What's your biggest distraction from work? It could be the couch five feet away, a hankering for another snack or even the siren call of TikTok.
A San Francisco startup thinks it can help remote workers rein in their focus via a virtual co-working platform called Flow Club.
On Wednesday they announced a $5 million seed round led by Worklife Ventures that also included Day One Ventures, Soma Capital, Y Combinator, Hustle Fund, Nomo Ventures, Night Capital and Hyphen Capital.
The app was founded in 2020 by CEO Ricky Yean, 34, and CTO David Tran, 34, but this wasn't their first startup idea.
In fact, they experimented with 10 other products before landing on Flow Club. The common thread was trying to bring their friends together. But even though people said they wanted that, Yean and Tran found that people didn't stick to using their experimental social apps.
One was called PalCast, a podcasting app that collected audio messages asynchronously from its users and then weaved the clips together with some background music to produce a podcast-style conversation. Another was called Unmute which would dial up your friends for a live conversation while everyone commuted to work.
Eventually they noticed that people were gravitating more towards experiences that had something to do with getting things done, aka productivity. And that's when Flow Club was born.
"You can't think of it like it's another video meeting," Yean told me. "The essence of Flow Club is not video co-working. It's like a work arrangement. It's a productive context that we're helping you hire on demand."
Now they have hundreds of users on the platform in more than 25 countries for anything from work-related projects to side hobbies. On average, they use the platform for six hours a week.
Sessions typically last 60 minutes but can go for several hours, and hosts can make them themed around a musical genre (for productivity, of course) or a common interest like weekend writing. Users can sign up to join sessions with up to eight other people.
The platform costs $40 a month as a subscription service, and Yean says that companies are starting to pay for the service to help boost worker productivity.
Tuesdays are currently the busiest day on Flow Club as it's an unpopular day to schedule work meetings.
Flow Club's employees aren't just building the app, they're using it, too. Yean hosts lots of sessions himself and says he has logged at least 1,000 hours of productive time.
The startup has six full-time staffers as well as one part-timer, and Yean wants to get their headcount close to 10 people this year. They'll be focused on growing their user base and figuring out ways to support different types of working styles.
