CASE STUDY
Thursday
A place for remote teams to do social events
Thursday is where remote teams connect with each other over interesting conversations - from fast-paced 1-on-1 chats on space colonization to a game of doodle race.
SAAS
- Product
- Strategy
- Marketing
- Design & Branding
- UX
- Engineering
- DevOps
Remote was not something we initially adopted by choice. Our playbook to create a solid culture that worked well when working in person didn’t work any longer.
Our hunch was that we weren’t alone. We started talking to and interviewing over 25 people across different companies. While most people thought remote work has increased productivity, the #1 challenge that everyone faced was building a strong culture. They were experiencing a loss of sense of belonging in the workplace.
And that was the genesis of Thursday - a place for remote teams to build a strong culture.
Design and experience
A huge differentiator for Thursday was our unique user experience. In a world where Zoom fatigue is real, Thursday’s refreshing UX helps remote teams break out of Zoom’s rigid grid structures.
As we went on to create newer experiences, we also started building a foundation for a good design system. Our style guide helped us move faster and maintain a consistent visual language without the burden of creating a full-fledged design system. This attention to details won praise from our users having fun time with their teams.
Lounge
The lounge is so much more than just your regular waiting area. The reactions, fleeting chats, icebreakers, and videos create a refreshing experience that shatters the rigid boundaries of the Zooms of the world.
Just a simple movement of the goofy avatars following your mouse cursor allows your presence to be felt even in a large group where people might otherwise be uncomfortable speaking up.
Engineering the lounge
The unique experience of the lounge was made possible by our engineering team’s explorations.
AWS Chime enabled a live audio-video space, while WebSockets provided an immersive shared-room experience with live cursor movements, and real-time YouTube streaming with synchronized play/pause actions.
We deployed RabbitMQ to solve WebSocket’s horizontal scaling problem. This guaranteed a smooth experience for all participants regardless of the number of concurrent socials.
Mixers, the mini-games
Mixers are engaging social activities that you do in small breakout groups . These range from mindful talks to charades, from speed 1-on-1s to doodle race and more.
Each mixer came with its own engineering and synchronization challenges. Our Drunk Startup mixer leveraged Liveblocks storage to allow multiple users to collaborate in real-time on the same whiteboard simultaneously. In Doodle Race, we used a large dataset of doodles to fine-tune our AI model to accurately guess the users’ drawings.
Slack bot
One-click social templates
Scheduling tools
Short-lived preview environments
Having just one staging + local environment posed several challenges for our team of 11 developers working on 4-5 features simultaneously.
Making use of Kubernetes cluster, Helm and GitHub Actions, we orchestrated our CI/CD pipeline to spawn a new preview environment whenever we pushed code to a Git branch with a name that matches the pattern "preview-*".
These short-lived and cost-effective preview environments allowed us to gather early feedback in the development phase and move really fast. Now we can’t imagine life without it.
Launching early has been a part of our DNA since over a decade now. We are Ship It fanatics! We are obsessed with getting users to try our product as early as possible, and keep learning from it.
With Thursday, we kept launching (again and again). It became an integral part of Thursday’s go-to-market strategy. Over the course of a year, we did 7 successful launches which included receiving Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty Award for the “Work from Anywhere” category.
A lot of tools have tried to create the energy that Thursday has, but I don't think that anyone has come close to what Thursday is doing.
Sarah Park
Head of People at Geneva
2700+
Number of socials and counting
Winner
Product Hunt Golden Kitty Award “Work from Anywhere” category
1000+
Number of remote teams using Thursday