Pingboard is an employee directory & shared org chart for your company

It is a place for companies to store and share their most important data: their employees. That means things like: photos, birthdays, phone numbers, interests, or even your team’s favorite restaurant. Pingboard helps office managers store and update the information (no more spreadsheets!) and allows employees to do the same (“I just got married!”). Your employees stay connected to each other (“I want to learn about the new guy!”) and their information stays connected to all their other apps (Salesforce, Google Apps, etc.)

Who uses Pingboard? Pingboard is for people who run companies. It is designed to break down barriers that prevent teams from getting things done together, barriers that prevent people from getting to know one other better.

Here are a few more things to know about us:

1. Office managers love Pingboard

Office managers are heroes and the backbone of any office.

If you manage an office, we are building Pingboard for you. There is software built to help HR and IT do their jobs better, but there isn’t anything built specifically for office management. So we are building it… and it is centered around a beautiful company directory.

2. We built Pingboard to be highly collaborative 

With Pingboard, your employees keep their information up to date so that you don’t have to.

They can choose what phone number to share, whether or not to link to their personal social profile (Facebook/Twitter/Github/etc.) and they can change their photo any time they feel in the mood to do so.

 Messaging, aka “pings”, are quick short messages that your team can send to each other from the Pingboard mobile app when they’re running late for a meeting or when its time for the company lunch. And with the Pingboard visitor iPad app, you’ll have a “virtual receptionist” at your front door that lets visitors ping the person they are there to see.

3. Pingboard is customizable

Companies customize Pingboard to store whatever they want.

They can choose which information is kept private and which is shared with the team and with visitors. Developers can extend the Pingboard functionality and integrate employee data into other systems by using our API.

It is reasonable to expect that we’ll extend Pingboard ourselves, too. Tell us what you want. Tell us what you need. Tell us what you’re desperate for!

4. So, why did we build Pingboard?

Recently I teamed up with Josh Baer and a group of Austin’s top entrepreneurs to open Capital Factory, a shared office space for startups in Austin, Texas. We’ve grown to 50,000 square feet and we now have hundreds of startups working at our space.

As engineers, we started noticing our office managers wasting their precious time maintaining spreadsheets and manual processes in order to onboard new members, bill members, create access badges, and adding them to all our community tools such as our conference room booking system and our Facebook group. Their time could be much better spent on things that software can’t do, like helping new members get integrated into the community, planning fun events, working on special projects and making everyone at Capital Factory feel special. So we decided to do something about it.

We sat down with our office managers and talked about what they do every day and we discussed ideas for how it could be better. I also sat down with office managers at about 20 different companies that I know around Austin. I realized that virtually everything these office managers do is centered around information about people.

So a friend and I started building a product that we felt would make these people’s jobs easier and their work lives more fun. It was clear that the product needed to have a directory of people at its core, so that is what we built first.

We built the first version of the Pingboard directory and we tested it at Capital Factory. The first version was very clunky but showed signs of usefulness, so we took what we learned by watching people use it and then we made it better. We went through several iterations, adding features and polish, and testing along the way.

About 4 months ago we started testing Pingboard at other companies around the country and we found that office managers were delighted by how much time it saved them. We’ve added several people to our team in order to accelerate our development and we have earned some great investors who believe in what we are building.

We’ve only scratched the surface of how we can help people run their offices smarter and help teams be more connected, and we are excited about the possibilities.

We’d love to show you what we’ve built. If you are interested in giving Pingboard a try or just seeing a demo, let me know. If you are interested in helping us build it, we are hiring.

Thanks for reading this!