On May 9th of this year, I shut down Vela: my attempt at solving several mental health problems for remote workers.
This is what I learned along the way.
Context
Vela was designed to be the virtual workplace for humans: one that valued meaningful connection over message throughput.
Intentional omission of direct messaging meant people were forced to finally talk to each other again — something I’ve desparately wanted for years since remote work took over after the pandemic. Instead, all text-based communication lived in message board posts akin to traditional online forums.
Open-room voice communication took center stage, encouraging “watercooler” chat throughout the work day and building closer relationships with your teammates.
Throughout it’s various iterations, I intended the experience to feel like it shipped with macOS. It’s glass-like appearance and windowless design mirrored macOS Spotlight and faded away into the menu bar while you worked.
You can still check out the original launch over at ProductHunt.
I also redesigned the entire experience in an attempt to solve some key problems with the first iteration, but these never made it past internal prototypes.
The Culture Problem
We’ve been collectively convinced by Silicon Valley and friends that asynchronous communication is king: no more disruptive phone calls or awkward silence during small talk.
The problem with this is of course is it’s all based on text.
Text cannot carry true emotion. Critical meaning (read: the humanity) is often lost in transmission. Message throughput flourishes while misunderstandings skyrocket.
Vela’s greatest competition was not other apps like Slack or Teams, but rather our decade-defining decision as a culture to give the boot to social interaction in the physical realm.
Press F to pay respects.
Market Resistance
Entering a market with abnormally high switching costs is astronomical in difficulty. If you thought building startups was hard, try starting one in an industry hostile to change and plagued by vendor lock-in.
Uprooting one’s company to an entirely different approach to collaboration is a tough ask.
Educating my target audience on why workplace communication is broken was a dreadfully-steep hill to climb in the age of TikTok and Instagram.
Take away instant messaging and you’re essentially dead in the water.
To add to all of this, teams value highly the ability to search through years, decades even, of message history. This naturally-accumulated knowledge base reduces duplication of effort and repetitive conversation, especially for message threads that often act as a company’s internal support forum.
With Slack, Teams and other major players reluctant to implement history export or migration tooling, their customers get stuck in a rock and a hard place when they desire to leave.
And once you stop paying your monthly/yearly ransom (ahem, subscription I mean), your access to said history is locked away from view.
Improve employee mental health, or retain years of critical decisions and documents?
Headphones Requirement
Somewhere along development, I realized people would need to either be home with their speakers on or have headphones in order to listen and engage with thier teammates.
If people were stuck at home because of Vela, then this went against my core mission of connecting remote workers.
And if people were required to have some sort of heaphones or ear buds in while at their local coffee shop, the liklihood of spontaneous conversation and forming new connections in the real world dramatically decreased.
In retrospect, I naively ignored this and continued on with development in the hopes that I would figure it out later.
Perfect Is The Enemy of Good
Perfectionism, fueled by OCD, meant every new design or feature incurred far too much time than it should have.
Every moment I spent redesigning or refactoring was another moment lost, time that would have been better spent marketing the MVP to receive early feedback.
Opportunity cost is very real — don’t let “perfect” get in the way of “good”.
What’s Next
My time since Vela has mostly been spent exploring new domains like blockchain technology, diving deeper into God’s Word and apologetics, redesigning this very website, and building a PBR renderer with Odin and Vulkan.
At this very moment, I’m actually wrapping up development on an OCD companion app to help people like me (hello!) who struggle to keep their compulsions in check. I’ll be writing more on this in the very near future.
Whatever God has in store for me, I’m more excited than ever to see how I can serve others like never before <3
If you’d like to be a part of that story, you can find me on Bluesky.