Internal Comms Platform

A growing team's conversations were scattered across group chats never meant for work, email threads nobody could search, and a dozen apps that each held a piece of the picture. Nothing was in one place, search barely worked where it existed at all, and the business had no real control over where its own internal conversations actually lived.

The starting point wasn't "build a chat app" — it was deciding what kind of room actually matches how teams talk. A single generic "channel" concept forces every conversation into the same shape. Three distinct room types do more real work: open rooms anyone can join, closed rooms by invitation, and direct messages for one-to-one or small group conversations — each with its own access rules, not one permission system stretched to cover every case.

Notification control needed to be per room, per person, not a single global on/off switch. Someone can follow every message in a room that matters to them and only mentions in one that doesn't, without missing something important or drowning in noise from everything else.

Search had to actually work, not be a feature that technically exists. A message someone half-remembers from three months ago needs to be findable in seconds, not buried under a search box that only matches exact phrases.

Running it also had to be simple, not an operations project of its own. The whole thing — the chat application, background job processing, caching, file serving, and SSL — runs as one self-contained deployment, not a sprawl of separate services someone has to keep wired together.

Integrations happen through a real API with bot and webhook support, so the platform can be told about things happening elsewhere — a deploy finishing, a support ticket coming in — without turning the product itself into an integration platform.

The business owns its own conversation history outright — nothing routes through a third party's infrastructure, and nothing disappears when a free-tier message limit resets.

Because it runs as one self-contained deployment, there's no sprawl of separate services to keep patched and running — the people who run it day to day aren't suddenly operating a distributed system to get team chat.

Search and per-room notification control turned "I know someone said this somewhere" from a recurring frustration into a non-issue.