Flat: Simple, delightful, collaborative work tracking | Product Hunt

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Flat: Simple, delightful, collaborative work tracking | Product Hunt

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Launch tags:

Productivity•Task Management•Developer Tools

Launch Team / Built With

Flat

Maker

📌

Hey ProductHunters! 👋 I’m Seth, one of the founders of Flat, and we’re excited to share it with you today and get your feedback! Our motto is: simpler is better. We built Flat out of frustration with the complicated project management tools we’ve used at previous jobs — things like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Jira, etc. What we wanted was a simple shared space where we could organize our work, make priorities clear, and stay aligned as a team, without all the friction and complexity. So we set out to build a tool that was so simple and easy to use that anyone could pick it up within five minutes. Our strategy for achieving this has been to combine familiar, proven concepts like collaborative document editing, status tracking, comment threads, and kanban boards. As a result, Flat feels immediately familiar, and new users can hit the ground running. Flat also doesn’t aim to be an “everything app”. Instead, it complements the apps you use and love by serving as the home base that ties them all together. Don’t write blog posts in Flat — that’s what Google Docs is for! But do use Flat to capture the goals for each post, and track them through their lifecycle. Don’t hold brainstorming sessions in Flat — that’s what Miro is for! But do use Flat to keep track of the whiteboards for later reference. Don’t hang out and celebrate wins in Flat — that’s what Slack is for! But do use Flat to ask questions or raise issues on a topic without worrying about balls getting dropped. Flat isn’t done; we’re hard at work making it better every day. But we think it’s ready for you to check it out, and we’d be grateful for any feedback you have to share in the comments below! We’ll be here all day to answer questions.

1yr ago

Antoni Kozelski

Evryface

@seth_purcell Congratulations on the release of Flat! It really provides Enough functionality!👍

1yr ago

@seth_purcell Looks very clean. Nice job!

1yr ago

Flat

Maker

@antonikozelski thank you! And yeah, figuring out exactly what's "enough" is the core challenge we wrestle with every day.

1yr ago

Flat

Maker

@eddyvinck thank you!

1yr ago

Superjoin

Congrats on the launch of Flat, @seth_purcell ! 🎉 The focus on simplicity and ease of use is refreshing, and I love how Flat complements other tools rather than trying to replace them. How do you plan to balance adding new features while keeping Flat simple?

1yr ago

Flat

Maker

@manan_gupta19 Thanks so much! Andrew here, one of the other founders of Flat. It's great question, so much so that we actually wrote an entire blog post about it! You can check it out at https://flat.app/blog/how-we-kee.... Truth is, there's no secret or magic recipe for striking that balance. We just obsess over maintaining simplicity in all of our design decisions -- from choosing the mental model user's should have when using Flat, through interaction design, all the way to final visual design. Maintaining simplicity is something that doesn't happen automatically, it has to be fought. It's part of the culture of our product team, and it's one of the things we believe differentiates Flat. Happy to answer any more questions!

1yr ago

Superjoin

@andrew_kallem damn this is great. From my experience, most tools become the problem they're trying to solve. Specially SaaS. I hope you're successful in keeping Flat away from becoming that:)

1yr ago

Flat

Maker

@manan_gupta19 That's exactly our view, too, and what we're building Flat to avoid. Thanks again, we appreciate it!

1yr ago

Flat

Maker

@manan_gupta19 this is a great question, and I don't think I can add much to what Andrew already said, but the fact is simplicity is our main differentiator and a core value, so we constantly, constantly defend it. And sometimes that means saying "we don't know how to make this simple right now so we're going to defer it".

1yr ago

Just Scroll

My team currently uses Asana and Jira for project management. Flat looks really simple and intuitive with all the essentials, plus lots of integrations. My team relies a lot on visualization of work outputs, like Weekly Digest/Summary, and customizable charts with specific measurements, does Flat offer any quantitative measurement and visualizations as well? Congrats on the launch!

1yr ago

Flat

Maker

@kehui_guo Thanks Kehui! One of our takeaways when speaking with users is that, across teams, the needs and preferences for visualization, reporting, etc., can vary quite a lot. To keep Flat simple and intuitive, our approach has been to let users who want custom visualizations and reports to build them out using Flat's GraphQL API (https://docs.flat.app/developers...). Indeed, there are many cases of teams using Flat and doing exactly that! Out of curiosity, what kind of measurements are you including in your reports? I'd be happy to chat more about that, and how you're using Asana and Jira more generally. Feel free to reach out directly or post additional questions here!

1yr ago