Workspaces - Special Edition: Remote + Async

Good morning and welcome to a very special edition of Workspaces!

First and foremost... apologies for arriving in your inbox unexpectedly (I know it is Wednesday and not Saturday/Sunday). You will still be receiving those editions as planned (and I actually get married on Saturday so please stick around until then).

Now, the reason for this unexpected edition of Workspaces.

Loops (the startup that acquired Workspaces back in 2022) is officially launching today! And we're live on Product Hunt! It's the email platform I use to send these every single week. I love it (bias aside)!

We'd love to hear what you think! Feel free to reply to this email or dive into the PH comments!

Loops on Product Hunt!

And with that said... the below edition of Workspaces will be a unique one. Take a look!

-Ryan (@rjgilbert)

WORKSPACE TOUR

This "workspace tour" will be a unique one. It'll be a quick peek inside four separate workspaces.

At Loops, we are a small team (5 people) that work remote + async.

We thought it would be fun to pull back the curtains and give a very real look inside the workspaces of a venture-backed company that was grinding towards a public launch.

This is a desk in the co-working space that Chris (CEO) spent a lot of time in as we prepped for today.

Q: Loops is a remote and async company. What are some of the benefits of running a company like this? Any challenges?

The benefits are being able to hire the best people regardless of where they may live. We're able to support employees living a full life near family.

Async and remote scales well, most large companies end up with offices around the world, starting remote leads to a better framework for scale.

Async lets people work whenever they feel most productive (10:30 on a sunday rn).

This is the desk that Adam (CTO) spent hours squashing bugs and doing technical things that I won't ever fully understand at.

Q: What was the toughest engineering challenge you and the team went through recently while preparing for the public launch?

We'd invested a bunch of time in supporting dark mode in a variety of email clients over the past 18 months, but we still had limited support on Superhuman. We spent a couple focused days working on our email rendering. Now we have much better support but it is extremely challenging to improve rendering on one client without changing how emails appear on other clients.

This is where Sam (Engineer) spent an unmentionable amount of time working on our loop editor.

Q: What is an interesting engineering challenge you went through recently while preparing for the public launch?

We recently launched a loop editor with multiple nodes. Underneath the hood, our system records the journey of each contact as they progress through the loop. When a user needs to edit a loop that's already deployed, we provide options for managing live contacts still journeying through the loop. There can be side-effects when you add features to such a flexible scheduling and tracking system, so automated test coverage is important. I thought it was an interesting challenge to write a testing library so we can quickly and clearly express asynchronous scheduling scenarios across multiple systems as human-legible tests, even as we keep adding new features.

This is where Phil (Engineer) and his cat spent hours squashing bugs and making Loops the polished product that you see today.

Q: What does your typical daily routine look like at a remote + async company?

Starting my professional journey as a public high school math teacher, I was accustomed to immediate, face-to-face feedback. The classroom environment was dynamic, and the ability to quickly adapt and pivot based on real-time reactions was crucial. I relied on being able to troubleshoot rough patches with colleagues between classes and during my planning period. The pandemic shifted this dynamic. Scheduled weekly collaboration replaced spontaneous classroom visits, and while it was different, it was a necessary adaptation to the times.

Transitioning to a developer role brought its own set of challenges. At my previous company, I was a remote member in a predominantly in-person team.. While Zoom meetings were manageable, larger hybrid sessions posed challenges. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but factors like sound balance, difficulty in reading facial expressions, and internet lags made me feel like a second-class participant during hybrid collaboration.

However, joining Loops was a game-changer. Here, being remote is the norm, not the exception. We didn’t have to retrofit in-person practices to a virtual setting. The digital tools at our disposal, from Slack to GitHub, are not just alternatives to in-person communication; they are our primary channels. They are designed to foster engagement, collaboration, and a sense of community. It’s refreshing to be in an environment where everyone is on the same digital page, and I’m having a blast.

These are the two main spots where Ryan (the publisher of this newsletter) tweeted pictures of desks, onboarded customers from the waitlist, and blogged about email.

Q: Why haven't you moved to San Francisco?

I used to think I 100% needed to be in SF. I was working in supply chain and thought moving there would be my way into tech.

Thankfully... remote work made that unnecessary. I love working both remote + async where I can knock out tasks whenever I am truly most productive. And for me, this can honestly change day to day.

I'd still visit SF though...

If you made it this far... I hope you enjoyed this little change of pace. We'd love if you would check out what we've been working on outside of this newsletter.

Let me know what you think!

Product Hunt →

Workspaces - Special Edition: Remote + Async

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