DocsInBox
How a company of 520+ people took a careful look at the market after Slack and chose Pachca
About the company
Hi everyone, I'm Sergey Shagin, CTO of DocsInBox, a product IT company. For 10 years, our service has helped restaurants with electronic document management. In that time, we've earned the trust of more than 6,500 suppliers and 11,000 customers, including Dodo Pizza, Tanuki, KFC and Metro.
Life before Pachca
Back when our team was only 160 people, we used Slack. It didn't cause us much pain, but we knew that sooner or later the wave of shutdowns would reach us too. So we started preparing and researching the team chat app market well in advance.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
Before the move, we tested Russian team chat apps very thoroughly. So choosing Pachca was a careful, deliberate decision.
We liked how openly the team talked about their plans and how responsive and flexible they were. During the move, we set up a shared chat where the Pachca team answered all our questions.
Many alternatives felt more like a corporate WhatsApp* with no threads and no split between group chats and direct messages. Pachca had every feature that was critical for us, which is why we chose it.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
It was important to us not to lose the way we communicated in Slack, and we pulled it off. During the move, we did a full inventory of every chat we had.
Thanks to cross-chat threads, our workspace no longer gets cluttered with extra chats. In Slack, we had a rule: if a task needed more than two people, you created a temporary chat. In Pachca, cross-chat threads solve that problem.
Another thing we didn't have before: tags. We use them to group members, and that makes adding new employees to Pachca much easier.
Of course, there are still a few things we'd like to see in Pachca, but they're minor.
Tips for making the switch
At first, I'd recommend setting up a separate chat where employees can ask any questions they have about the app. Ours was called "Help with Pachca." After a while, activity there naturally died down and we stopped using it.
We also asked all employees to fill out their work profiles in the same format. For example, our usernames are the first initial, a dot and the last name.
* Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook, Instagram) declared extremist and banned in Russia.
