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Launch HN: Flow Club (YC S21) – Virtual co-working space for focused work
We’re Ricky, David, and Minjeong and we built Flow Club: https://www.flow.club https://www.flow.club. Flow Club is a virtual co-working space to help you focus. You work in hour-long sprints of up to 9 people led by a host and designed to get you into flow quickly. Here’s a video showing how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl68znFgLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl68znFgLc.
A lot of innovation around work today focuses on helping employees collaborate while distributed. The problem? Either you can’t get any work done from the constant Slack pings, excessive emails and agenda-less Zoom meetings, or (if you unplug from all that) you’re isolated and without structure. Then it can get hard to figure out which tasks to work on or find motivation to start. The challenge is to craft a virtual environment that is conducive to doing deep work and at the same time feeling connected to other people. That’s what we’re trying to solve.
David and I got back together to do our third startup in 13 years. I’m a hard worker, but David takes it to another level. When we would get together in coffee shops, we’d start pomodoro timers to make sure we don’t talk forever instead of working. When the pandemic began, we made a virtual timer overlay for our Zoom meetings to do stretches of work together while WFH. It was effective, but we didn’t think about it as a startup because we were working on other, more social products. None of those got traction.
The hard part about building a social product, especially for “older” people (i.e. everybody but the super young), is that purely social value props no longer work. Our desire to meet people, self-express, etc., goes down as we get older and busier. So how to bring busy people together? That led us to think about working as part of a “club,” and we went back to our simple timer, which had solved a real problem for us, and developed the idea from there.
With Flow Club, you work in sprints in the style of a group workout class. Every session takes place in a small group setting led by a host. The first five and last five minutes of the hour are reserved to hear a bit about what each person is working on and to celebrate their progress. Over time, as you attend more sessions, you start to feel connected to the community of “co-workers”.
If you’ve tried remote co-working with friends and found it distracting, you could try bringing your friend to Flow Club instead. It’s harder to slack off / goof around when there is structure, community norms, and a clear leader. We help you get started on big tasks like writing, coding, or creating, as well as keep you accountable for smaller tasks to unblock you for the first type of task. I’m writing this in a Flow Club right now because I read HN everyday and I am intimidated to post to HN. Tasks that scare you a little bit are great for Flow Club :)
Our members have launched their startups, finished their pitch decks, finished research papers, gotten to inbox zero, finally sent their investor updates. Others come at specific times, for example, to follow up right after a meeting, or to fight an after-lunch slump.
So please check out the demo video we made and let us know what you think! If you’ve tried your own Zoom coworking with friends, we’d love to hear how that went as well. We know that live video coworking isn’t for everyone—we actually initially thought it might just be for solo or new founders working on their own projects, but we’ve been very pleasantly surprised by who it has resonated with. We also keep hearing from community members who thought it sounded weird, but tried it, and now have been back to hundreds of sessions.
If this sounds like something you might like and benefit from, we created a special invite code for a limited number of Hacker News readers. We have a waitlist because session space is limited. This will also get you a special HN tag to find other HN members, and see a few HN-only sessions David is hosting: https://in.flow.club/invite/HNRunsOnArc07 https://in.flow.club/invite/HNRunsOnArc07
- dtran 5y agoDavid from Flow Club here— I'll be hosting a few Hacker News-only sessions today and tomorrow. I remember attending a HN meetup in Palo Alto back when I was an undergrad back in 2009 and it was super cool to hear what people were working on—not just the high-level pitch, but literally what they were debugging that day. That's been my favorite part of Flow Club as well. I've been a big fan of pomodoro and time-blocking, but for a long time was convinced that it didn't work well for coding until I experimented a bit. Wrote up some of my thoughts here: https://www.flow.club/blog/makers-schedule-2021 https://www.flow.club/blog/makers-schedule-2021 Would love to hear if any of y'all try to time block for writing code and will be around to answer any questions!
- dgnemo 5y agoCongrats on the launch! really like the concept. I actually worked on a company where the entire team was working on the rhythm (focus/pause/focus...) of a shared pomodoro timer (a physical one!). It was super productive. Now that we all work remotely your concept is very intriguing. I wonder if you could remove some requirements (camera, introductions, slot booking) and still have accountability benefits from having other people sharing your focus time. Nevertheless, cool idea! wish you the best!
- qnsi 5y agoI actually like the idea. One small thing, I wish you added pricing on your homepage. And one of the reasons I am not 100% excited about it, is I can kinda see it being helpful, but I think there is no real accountability (I can imagine pathological procrastinator might lie that their session went well, when in reality they browsed FB). Any ideas how to fix it? I guess showing proof of work might be too intrusive for some, but maybe 10% of flow session could be in accountability mode (so the user selects accountability/no accountability)? Then I guess faking real work might make people decide fuck it it's too much work, I am going to do a real thing and make them really productive.
- dtran 5y agoThanks for checking it out and the kind words re: the idea qnsi. >I think there is no real accountability (I can imagine pathological procrastinator might lie that their session went well, when in reality they browsed FB). That's a good point— a "pathological procrastinator" could definitely do that, but they'd mostly just be cheating themselves since they're not here to pretend to work for their boss. To your point though, some users have requested a way to share their screen for extra accountability, and we've even had a couple members do this with virtual cameras. At the end of the day though, we're building a community that celebrates the process and gradual progress made by time-blocking and goal-setting to do our best work, so if someone feels this way, I think the community can help them. To bring in another perspective, I'm an avid runner, and occasional cheating (course-cutting during races or faking Strava data) does happen within that community, but besides the shame of getting caught, if you're running every week with a community, cheaters will either self-select out of the community, or hopefully see the emptiness that comes with achievements they didn't earn.