Planoplan

About the company

Hi! I'm Anton, Chief Product Officer at Planoplan. We have more than 30 people on the team, and we build a 3D graphics editor for interior design, taking projects from concept to renders and drawings. It's an alternative to the foreign software interior designers typically use, but it's fully tailored to our local market.

Life before Pachca

Before Pachca, we communicated in Telegram. As the company grew, the number of chats kept climbing. At some point, it passed 200 😱. That created a few problems:

• People who had left the team long ago were still in the chats. Everyone forgot to remove them, and there was no way to keep track.
• Chaotic discussions. One person writes about one topic, another replies about something else, and someone else starts a whole new topic. That alone was usually a trigger to create yet another chat.
• No way to separate personal from work. I'm on vacation, and people still message me.

The number of chats grew exponentially. They were created for literally any reason.

By then, we were expanding quickly, and working in Telegram became even more of a problem. We came up with the idea of organizing communication by department and area of work. That's what pushed us to look for a team chat app.

We had a few requirements:

→ The app had to be Russian → It had to have threads → Admin tools had to be easy to use → It couldn't cost a fortune → Video calls were a nice-to-have

How Pachca changed our team communication

First, we organized our communication with threads:

→ No need to create lots of chats: you can start a discussion right under a message → No need to scroll through a hundred messages to find context → The chat is easier to follow visually

We usually use threads for fairly short discussions. If the topic is big, there's no point in writing a lot. It's better to talk it through on a call. After that, the meeting recording goes into the relevant thread. Overall, it's more convenient than before.

Managing employees in Pachca got easier. Basically, we sorted everyone once, set everything up and haven't had to touch it since. No more struggling to remove and add people like we did in Telegram.

Pachca makes it easy to separate personal from work. I use notification schedules a lot. You can set notifications to be active only at certain times, and the preset statuses help colleagues see whether it makes sense to message someone and when they'll be available.