startup tools podcast
Speaker 1: All right. I am so excited for you all to listen to this episode of Forward Thinking Founders. Before we get started, I just wanted to let you know that we are officially starting an email list, as we have some big plans for the podcast and we'll be telling people on the email list first and probably only the people on the email list. So feel free to sign up and get on the email list at f20r.com. That's F as in Frank, two, zero, R as in red, .com, and I'll see you over there. Speaker 1: All right. How is it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders, where we're talking to founders about their companies, their visions for the future and how to collide. Today, I am very excited to be talking to John Xie, who is the CEO and co-founder of Taskade. John, welcome to the show. John Xie: Yeah, thank you. Great to be here. Speaker 1: Yeah, great to have you on. Let's just get right into it. For people that don't know, can you explain what Taskade is? John Xie: Yeah, sure. So, we built this really crazy tool and it's a combination of many things in one, but ultimately, the vision has been to create a unified workspace for remote and distributed teams. And with Taskade, we made it very simple for teams to chat and video conference with one another, manage tasks and projects, but also write product specs and documents, all with one simple and elegant tool. John Xie: And I think one part that's really beautiful about Taskade is that it's not only designed for real-time collaboration, it's also asynchronous. So it can work across with different teams on different time zones. And the app right now today is available on almost every platform imaginable, from web, to desktop, to iOS and Android, to even having a Firefox and Chrome extension. Speaker 1: Holy smokes. We'll have to go into that in a second, after we dive into some of the features and whatnot. But, oh wow, every platform. That's awesome. Speaker 1: All right, so let's stay on the product for now. So, can you go into some of the kind of some... I know you have tons of features because I've used Taskade, but can you go into some of your favorite features and the ways that teams can get benefit out of them on Taskade? John Xie: Yeah, sure. So I think the key components of Taskade is the fact that you have the task management portion and then you also have the communication aspect of it. The projects on Taskade are incredibly unique because it's almost like a piece of origami. You can create a task list and then you can transform it into a mind map with the same data structure. And then one of your teammates could collaborate with you on the same project but in a column view, and then he or she has to switch it back into a task list view. John Xie: When we started this idea, the idea was to help visual thinkers and people that are like me, that are just crazy and cannot focus and concentrate, and have like a Schuyler brain, to be able to plan, organize and really focus on the big picture, but also really be able to drill down and think small and write things down and break it into tiny actionable steps. John Xie: So Taskade really is like an outlining tool at its core, that is incredibly flexible, really real time, with a chat and communication element attached to it. That's basically a chat room next to your project. Speaker 1: All right, so we're going to role play slightly, because I am not the most ... or I'm someone that definitely needs a tool in this category of organization and communication. And I'm kind of one of those people that scatterbrained a little bit. I have some papers over there, I have some stuff on Google docs, whatever. Speaker 1: So, I am curious, for people like what you just mentioned that have a scatterbrain, let's say they're founders, become a founder. What would be your advice or tips on what to do on Taskade first? What to add in first? How to get the most out of it in the beginning, then how to ramp up? I'm curious if you were just giving me advice as a potential user. John Xie: Yeah, sure. So I think one thing that we really encourage new users and new teams to do is that you start off with one of our existing templates, right? And then from there on, really try to get to learn some of the basic keyboard shortcuts, like tab and shift-tab to outdent and indent, and be able to collapse and un-collapse different sections within your document, within your task list. And of course, playing around with the different views and elements. John Xie: It might sound incredibly complicated, but in reality, we really try our best to keep this product as simple and as elegant as possible, because we understand, having built and designed products for consumers in the past, that really the second you make things even two or three clicks away, no one will ever discover it.
Thursday, December 26th 2019 
