Doist, the company behind popular todo service Todoist has been building Twist for a couple of years and using it for more than a year. Doist is a remote-first company distributed across many time zones with around 50 employees. The company tried Slack, but it didn’t work out.
In particular, when you wake up in the morning and you need to catch up with the most important things that happened while you were sleeping, it’s going to take you a while to scroll through the noise. It’s easy to get distracted by Slack. Twist tries to bridge the gap between real-time communication, such as Slack and HipChat, and asynchronous communication, such as emails, Yammer, Convo, Workplace by Facebook, etc.
The most stark difference is that everything is a thread. When you want to post a new message about a new project, you enter a channel (#design, #ios, #support…) and you create a new thread.
The compose screen looks like you’re writing a new email. It’s nothing like sending a message in Slack. You have to name your thread, you can easily write multiple paragraphs, you can attach files and you can notify some or all members of the current channel.
After your thread is live, people can comment and react to comments using emojis. This is pretty much like commenting on a thread in Slack. But having threads front and center changes the entire philosophy. You can’t talk outside of a thread, which makes it harder to bury important information in the middle of mindless GIFs
