Mobile apps on our devices alerting us to the latest notifications on our screens have become a way of life in the 21st century. While some are used for fun every day, others are downloaded obligingly. According to a workplace messaging report by Mio, most businesses use at least two messaging apps and four to seven collaboration tools. Swit is hoping to bring that number down to one.
Swit co-founder and CEO Josh Lee realised that using several tools “reduced team productivity and increased communication overhead,” as he told TechCrunch. Large companies also tend to have department-specific apps, adding to the confusion.
“Like so many, we spent significant time on collaboration apps but felt frustrated that we needed to use different apps when dealing with different functions and departments of the company,” said Josh Lee, Swit founder and CEO, as reported by Tech Startups. “Every team was using Slack for internal communication but it doesn’t really provide task management, so in addition Marketing was using Asana, IT was using Jira, Sales was using Monday.com.”
Frustrated that there was not one app that worked for everyone, Swit wanted to create the new standard for collaboration apps in the workplace. Four months after the app was released, over 450 companies of all sizes around the world started using it—without any marketing. Josh claims that the app has one of the fastest adoption rates in the business SaaS space.
CTO Max Lim explained that the company was able to use the “last mover” approach, putting together the features that each department needed into one platform. The app uses components such as Kanban task management, calendar, chat, forums, Gantt charts, reports and more. Swit also places a high level of importance on the user experience, as that’s easily the most annoying aspect of using collaboration apps.
“We knew well the functionality and features each department of a company needed and put them into one centralized system,” he said. “Messaging apps are great but getting bombarded with notifications all day from group chats that have nothing to do with you is not so fun. We integrated chat with advanced settings to determine what kinds of messages you want to be alerted to, and which shouldn’t interrupt your workflow.”
Swit is also compatible on computers and mobile apps, improving the UI even more.
“If people integrate multiple apps into a desktop app or web browser, they might not be able to use them on mobile,” Josh explained. “So if they are looking for data, they have to search app by app, channel by channel, product by product, so data and information is scattered everywhere, hair on fire. We provide one centralized command center for team collaboration without losing context and that is one of our biggest sources of customer satisfaction.”