Who uses Viably
Viably came out of three founder-led, employee-owned companies built to operate with an ethos of extreme efficiency and automation. We want to share it with other teams that are maniacally focused on producing work at the highest level of efficiency.
Samuel Chan, founder. Written for anyone weighing up whether their team belongs here.
From the founder
Hello. I am Samuel Chan, the founder of Algoritma, Supertype, Sectors, and now Viably. For a while I was a monetized creator on YouTube, and I have always kept one foot in community work. At the moment I mentor at Gaza Tech Mentorship, where I mentor Palestinian youth graduating from computer science programs on software engineering and product development.
Before all of that I spent years answering questions on StackOverflow, where I finished in the top 2% of contributors across the Python and R topics, and I still maintain open source tooling in the large language model space on my GitHub. Over the past twelve months I have guest lectured at Singapore Institute of Technology and Nanyang Technological University on AI, data science and product development, and before that I wrote the machine learning and data science curriculum for Ngee Ann Polytechnic and taught it on campus in their CET programs.
I'm saying all of this because what comes before that is important. I have had ADHD since my earliest school years, and a company doctor diagnosed me at nineteen. Getting there was a long stretch of self discovery, interrupted every so often by weeks where concentration simply left the room, which I now understand as what happens when your executive function is in short supply.
These days I run Algoritma, Supertype and Sectors, and I still do about 60% of the software and product development work myself. Whatever time is left over goes to my family and my kids, and to the community work above. Carrying the rest of it with me are fifteen engineers and software craftsmen, alongside a small team of three in business and marketing. All of our companies are bootstrapped, self funded, employee owned and profitable, and they can be profitable because of the way we work and the culture of extreme efficiency and focus we maintain.
When I set out to build Viably, the intention was to package everything my team and I have learned across twelve years of building software companies and products. We wanted a name we could put on it. A system, a way of assembling workspaces and workforces that stay efficient and highly focused, and that can ship work viably without a management layer sitting on top of them.
So who uses Viably? Our own companies do. Supertype was the first workspace onboarded, and has been on it every day since.
Algoritma was the second and Sectors the third. Viably has a workspace switcher, so I hop between all three most days of the week, and after all this time I am still taken aback by how little friction there is in moving between them. I hope you will be too.
Who Viably is for
Viably is not a 1-for-1 replacement for enterprise resource planning software or a heavy-duty enterprise project management suite. Let me be honest: if you have great success running your business with those, Viably might not be for you. It ships without the full catalogue of project management and ERP features, and that absence is a deliberate design choice so our teams don't end up spending more time managing the management software than they do shipping work.
So, what Viably does do is take a great deal of overhead and management work off the table. Once you have it set up, and we are glad to help you with that, it can retire a few of the other tools you thought you needed. That comes as a side effect of having far fewer management processes to feed, and far less data entry and manual reconciliation. Every design decision that goes into Viably answers the question: how do we default to automation, so that Viably takes care of the work in the background and escalates only what it could not? The five principles that question comes from are set out in the Viably philosophy.
More precisely, I believe Viably will suit teams under the size of fifty who want a work environment that is extremely efficient, cultivates ownership and accountability, and defaults to automation and observability. Supertype, the company that publishes Viably, is one such team. Teams that regularly punch above their weight and remain relentlessly obsessed with human empowerment are the ones who tend to thrive here.
What arrives in a workspace
A new workspace is not an empty canvas waiting for somebody to configure it. A few core modules arrive already wired to each other, and the order they are described in below is the order a signal travels through them.
- 01
Observability, where a workspace starts
Viably connects to the places your business already reports on itself. Google Search Console, analytics, and the rest of your measurement surfaces resolve into one dashboard, so the numbers somebody was going to open five tabs for on Monday morning are already sitting together. Beside them, webhook management gives every other system you run a way in, whether that is a payment, a form submission, a deploy, or a support enquiry. Anything that looks like an incident gets detected and announced while it is still small.
Nothing further down this page works without that layer, because everything reads from the same stream of events rather than from a collection of dashboards and Excel sheets.
- 02
A customer record that fills itself in
Every event that names a person is matched against the contact record, so your CRM assembles itself out of traffic you were generating anyway. Lifecycle and relationship history, revenue attribution, deal tracking, email and calendar, and the reporting on top of all of it read from that one stream. Data entry becomes the exception you reach for when a conversation happened somewhere Viably cannot see, and the rest of the time the record is simply already right.
- 03
Work that already knows who owns it
An event that deserves a response becomes a task or an issue with a name on it, a due date, and a thread it can be discussed in. Issues sync both ways with GitHub, so your engineers keep working where they already work while Viably keeps the team informed. We borrowed from the GTD school of thought to capture-first, process-later so important signals do not get lost in the noise.
- 04
The shared memory of a team
A shared pinboard holds the links, decisions and references a team keeps re-asking each other for, thread management keeps Slack conversations from dissolving into scrollback, and @Via, the assistant that lives in your channels, answers from everything above instead of from a general impression of your company. The three of them are what stop the workspace becoming another place where information goes to be lost.
Slack as the control surface
The last piece is how a person tells Viably what they want, and the answer is that they mostly do not have to leave the conversation they are already having. An emoji reaction on a Slack message is a complete instruction, and Viably treats it as one.
A medal on a teammate's post awards them a point in your workspace and moves them up the leaderboard, with no form to fill in and nobody to ask for permission.
A bug on a message creates a tracked issue, carrying the original thread with it so whoever picks it up can read what actually happened.
A pin pushes the message onto your team pinboard, where it stays findable long after the channel has scrolled past it.
There are more of them, covering tasks, reminders, calendar events, email and document scanning, and each one is documented in the catalogue of powers with the reactions that trigger it. You do not need a Slack team to use Viably, but if you do then @Via is the natural extension of Viably's ethos in the place where your team already talks.
Joining us
We have started onboarding the first workspaces beyond the circle of companies in my immediate network. Signing up with a Slack account or a Google Workspace account creates your own workspace, and from there you can start welcoming your team into something thoughtfully designed and handcrafted for teams that want to ship work viably, well away from the bloat and overhead of traditional management software.
We would be honoured to have you along. When you join, I will reach out to you personally to understand how you are planning to use Viably, and to offer whatever help and guidance you need in setting it up. I want to make sure your team is set up for success, and that you can start shipping work viably as soon as possible.
See you inside.