

Show HN: Ginger: Better Team Discussions - ipmb

Hi everyone, we (Lincoln Loop) are a development/consulting shop launching our first product, Ginger.<p>Our team is spread across many time zones and has an aversion to disruptive/ineffective meetings. We've been looking for a tool that can help us have discussions and share information without interrupting our developers while they are in the flow. Email, Basecamp, Google Wave, and IRC all came close, but always fell short in some critical manner. We built Ginger to scratch our own itch hoping it scratches some of yours too.<p>https://gingerhq.com<p>Sign up is 1-click (Google/Facebook) or just a couple of fields to enter and no credit card is required to take it for a spin. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it all!
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adambrault
We've been using this for several months at &yet and it's been a surprisingly
valuable tool. At first, my thought was honestly, "So what? It's a threaded
message board." until we actually started using it.

It's actually the feature restraint that makes it so remarkably useful and
powerful.

Here's what we do. Every day, we start a new thread and each person on our
team posts a daily checkin "rating" their day and then writes any comments on
what they worked on, what they learned, what frustrated them, etc. Super
simple stuff, for sure, but it's been one of the most valuable things we've
done for creating a strong sense of team and togetherness.

What's been most surprising about this is that most of our team of 15+ work
within feet from each other in our office, but our team's connectedness feels
better than ever as a result of Ginger.

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mtrythall
Clickable: <https://gingerhq.com>

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adamzochowski
When I click \\\Pricing// I am scrolled to seeing the green text ''Eliminate
Meetings , Get a Pulse , Never Forget''. It tells me nothing of price. So I
look for largest text closest to middle. There I see ''What do our Customers
Say?''. Also totally irrelevant to what I want, the price.

Please make sure that bottom item scrolls high enough. I know that this is
partially because my screen is 1900x1200, so just pad the last item.

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ipmb
Thanks for the feedback, we'll get that fixed today.

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graham_king_3
I've been using Ginger for ~ 6 months (I work for Lincoln Loop), and it's
appeal is difficult to describe.

It doesn't really _do_ anything, there's no clever features, yet as a team
we've been having these intelligent thoughtful discussions since we started
using it. Somehow those discussions just didn't happen with the other tools we
tried.

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HenrikJoreteg
We've been enjoying it a lot at &yet. We use it for daily checkins and
developer discussions. Like a private mailing list... without the mail :)

It's helped pull our team together and give a better sense of how people are
feeling about their work and progress.

That's been huge for us.

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factorialboy
Looks very interesting.

Will it integrate with external apps?

My product, Review19.com , offers collaborative decision making and project
tracking for teams and a messaging system ( similar to GingerHQ) built in
would be pretty useful.

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ipmb
We have a (undocumented) public API to let you do everything you can do on the
site.

We have mentioned embedding discussions on other sites a couple times the
past, but haven't come to any conclusions there. Is that what you have in
mind?

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ericzanol
we've been using it within our team for a few months, it's pretty great. it's
easy to use for the non-dev folks on the team, and i think probably the thing
i like about it most is it's basically a team forum where people feel
comfortable talking about whatever and it DOESN'T have all the other project
management stuff and so forth.

