A Productive Conversation
Davorin Gabrovec is the Co-Founder of Flowr, a communication service meant to encourage true collaborative work flow.
This week, I exchanged emails with Davorin regarding collaborative productivity and the orgin of Flowr.
Tattletech: I assume that now, if your office, you use Flowr as your primary tool for organization. Before you founded Flowr, what was your project organization like? A mess of emails and shared documents like the rest of us, or were you always ahead of the game?
Davorin Gabrovec: Before we built up Flowr, we used email, skype and scheduled meetings as our major communication tools. However, from the moment we wrote first few lines of code, we started with using Flowr for the development of Flowr and then evolved it based on our needs and our first beta users.
Tattletech: Wow. Using Flowr to develop Flowr, very Inception of you. When was the first time you had an idea that you wanted to create something like Flowr? Was it in a dream?
DG: Haha, it was not in a dream. It was came from thinking about improving our communication/collaboration issues within the small (20 employee) company which I funded before Flowr. We had been using several tools such as wikis, intranets and blogs to manage our internal information along with tons of emails and meetings, all of which were time consuming. At the same time, I was looking at social networks, which provided good examples of how you can easily get an information flow about your network, even amongst people you have never met in person.
Then I started to think about making a very easy “twitter-like” 140 character message box, where anyone inside our team could share a new idea, ask other some questions or just pass on an interesting link, without spamming the rest of the team–this would be great! We could reduce meetings, colleagues could interact when they will had time and all the information and knowledge would stay in one place. When I started talking with few of my colleagues from other companies, they loved the idea. That was the moment when two of my colleagues and I decided to build such a tool.
Tattletech: What was your biggest challenge in development?
DG: Our biggest challenge was making the product beautifully designed and as simple as possible. Our next biggest challenge was scalability from the tech perspective where our CTO Vlada played his role very well.
Tattletech: Have you had to change anything major from your original design to Flowr’s current iteration?
DG: We changed the user interface two times to make the product perfect (from our perspective). After the first redesign we put several analytics in place to start measuring how users actually use Flowr. Now we are much closer to what we want Flowr to be.
Tattletech: What is the next step for Flowr? What can we look forward to in the fall?
DG: The focus for the next few months is integration with third party apps such as customer relationship management, helpdesk and project management tools, as well as further development of mobile apps and an iPad app. We hope that Flowr will become a major communication tool for every small and medium business, with basic social features and notifications from the different applications companies usually use. That way, Flowr will become a major internal collaboration and information hub.
– Jason Oberholtzer
Follow Davorin on Twitter and take a look at Flowr.
