Interview with Rami Nasser of WorkHack
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WorkHack is a functional and registration-free whiteboard to-do list. You can visualize the priorities of your tasks by color and size, and collaborate with your team members on the same whiteboard.
Rami is an electrical engineer and a web developer from Halifax, NS, Canada. Rami is the creator of WorkHack.com, a part-time MBA student at Dalhousie University, and a freelance engineering consultant. |
A lot of great startups come about by the founder solving an everyday problem that they are facing. What was the inspiration behind WorkHack?
I created WorkHack to solve a personal problem; I am a visual thinker and I use whiteboards on a daily basis to prioritize my tasks by color and size. Whiteboards work because they are simple and distraction-free. WorkHack was my answer to an online version of my whiteboard setup that I could use at work, school and home. WorkHack is unique because it is all about getting your tasks done with minimal effort and without the burden of tags, task assignments, and due dates.
Have you leveraged your community to help better the product? If so, how have they helped further the product?
The community is the driving force behind WorkHack. WorkHack started simple, and based on users’ feedback I improved WorkHack. Some of the additions to WorkHack include: an RSS feed to the to-do list, a pop-up version of WorkHack called miniWorkHack, and the ability to sort tasks by drag and drop.
Moreover, some creative users started tagging and assigning due dates as part of the tasks description, an idea that I adopted for some of my tasks.
WorkHack has obviously found its way outside of the United States, have you found other countries using the product in ways that you did not imagine?
WorkHack is very popular internationally; WorkHack overcame the language barrier by using few English words and by making everything simple enough to be self-explanatory.
WorkHack is very popular in schools; for example, students from Belgium use WorkHack to manager to-do lists for lab projects, research papers and assignments.
BONUS: Where do you see WorkHack a year from now?
I am working on a plan to add new features to WorkHack, including: optional registration for easier access to multiple whiteboard to-do lists, support for OpenID, a widget to integrate WorkHack into web-based operating systems and blogs, and a new whiteboard time tracking
application.
Copyright © 2007 by Will Kern