Got tired of unproductive meetings so I built Vork

Cool tool :).

I would checkout writings from Steven Rogelberg. He has a lot of content that breaks down the causes of ineffective meetings and how to improve them.

The main problem is that people don't put effort into creating & running meetings and they aren't taught how to run effective meetings. Your tool is a great start in that it helps people really think about what they want to talk about and for how long which is awesome!

Thanks for the comment. I'm sad to hear your app didn't succeed, but here are my thoughts.

"sometimes goofing off in a meeting is a nice break from other things"

Meeting Science suggests that people view meetings as a net negative. If you haven't already, I would check out Steven Rogelberg's writings. He goes into great detail why most meetings are unproductive and how to improve them.

" 'Unproductive meetings' are not a problem that can be solved with software."

Yes and no. You're right when you say there's no silver bullet to solving unproductive meetings as there's no objective standard for a productive meeting. The difference makers based on meeting science are how much time and effort is put into preparing and running the meeting and the fact that majority of people don't receive training on running effective meetings.

Most people when booking meetings quickly just add a title, write a short description and add whoever they think should be added to the meeting. More people spend time trying to coordinate meeting times than actually focusing on the content of the meeting. That's where we come in.

Our tool creates what we consider "healthy friction" in the meeting creation process. Some examples:

• Our meeting score lets you know how well your meeting is built and gives up suggestions on how to improve (ie. Are the right people in the meeting? Are there too many individuals? Is there an agenda? Is the meeting too long? Etc)

• Our role selector allows you to assign roles to individuals in the meeting. This helps people think about why they're inviting individuals to a meeting. Is this person a contributor? Are they just there to listen? These questions help people decide who is most valuable to a meeting and who isn't.

• Our topic library and template selector allow you to quickly add agenda items and a meeting goal. This not only helps structure your meeting, but helps attendees prepare so that meetings run smoothly.

This is just scratching the surface of that we're doing and are planning to do.

Essentially our tool doesn't 100% guarantee productive meetings, but it gives you the tools and framework to think through and build your meeting in such a way that it leads to a productive meeting.

TLDR: No tool can guarantee 100% productive meetings, but they can help you plan and moderate meetings better which lead to more productive meetings.

The main concern we had was that MS Teams is dominating the workplace communication market mainly because MS Teams is free for Office 365 users. This is one of the major reasons why Slack has barely grown in 5 years whereas MS Teams is skyrocketing in adoption.

We didn't want to get caught up in all of that because we figured it would be a losing uphill battle.

Vork stands for "Virtual Work". Our original product was a tool to improve virtual workplace communication but we pivoted to meetings. We loved the name so we kept it haha.

And eventually we would like to monetize. We are going to focus on monetizing team and enterprise related features (ie. Admin tools for understanding meeting quality company wide, etc)