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
This seems like the opposite of that. It seems to want to point a camera at me all day long and interrupt for 10 minutes of standup meetings (with strangers) every hour. I can't get my head around why that'd be something you'd want.
I guess maybe if you weren't the self-motivated type (and kinda got thrown into remote work against your will, and are thus struggling), maybe this would help. But if you thrive in a remote environment and have a bunch of things to do, I can't imagine it would do anything but slow you down.
It's great if you can have that luxury, but it's not always possible. A lot of us have some level of constant "on call" duty where we can't just be unreachable the whole day.
The problem for me is that it is definitely possible for me to be unreachable for 1-2 hour chunks, but often times when I "get out of flow" it's difficult for me to get back it. I could see something like Flow Club benefitting me.
I think motivation is messier than just self-motivated vs not self-motivated. Could depend on the task you're tackling, time of day, other things in life that happened that day. Work is so personal and so varied. I'd say Flow Club members are very self-motivated, some are wildly successful by conventional standards, and yet there are still moments where Flow Club is a reliable environment to fall back on or to pick themselves up just a little.
I get a few dozen pings in Slack per day, many of which need quick responses. It would be awesome to be able to only look at Slack once or twice per day but I'd keep too many engineers blocked / waiting if I did that.
I don't see much advantage of having work colleages if it turns out they are just available for half an hour every morning and then they will dissappear for the rest of the day. Say someone needs me to guide them find some file or some method that I wrote and I'm the best one to answer that question, should they just wait for 4, 6 hours, or even until the next day, just to have me getting to know that my help would be welcome?
I see most value in working with other people precisely in the ability to work _with_ other people. Maybe not interrupting people constantly for silly questions, but definitely either not having to almost feel like if we had to ask for an appointment with the doctor.
I suspect that you wouldn't want it, and yet, there are loads of people willing to sign up for a service like this. I have seen similar services which seem to get users and charge a hefty monthly.
Personally, I have been doing this so long that text feels normal for me. I think the key for me has been to work with people who are able to shoot across a lot of information without the need to say much. For most of the people I work with, I can sort of read their mind. For a small number of others, text becomes a chore. The occasional chores are a reminder that not everyone feels at home working from home. Maybe this sort of service could be useful for them.
To me, I feel so little additional accountability just because there's a backgrounded meeting. I scroll Twitter in large meetings already.
But if there's other people who would see a report that I was on Twitter/HN/Reddit for 10 mins of the flow session, I would not let myself do that.
> It’s harder to slack off / goof around when there is structure, community norms, and a clear leader.
People had this in an office, but I bet your monitor screen being visible to everyone around you in the office is more of a forcing function to not goof off than all of those other things combined.
The data broadcasted that I have in mind is something like what RescueTime might collect (https://twitter.com/jarredsumner/status/1426962249332125701/...). Obviously difficult to navigate privacy issues around a feature like that, but I don't think impossible (e.g. I'd trust a collector agent if it were open source).
Anyway, that's just me personally. Good luck!
Anyway, here are a couple of magic incantations:
xprop -id $(xprop -root -f _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW 0x " \$0\\n" _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW | awk "{print \$2}") WM_NAME
xprop -id $(xprop -root -f _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW 0x " \$0\\n" _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW | awk "{print \$2}") WM_CLASS
There's also the xprintidle command (may need to be installed). With these three pieces together, you can create a little background daemon that monitors what you're up to at any given moment.
Unless they've changed something in the last year since I used it.
Also this post from Joel Spolsky [0]
> When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true.
For me personally, the biggest issue from distractions are not these extra hours that may accumulate over time, but rather a loss of momentum.
When I feel productive I can churn tasks quickly one after the other, even the ones I "dread" -- documentations, docs, posts. OTOH when I start getting distracted its hard to be back to productive even on something I usually enjoy (coding, investigating some tricky problem).
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
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 Would love to hear if any of y'all try to time block for writing code and will be around to answer any questions!
Nevertheless, cool idea! wish you the best!
So the premise upon which your business is based is that many organizations have a bad remote work culture. To be fair, many (most) do. But I'm curious what you envision as more organizations learn how to properly work in a remote environment? Because this feels like it is adding meetings around my work, not even with my co-workers, and with a time limit on when I need to stop flow. It all feels quite odd to be honest.
But the problem you are trying to solve is real. It seems like it would be effective to push this more towards a coaching service for organizations struggling to define their remote culture vs. ongoing flow meetings.
Of course, a huge number of companies will append "work from home" to their job descriptions, but for non other reason than to avoid to lag behind others.
Yes, that's a bit harsh and the reality may be that in fact, most companies will think they have a remote culture for one reason or the other, but will lack the... well... culture, to support it.
If you think I'm being pessimistic, think about agile. Certainly you can name companies that do agile properly (good for you, please share names :), but most companies claim to be agile only because anything else is a blocker to hire these days.
We have worked with several employers to bring Flow Club to their employees to help create opportunities for deep work, but the problem is bigger than that. From Cal Newport's New Yorker article last year (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise...): "The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem."
This isn't just theory - My company was downright sad when the pandemic started when it came to remote culture. But a handful of us stepped up, made suggestions and recommendations, and things have improved greatly. At this point, we have established communication guidelines that are shared with the company, and mostly followed.
The tragedy comes when everybody believes that one person cannot make a difference, so nobody tries.
Maybe I'm just old but I need some privacy to be really focused, creative, and productive. Feeling like I'm being watched just kills my focus.
Re: open offices, that's a good point— I actually think open offices are distracting if people are walking around behind you or chatting in the background. But if everyone else is also hard at work (and therefore not really watching), I definitely feel a small lift from that ambiance/energy.
One problem with trying to get co-workers to do this is that it's probably hard to find people that would want to. So instead open it up to a global pool of people and you're much more likely to easily find 9 that want to sit and work.
Long time ago I rented a co-working space for $99 / month and working amongst strangers is oddly powerfully motivating.
Pre-pandemic, I would often sit at a Starbucks before going into the office to knock out one specific task since I always knew as soon as I got to the office, I'd usually have to sync up with a coworker on something. Again, I know everyone has their own preferences, but something about the energy/ambiance of a coffee shop has always helped me get focused much more than a library or completely silent corner. One issue with co-working spaces is that sometimes it's not clearly delineated when people are trying to get focused work done vs. chat, and we felt the same pain with unstructured co-working Zooms that we did at the beginning of the pandemic.
> In my world, I need less discipline for vision work and more for tedious activities.
That's definitely a big use case for Flow Club—getting to inbox zero or writing an email that you've been dreading.
Re: increasing the intensity, we do have some 90-minute and 120-minute sessions, which are super challenging for me even after hundreds of Flow Club sessions and years of using pomodoros. There's also some interesting ideas in this thread that my co-founder responded to re: ways to increase the intensity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223257
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.
>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.
One question: how do you optimize for quality time during the 5min intro to set the enter-the-flow mood/vibe? do you mute a person’s mic after 1 min (eg to prevent some people from accidentally becoming mildly annoying for talking too long?)
[edit: elaboration]
I led a Startup School cohort a few years ago when I was in-between projects. Yes, kind of like that in terms of the kind of people you'll get to meet in Flow Club, but the primary purpose of sharing in Flow Club is not to learn from each other but to prime yourself into focus.
and also let users work together on shared tasks, such as leetcode prep, school homework, startup or open-source project, or anything which requires collaboration.
Also you could provide "virtual PM" as a service to tech companies to manage their sprints.
Now tech companies hire a legion of PMs with no particular domain or tech skills just to repeat the same standup/sprint routine on daily/weekly basis. If a vendor comes in with consistent and cost-effective way to administer remote-first virtual sprints I believe businesses would pay for it. Your "hosts" are the real asset.
I'm not arguing against some finding it useful, I'm sure some (like yourself) do, I don't know how sustainable that is though, or what it means about our society as we move forward, but in my opinion it's ominous.
I get the folks saying they'd be distracted and I thought the camera would throw me off (and you can turn it off if you want), but I got used to it right away and have been pretty productive during my sessions.
I'm working solo from home, so having others there has been energizing.
The people in my sessions seem to most commonly use Flow Club to get through work that they don't want to do or something they've been putting off.
If the block on my calendar for this is supposed to help stop people contacting me -- well, it doesn't stop them now.
I'm glad this seems to work for some people though.
As I understand it, this service involves voluntarily putting myself in front of a security camera, and then being forced to interact with people irrelevant to my task on a regular basis.
How exactly is this "designed to get me into flow quickly" ?
Would definitely recommend this to anyone that finds themselves pushing certain to-dos forward from one day to the next.
I'm sorry if this comes off as a bit brusque, but maybe this is a self-confidence thing on your part.
I can already see it: teams work under surveillance in shifts with a 5 minute break every hour. Companies clawing themselves into the home, with no way to avoid it. Terrifying.
An off switch or other way to preserve privacy would help address this.
Great job, Ricky, David, and Minjeong!
> setting goals for the hour, seeing the faces of six strangers on mute, and a timer ticking down. It drove focus and accountability.
Goal-setting is so powerful and yet so difficult— clarity of goals + setting the right level of challenge for the time period are two of the key characteristics of flow state (as defined by the great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Re: "seeing the faces of six strangers", we think that this experience becomes more powerful as you come back to Flow Club over time—you'll do sessions with some of the same hosts and a mix of new faces, acquaintances, and friends, both from outside Flow Club as well as ones that you make in Flow Club.
1) There's a Francis Darwin quote that is relevant "In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs." I hope to explore that idea in an essay someday, for now I'll just share the quote. I am not trying to make a prediction here. Getting into YC is not convincing the world. No one has done that yet in this market. I know some of the people involved in Focus Mate and absolutely think they could be the #1 player, but assuming a big market is there it's certainly game on and who was first is a rounding error and the rest comes down to execution. It's a wide open field.
2) I did YC with AirBnb and at the time CouchSurfing.org was indeed a decently known thing in some circles. For every YC investment I'm sure you can find multiple "really good implementation of the concept".
3) This is still very much early innings in this space. As an investment, it's very hard to predict whether Flow Club or FocusMate or one of the other 8 will be the big unicorn (if any). A lot of it will come down to the founders. Even if there does turn out to be a huge market, some may take an early exit (Facebook v. MySpace, for example). As an entrepreneur I generally opt for the small earlier exit, but as an angel investor I try to avoid investing in people like me (both to hedge and b/c of power laws of returns).
4) A friend had brought me to SoulCycle once and so I totally get the "Peloton for Work" angle. So that's what led me to give Flow Club a shot. And I have found it very productive a couple of times per month. The coach and music have been great. For me the FocusMate style was intriguing, but it was just slightly below the threshold where I would give it a shot. Could those be 2 different markets with one being 100x bigger than the other? I have no idea but seems small things like that could actually make a big difference.
2) It's easier to think of Airbnb as a good idea now, but back then the idea that you could even make a business out of it was mind blowing. A lot of concepts that subsequents startups borrowed where introduced on a big stage by Airbnb. How you attacked 2-sided consumer markets. How you monetised it, .how a better UX than craigslist translated to a great, business,... And even YC back then was still a novel thing.
If you compare to the FlowClub-FocusMate situation. FocusMate had a good insight about the market, guts to go for it, good implementation, ingenuous BeachHead. They surely wheren't first to think about it but they delivered at a time when a lot of developpers fumbled around. And They were Genuine.
Which brings me back to my curiosity around FlowClub YC pitch. Do they have a particular insight about the market, or are they confident in their ability to outraise FocusMate ?
In 4) Could those be 2 different markets with one being 100x bigger than the other? I have no idea but seems small things like that could actually make a big difference. , I guess It's true and it it's woth a shot from the entrepreneur side. But from my armchair, while doing some amateur quaterbacking, it feels weird to see the incubator with the most cachet pick the not genuine product. As if YC had backed studivz after Facebook came ( it's easy to say in hindsight of course ).