Collaboration has never been easier than with this Evernote-esque tool for conversations

Guilty... this Sumo is guilty as hell.

Guilty of one thing or another... but that’s for another campfire session. You see... this Sumo is guilty of being cheap.

Yep... well... scratch that, what I mean to say is that this Sumo is bargain-competitive.

Yeah, that definitely sounds better.

When we started AppSumo, we were low-budget everything, from work space (Chief Sumo’s Dojo), to the tools we used, like Google Docs for collaborative... documentation, Skype for team chatting, and what ever else we could find that we didn’t have to pay a penny for.

And we’re proud to say that we bootstrapped it. But there comes a time when a company puts out an absolutely amazing web service that we gladly would’ve paid for back then...

That company is called Flowdock.

And it’s amazing-zing-zing!

You see, Flowdock brings together your team’s inbox AND chat, rolled into an intuitively easy interface that makes me wonder why I haven’t thought about this in the first place.

It plays nicely with your favorite IRC client to chat directly from within, with your project management tools like Pivotal Tracker, JIRA, and Basecamp, and a hell of a lot more that I’ll get into later...

So let’s say you’re part of a development team for some awesome software, and you’re notified by Twitter that a feature is down (Flowdock integrates your wikis, project management tools, customer feedback, Twitter feeds, and much more into one simple feed, so you and your team are always in the loop.)

Your team sees that it’s down and is able to react within minutes as opposed to hours when everyone can see who’s working on what.

So while Bob volunteers to check out the problem and provide a solution, Sally sends out a reply to the original Tweet that they’re working on it, and when everything is back up and running, John tests it, confirms, and Tweets out again that all issues have been resolved.

It’s almost like Bob, Sally, and John are all one person with 6 arms and a knack for multitasking... almost... but it’s more like there’s some great communication going on, and that’s the key.

Where Flowdock really shines is in its chat feature. It’s the main place for real-time discussion in Flowdock.

You can get your teammate’s attention by mentioning their name in your messages. Messages with your name will trigger an audio notification (which you can turn off from flow settings) and show as highlighted in the chat. You can also highlight the whole team using one of these special tags: @everyone, @everybody, @all, @anyone or @anybody.

It works exactly how you think it should work and gets everyone to work better. How so?

Simple... just tagging your conversations (a lot like how you would tag items in Evernote) and your chats will forever archive and make your content searchable whenever you’re looking for that particular bit of information like a snippet of code, past bug issues, or that testimonial that would go great with your landing page.

So now you can stop worrying about forgetting, and let Flowdock remember for you.

So if you care about keeping your team (and you can assign anyone to as many teams as you need, ie., developer, customer support, or sales) on track and savvy to what’s going on with everyone else in real-time, you NEED to pick up Flowdock and start collaborating the way you’re meant to.

We’ve got access to 6 months of Flowdock’s Unit Plan ($39/mo) which includes 15 users for ONLY $59! (Normally $234)

This deal won’t last long though, and when the timer hits ZERO, you’re out of luck and will have to pay the non-Sumo pricing!

Sincerely,
The “Should’ve Thought Of This Earlier” Chief Sumo

P.S. - Here’s a few more examples of what else Flowdock integrates and plays nicely with:

• GitHub
• BitBucket
• Confluence
• AWS CloudWatch
• Heroku
• Bamboo
• Google Apps/Calendar
• Zendesk
• And more! (You can check out the full list here)

P.P.S. - A message from happy Flowdock users...

“For an organization with lots of ideas worth spreading, Flowdock is a perfect fit.”

-Michael Twentyman, Software Architect, TED Conferences

“Flowdock keeps the Pivotal Tracker team connected and in the same virtual room.”

-Dan Podsedly, VP Software Services, Pivotal Labs

“We are a more effective team because of Flowdock, no doubt about it.”

-Kevin Whinnery, Director of Developer Relations Appcelerator

“Flowdock keeps us on top of our game and our responses lighting fast.”

-Abby Larson, Editor & Founder of Style Me Pretty