TL;DR

• Keep Posted is shutting down. It’s been a really great project to work on for the past year, but it’s become clear to me that it’s not solving the problems it was designed for.
• I’ll leave the servers running for a couple of months, but if you want to download any of your messages, you should do it soon. Instructions on how to do that at the bottom of this email.👇
• If you have any questions or anything, I'm happy to talk about all that I've learned with this project. Get in touch!

The Long Version

You’re getting this because at some point over the past year, you signed up for the Keep Posted beta.

Keep Posted started as a personal project to keep me busy during the pandemic, trying to solve a problem I had at my last job—boring, ineffective meetings that disrupted everyone’s time and screwed up people’s ability to focus on their most important work.

The idea was simple. Bad meetings suck. They’re stressful, they make the organizer feel bad, and they waste a lot of time for everyone. I thought, “What if we could divert some of what usually happens in meetings to a communication channel that didn’t require everyone disruptively blocking off time on their calendars? And could we do it in a way that feels more personal and vital than an email or a message dumped into Slack?”

Keep Posted tried to make team communication better with video messaging to deliver updates and ideas without meetings, but keeping a human connection by letting people see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices.

But after working on it for a year, it’s become clear to me that Keep Posted is not doing the best job of fixing the problems it was designed to solve. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to asynchronous team collaboration. But at this point, I can’t see a way where it makes sense to keep developing Keep Posted.

The biggest reasons for the shutdown:

• The experience of using Keep Posted hasn’t shown enough of an impact on team communication to justify itself. I can't honestly say it's made the problem better. In some ways, it's created new friction.
• It’s failed to get any traction with users (largely due to the point above)

What’s next?

Keep Posted will stay online for the next few months. I enjoy being able to share what I’ve learned from it, and it’s not out of the question that some of the ideas in it will resurface in a new project. So it makes sense to leave it up for posterity.

Thanks for being a part of this project!

This has been a huge learning experience for me, and I can’t thank you enough for your interest in the idea. I had so many great conversations over the past year that gave me a much deeper, human-centered understanding of workplace communication. There are clearly some big problems to solve in this area.

If you’re interested, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned (and mistakes I’ve made) working on this over the past year. I’ll be writing some about it, and the best way to stay on top of that is to follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also email me with any questions.

If you want to download your past messages

• Log in to your Keep Posted account.
• Go to the detail page for any of your messages, and click on the 'View message as viewers will see it' link.
• On the page that opens, add '.mp4' on the end of the URL.
• Download and save.

I really appreciate you being part of this project with me!

Robby