what you’d be like or feel like with those goals already accomplished and behind you.

- Then, let go of the goals. Realize that the goals could change. Your intent is to hope for these things or something better. It’s impossible to know how life is paved in front of you. Accept that you can achieve these things or something better.

- Final step is to write down some things you can do today to get started on your goals. Baby steps.

I proceeded to work on this stuff immediately. I found it pretty tough to change my behavior of complaining and vague goal planning. But I liked the results of what I started back then.

The reason I bring this up is because for some reason it’s so difficult to keep at this behavior. I look over that list from 4.5 years ago and I achieved so much of it. But there’s still some things I wanted to get done, and a lot more new things to add.

But it’s 4.5 years later and I’ve totally given up on all the steps above.

Not sure why, they seemed to work.

One reason is I (like most people) really enjoy complaining. It makes us feel more important. But like a drug, the high wears off and we are left with nothing truly accomplished. We also are afraid of making our goals less vague. If they remain vague and cloudy, then we can’t really fail at them, can we?

This year, I’m back on the path described above. Back to nixing this habit of complaining. Back to visualizing some future awesome accomplishments behind me. So far so good, and I’m happy again with the results.

Can't start a business only eating a Tombstone pizza every day

“Dreams are always a work in progress.” - Dale Levitski, almost winner of Top Chef Season 3

I love following examples of people doing things small. Taking baby steps to get somewhere. All of us seem to have a crazy impatience inside to accomplish everything right now. We want to pick up a golf club for the first time and be Tiger Woods. We want to open our business and be Steve Jobs tomorrow.

This impatience unfortunately makes many of us just give up on the challenge. The climb just looks too daunting. And if anything gets in our way, we can’t deal with it and we cave.

I know how that impatience feels. I had it when we started Inkling. We started with just 18k from Y Combinator over 4 years ago that dried up on paying rent for 3 months. It’s real easy to give up at that point. Real easy to give up when a few deals go south or take a lot longer to accomplish than planned. But we’ve persisted and now run a profitable business that feels pretty great to run every single day.

Here’s an example of just giving up. Thankfully though he picked himself up again.

Dale Levitski lives a block from me. I see him constantly. He was cooking at this lounge on Thursdays that my wife and I would go to. We went there 5 or 6 times, and it was delicious.

I started a conversation with him at that lounge so now I can say hi to him on the street and he comes over and just chats with me. :)

We always found it confusing though. He was a tremendous chef. We loved his food. But he only cooked this one night a week, and bartended on another night. What’s his story? Why isn’t he running some crazy restaurant?

Dale almost won Top Chef. Came in second. But second means very little. He had some idea in his head to open a 200 person restaurant in downtown Chicago called Town and Country. And he needed 4 million dollars to do it. He was going to use the Top Chef winnings of $100,000 as a stepping stone to get there.

Problem is he lost Top Chef, and never could get his 4 million.

So he gave up. Sat in an apartment he couldn’t pay for. Ate a Tombstone pizza every day and gained 30 pounds.

Unfortunately it took his mom dying to realize he needed to get off his ass and keep trying.

Through some renewed persistence he got “lucky”. He didn’t just get lucky sitting around drinking, not answering his phone and being lazy. He got lucky AFTER he started persisting again. People look lucky, but often it’s a result of their persistence putting themselves out there in the world. Their idea. Their name. Their hustle.

Today Dale is now the executive chef of a restaurant in Chicago called Sprout. It’s just 35 seats. It’s not the empire he had in his mind he wanted tomorrow. But it’s a start. It’s a baby step in the right direction. And a 5 star rating on Yelp isn’t a bad baby step at that.

—-

Time to read more about Dale? Here’s a couple other great articles on his efforts. Time Out Chicago and the Chicago Tribune.

Case Study - Using tgethr with your family

A few months ago we launched a survey about how people use tgethr and how we can improve. Here’s a good example of a person using tgethr to stay in touch with their family. Let us know how you are using tgethr.

How did you discover tgethr?

Friend or colleague

How would you feel if you could no longer use tgethr?

Very disappointed: I use it pretty much daily and it’s great for keeping in touch with friends and family and sending / getting updates that probably wouldn’t be communicated otherwise!

What would you likely use as an alternative if tgethr were no longer available?

I would use: Facebook

What is the primary benefit that you have received from tgethr?

More communication with family

Have you recommended tgethr to others?

Yes: Not sure I’ve recommended it to anyone who isn’t already using it (hmm… will think about that), but have definitely encouraged my friends and family to use tgethr instead of sending emails to groups through individual email addresses…

What type of person do you think would benefit most from tgethr?

Someone who doesn’t like to publicize life events on something like facebook but who still wants to keep in touch with friends and family

How can we improve tgethr to better meet your needs?

Love the new feature for grabbing contacts from other tgethr groups or hotmail, etc when creating a new group!

Tgethr is easier than nailing Jell-O to a tree

“We’ve said it before. Countless times. Online collaboration is great. But sometimes, it’s just harder than nailing Jell-O to a tree. With people spread all over hither and yon, it’s increasingly complex to keep track of things, to collaborate, to simply get things done.

Ever on the lookout for online collaboration tools, we’ve seen some that are pretty neat, but they all require every person on a project to log into a new site and register in order to take advantage. We’re always on the hunt for something simple.

We think we may have found it with tgethr.”

Thanks for the glowing review guys! You can read the entire review here.

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