About Klusko: why we built tasks and chat as one app

Before Klusko, we ran a 12-person business. We had a chat app for talking and a task app for the work, and we paid for both every month. Jobs still went missing. Somebody would ask for a quote to be chased in a chat thread, somebody else would say “on it”, and a week or so later the customer would ring to ask where it was. The task app never heard about any of it.

We tried the usual fixes. A rule that every request goes into the task app, which works until the first busy week. A Monday meeting to copy things over from chat. None of it dealt with the actual problem, which was that the conversation and the job lived in two different places.

So we built one app with both. Klusko has boards, lists and calendars for the work, and channels and direct messages for the talking. When you mention a task in a chat message it becomes a live link, and the task keeps its own comments, so you can see what was agreed and who agreed it.

Why it’s called Klusko

“Klus” is Dutch for a job, a chore, a thing that needs doing. A klusjesman is a handyman. It seemed like the right word for an app that’s mostly about getting jobs out of a chat thread and onto someone’s list with a date next to them.

What we think

We think most small teams don’t need Gantt charts. They need to know who’s doing what this week and what’s late, and for a firm of eight people with a van and a diary, a calendar and a board probably cover that better than a chart nobody updates after the first month.

Per-seat buckets are annoying. If you have 11 people you should pay for 11, so that’s how our pricing works.

“All-in-one” tools that do forty things get tiring. Every feature comes with settings, and somebody on a small team has to understand all of them. We’d rather do tasks and chat properly and be honest about the rest.

Chat history belongs to you. Our free plan keeps every message, because hiding old messages until you pay is a strange way to treat people.

And we’d rather tell you what Klusko doesn’t do than have you find out after inviting the team. There’s a list in the FAQ, and our comparison pages say plainly where other tools are better.

What we’re working on

The iPhone app is in testing. Getting it out of testing and onto the App Store is the next big thing, and after that comes an Android app. We also want importers, so moving over from Trello, Asana or Slack doesn’t have to be done by hand. We’re not putting dates on any of these. We’re a small team, and we’d rather ship them than promise them.

Everything is free during early access, and the pricing page shows what the plans will cost once billing starts.

The company

Klusko is run by [Company name] Ltd. If you want to talk to us about anything, email hello@klusko.com or use the contact page.