An Interview with Josh Lee, the Founder of Swit
Swit is the love-child of a marriage between Slack and Trello. It is a cutting-edge team communication and high-performance task management tool born to help you love your work and the team.
Josh Lee, the founder of Swit, started his career as an English teacher in Korea. Dissatisfied with the standardized national curriculum which focuses on societal objectives without a much-needed conversation on the authentic purpose of student autonomy, he developed a user-friendly web-based app to help teachers create unique teaching materials equipped for student’s individual learning levels. Years later, this became the underlying technology for developing Swit.
Q: So, Swit! What is Swit and how did you develop it?
J: I used to be a heavy user of Slack integrating it with multiple apps like Trello and Monday.com. But I found using multiple tools on different platforms caused overlapped features with no interaction among the integrated products. This disjoint multi-app environment reduced team productivity and created unnecessary communication. Hence, Swit was born to bring everything you need to get things done together in one convenient place and to make your work collaboration a bit sweeter. Since most people spend 60% of their awake time at work, Swit was created to help you love working with your team.
Q: The name, Swit, has a nice ring to it, does it mean anything? I also like the logo, does it represent something?
J: Swit stands for Start/Stay Working in Teams. The pronunciation conjures up suite from tech suite platforms and the word sweet. The logo, a shape of Swit Heart, is made up of two circles symbolizing communication between two people and a checkmark indicating task is complete. There is no doubt that work environments have come to require a heavier load of collaboration today than ever. People have become more and more specialized in their field of knowledge, and soon enough, it wasn’t just managerial positions that required day-to-day communication with members from other divisions--a rise of cross-functional teams. Rather than exchanging meaningless communication between these teams, enabling them with a quality communication bridge coupled with a transparent project management tool seemed imperative to today’s workspaces.
Q: How does Swit set itself apart from other communication tools?
J: Team communication is crucial in workplaces yet many communication tools result in unwarranted conversations and wasted time. Using a team chat like Slack as the sole collaboration source could give employees a false idea that they are working hard while no tasks are actually getting done--because all you can do on Slack is talking.
Swit was created to provide teams with a more productive, task-centric collaboration hub designed to talk less and get more done. In Swit, you can create kanban style project cards, assign tasks, track timeline, and invite teammates, so everyone can stay informed as projects advance. Swit is the only team collaboration tool that supports cross-workspace features suitable for all types of organizational structures and sizes with various multi-workspace management features like the super-admin management system. Currently, the majority of our clients are IT companies, and by collaborating with Simple Steps, we are taking a step further by working with industries beyond tech.
Q: How did Swit’s partnership with Simple Steps begin? Can you share your experience working with Simple Steps?
J: When I met Doyeon, I couldn’t empathize better with Simple Steps’ mission to empower immigrant women to return to work by overcoming cultural and professional disconnect. I wanted to partake in the movement by contributing to the community and offering Swit’s best tier (Advanced Plan) in exchange for their feedback and support. I believe Swit will diminish unnecessary tasks while increasing team productivity so that the Simple Steps team can focus on making an impact on the greater community. I am very excited to witness how nonprofit organizations like Simple Steps make the best use of our tool in accomplishing their missions. Also, Swit is looking to hire bi-lingual talents for sales and marketing later this year and would love to work with Simple Steps to find quality candidates.
Q: Thank you very much for your time and your support, Josh. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers?
J: I am truly happy to work with such a diligent and dedicated team at Simple Steps. Every single one of the team members provided useful product feedback and new feature suggestions--some that weren't even on our product roadmap. Oh, and they found a bug too! We are really excited to continue this partnership and we look forward to connecting with Simple Steps’ talents in the future.
Thanks to Josh and the Swit team, Simple Steps have been using Swit for just over a month and so far, we love it! We use Swit to communicate with our teammates who are spread out in the Bay Area from El Cerrito to Pleasanton to Palo Alto, and with the Seattle team too. Sharing and communicating with teammates remotely has been a breeze thanks to Swit. What we love the most is being able to work on projects while receiving real-time feedback without switching between platforms. Swit is in the process of integrating Gmail, so sharing your emails and turning them into work cards just got easier. This power tool has a lot of features to offer from novice users to tech-savvy organization pros. Swit team is quick to respond with any questions, small or big, and we are excited to see how our suggestions blossom and roll out on future updates.
Interview date: January 24, 2020
Edited by Kat Choi