Kaspars Dancis @KasparsDancis Twitter profile

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@Kula1183

Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

9 months

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, thank you FigJam 🙂

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

10 months

Whimsical now lets you craft beautiful sequence diagrams. As with all things @whimsical , we optimized for speed and little UX details. Would love to hear what you think

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

Confession — I get inferiority complex from all these "How X builds product" posts by @lennysan . Everybody appear to have their shit together, all organized and confident. My experience has been very different. If you want to do something new and hard, it's a constant doubt,

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

Dear automakers, repeat after me - touchscreen has never been a better alternative to physical buttons. You should have learned from Apple's touchbar fiasco.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

This is going to be rad

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

We recently released an better way to add rows and columns in @Whimsical Docs tables. On surface it may appear like a simple feature, but it took a lot of tinkering to get it to the level of quality we felt good about. Here's an inside look at the process → 🧵

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

6 years

At Whimsical, we choose to bootstrap our business. Here's why

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

10 months

@natfriedman Try Whimsical Diagrams GPT (also available as plugin)

ChatGPT - Whimsical Diagrams

Explains and visualizes concepts with flowcharts, mindmaps and sequence diagrams.

chatgpt.com

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

We are doing a 4 day work week this summer at Whimsical. It may seem crazy for a 2 year old startup to do that. Here's why I don't think it's crazy at all. /1

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

3 years

We founded Whimsical with the mission to make distributed work the best it can be. Back in 2017, distributed work was still a niche thing but we believed it will eventually become commonplace. /1

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

8 months

Two things drove me to founding @Whimsical - irritation and ego. The irritation was caused by all the poorly designed software I had to use to get work done. As for the ego, I wanted to finally build something 100% for myself. 🧵

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

8 years

3 years of effort, 45K lines of #clojurescript , super proud of the team launching @FullContact 2.0 today

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

10 months

Ricky Gervais is roasting my life

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

9 months

I mean this sincerely. When FigJam first came out, they had borrowed a lot of UX ideas from Whimsical but they also did a good job building upon it. Some of their ideas inspired us as well.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

3 years

That's why we decided to raise $30M as our first funding, led by @accel with participation of @basisset , @natfriedman , @ericabrescia , @gaybrick , @elatable and several other amazing angels

We’ve raised $30M as our first funding, following four years of growth and profitability | Blog |...

Whimsical has raised $30M in Series A funding led by Accel, with participation of Basis Set Ventures. We’ve also garnered support through angel investments from GitHub’s CEO and COO, Stripe’s CPO,...

whimsical.com

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

8 months

ChatGPT mentions + @Whimsical is rad

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

Annnnd coincidentally we just reached profitability. I guess it's a good day. ☺️

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

@danieljmitchell @Janis_Bergs Is social safety net such as guaranteed health care a redistribution of wealth? GPA redistribution seems very poor analogy for that

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

@mattwensing @lennysan Yes, but I'm not sure that made things easier. In a way when something is too easy, it makes your subconsciousness believe everything will be easy and that's never the case.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

4 years

We've been thinking about a better writing experience from Day 1 at Whimsical. It's finally here

Whimsical

@whimsical

4 years

Combine text and visuals like never before — introducing Whimsical Docs, a fast new collaborative writing experience

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

3 years

This is essence of Whimsical - we don't sell features, we sell more time.

Ricardo Sousa

@ricardojrsousa

3 years

The time @WhimsicalPowers saved me since 2018 is insane. And such a pleasure to use. Just shown it to a friend who was blown away by the speed and features!

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

Whimsical's team of 4 just launched our 4th product while working 4 days a week. Also 4 is my favourite number 😊

Whimsical

@whimsical

5 years

✨ Introducing Whimsical Mind Maps – organize your ideas at the speed of thought

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

Working hard is not the same as working long hours. It’s doing what’s necessary even when that’s the last thing you want to do. It’s focus. It’s discipline. Extra hours have dimishing returns and just makes doing the hard things harder.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

9 months

Most enjoyable things in programming: 3. Working with simple and consistent APIs 2. Writing pure functions 1. Deleting code

Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

9 months

Most irritating things in programming: 3. Getting CSS to do exactly what you want 2. Dealing with object-oriented code 1. Resolving dependency issues

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

This has been a gamechanger for effective internal communication for me. All modern presentation tools focus on form more than content. The new presentation features in Whimsical focus 100% on content with zero gimmicks. Give it a try

Whimsical

@whimsical

2 years

We’re sliding in to present our latest feature ▶️

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

7 months

💜

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

Time machine in @whimsical is a hidden gem that will make you feel like a wizard.

Thinkmill

@thethinkmill

2 years

One of our teams recently system-mapped the functionality and user needs for a client in a highly complex domain 🤯 @whimsical ’s history timelapse feature makes for a great way to retro progress.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

When vomiting is a good thing

Jake Mor

@jakemor

2 years

Can't get over how excellent @whimsical is. We use it religiously for wireframing and thought-vomit. I'm not sure I can think without it – a true bicycle for the mind. Nice work

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

We are launching AI for Mind Maps today — would love to hear your thoughts →

Whimsical - Product Information, Latest Updates, and Reviews 2024 | Product Hunt

Whimsical is the iterative product workspace. We help teams build clarity and shared understanding faster with documentation tools for solving any product challenge.

www.producthunt.com

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

1 year

New superpower from Whimsical: go from idea to flowchart even faster with a help of AI. It's also available in ChatGPT as a plugin

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

Very cool visualization of European languages. Also gives you a sense of complexity of scaling in European market

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

via

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

10 months

Keep it weird ❤️ All these AI experiments feel like early days of internet, only the pace is so much faster

Charlie Holtz

@charliebholtz

10 months

David Attenborough is now narrating my life Here's a GPT-4-vision + @elevenlabsio python script so you can star in your own Planet Earth:

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

Building a software product is all about constant decision making. What matters is quality of decisions, not quantity. You simply cannot brute force it. 4/

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

@ben_issen @whimsical We are exploring this but want to make sure it's not just a checkbox feature but something actually useful. Stay tuned

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

6 years

👉 10 Reflections from Founding a SaaS Startup

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

Experimenting with a new design for file actions

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

4 years

On behalf of Whimsical team — thanks, Thomas! We take great pride in obsessing about details like these

Thomas Frank

@TomFrankly

4 years

Gotta give props where props are due, and hopefully push the industry forward: 👏👏👏 to @WhimsicalPowers for being the first (that I know of) to create a block-style editor that still allows precise text selection across blocks!

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

7 years

@JohnONolan For a fresh, design-obsessed approach check out (founder here)

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

4 years

@plexus @nikitonsky @WhimsicalPowers @NotionHQ Hey Arne - yeap, Whimsical is 100% Clojure. Also pretty fast :) This is an old post but the arch hasn't changed much

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

Finally.. somebody thinks an overheating Macbook is a good thing

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

ChatGPT multimodal is surprisingly good. Here it parsed a handdrawn flowchart with my terrible handwriting 100% correctly. Now the only ingredient missing is being able to use this together with plugins.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

Lil' quality-of-life improvement — file mentions got previews

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

7 years

"Steve Jobs famously called the computer the “bicycle for our minds” – that is, a multiplier of speed and efficiency. Some apps these days, though, feel like going up a big hill on a beach cruiser." @steveschoeffel about how we designed Whimsical for speed

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

9 years

I really wished there was something like this couple years ago. Awesome

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

9 months

@ShriDimensional I'm not complaining. And to be fair RealtimeBoard/Miro is the most shameless imitator of them all.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

Extended rest periods also gives your subconsciousness more time to process the information which fine-tunes your intuition and again improves quality of decisions. /6

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

It's all about little details (this one has been a long timg coming) — you can now set a custom thumbnail for your Whimsicals

Whimsical

@whimsical

2 years

Make your Whimsical boards thumb-thing special with custom thumbnails.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

@joelgascoigne @buffer @brendan Or you can also skip setting goals all together. I’ve been asked number of times how we got so much done with such a small team. We simply set the direction and review progress against it from time to time. Goals are only useful in crisis.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

7 years

. @WhimsicalPowers getting some serious beta testing

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

💜

Matt Wensing 🐙

@mattwensing

11 months

The amount of detail that the @whimsical team has obviously sweat to create a friction- and frustration-free UX is dramatically understated on here. Hats off to you today. You're making it possible for me to do real design work while fighting a cold.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

It happened because in building software, as @naval nicely put it, outputs are disconnected from inputs. You can spend a day on the right thing that has 1,000,000 times bigger return than spending a year on the wrong thing. 3/

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

6 years

NPS is a bullshit metric. Real customer satisfaction is measured by conversion and churn. $ is the only vote that matters.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

6 years

A morning dose of motivation from a customer: "Well no question or anything. Just here to say: good. job. Your product is hella-flippin-balls-to-the-wall awesome and makes my work a lot easier." 🙌

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

11 months

There's a lot to love from yesterday's @openai announcements BUT... I think custom GPTs is a mistake and OpenAI should've doubled down on plugins. Two and a half reasons why 🧵

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

6 years

👏 this resonates deeply. we have been thinking a lot about what kind of business we want @WhimsicalPowers to become and there are a lot of parallels. thanks @randfish for inspiration

Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads)

@randfish

6 years

SparkToro raised $1.3mm in an unusual round of funding: we've open-sourced our docs, so others can leverage this investor+founder-friendly structure

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

1 year

@_mql @whimsical Hey Michael, it's completely custom built

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

4 years

“The car became the owner of our cities, but we’re resetting the order again.”

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

So that is why I trust that an extra rest day will either not affect our output or may even increase it. /fin

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

The Truth

Aaron Levie 🇺🇸

@levie

2 years

It’s important to remember that for every product you love, there was a passionate group of people that spent an excruciating amount of time debating every single detail to get it right. This is hard and rare, which is why you don’t love most products.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

6 years

VC is like stereoids. It will increase your performance but make sure you are aware of long-term effects.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

@flawyte 1) it’s a black box (you can’t get raw event data out of it) 2) because of (1) we already had a simple custom solution in place that just recorded referral and landing page (all we care about) 3) we don't trust Google with data, especially when it's a free product

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

@heif

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

6 years

@RobStuttaford @WhimsicalPowers Thanks, Robert! In a way, I think of Whimsical as Clojure of (visual) collaboration. There are a lot of parallels in the core philosophy - opinionated, practical, minimalistic, thoughtful, no bullshit etc. Not for everyone either :)

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

@maccaw +1. We ended up building a custom spell-checker for @whimsical on top of WASM-compiled Hunspell. Pretty hardcore. Would pay for grammar-checker, although not sure about trusting user content to 3rd parties

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

3 years

Great to hear, Jacob! We're obsessed with easy of use

Jacob Bøtter

@boetter

3 years

Needed a break from Miro and Mural, as my workshop boards tend to explode with many attendees. This week I’ve been using @WhimsicalPowers to facilitate a week-long sprint and its been terrific! Easy to navigate for non-techy attendees, easy to keep an evolving agenda.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

9 months

Most software could be improved by having more constraints. I was just reminded of this when wife asked for a help with formatting in Google Docs. For some reason it wasn't doing what it was supposed to and it took bunch of fiddling to make it work.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

One day, choosing where you live will be as natural as choosing where you work. Cities and countries (if they still exist) will compete for you.

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

7 years

#marchforscience 🤓

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

Here's another handy shortcut we just added to Whimsical:

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

7 years

Oh so true

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

5 years

In my twenties I used to be that guy - pulling 60-80 hour workweeks and all-nighters. In retrospect my output was tiny compared to my thirties when I started doing strict 40h workweeks. /2

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

10 years

if you plan to read just single management book in your life, make it High output management. for vintage bonus it's only available in paper

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

8 years

Thought provoking on several levels.. End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?

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Kaspars Dancis

@KasparsDancis

2 years

@mparts_ We do this at @whimsical . If you do the same job, why would it matter where you live, especially in fully remote company? It's good for morale and culture which is more valuable than a bit of saved $.

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