u/CalmImplement3556

I'm a solo developer working with a couple of freelance collaborators across

timezones (one in the Philippines, one in Eastern Europe, me in India). We've

been trying to set up some lightweight async check-ins so I'm not pinging them

at 2am their time asking what they shipped.

Every tool I looked at — Geekbot, Standuply, DailyBot — assumes everyone's on

Slack. We're not. Two of us use email + occasional Google Meet. Adding Slack

just for one async ritual felt absurd.

So we tried:

- Shared Google Doc — nobody updates it

- Email thread — turned into chaos within a week

- WhatsApp group — works but answers get buried instantly

Genuinely curious how others handle this. If your remote team doesn't live in

Slack/Teams, what do you actually use for daily or weekly status check-ins?

Are people just... not doing standups? Or is there a tool I'm missing?

I asked around and a bunch of folks running small distributed teams said the

same thing — they want async standups but won't pay for a Slack add-on. So I

sketched a tiny landing page to see if this is a real pattern or just my bubble.

If anyone wants to take a look or be on the early list, drop a comment or DM —

happy to share. Mostly just trying to figure out if I'm chasing something real.

I’m a solo developer working with a couple of freelance collaborators across different time zones one in the Philippines, one in Eastern Europe, and me in India.

The biggest problem wasn’t coding. It was simply knowing what everyone finished without messaging people at odd hours.

I tried a few async standup tools like Geekbot, Standuply, and DailyBot. But almost all of them assume your team already lives in Slack or Teams.

We don’t.

Most of our communication is just email, occasional Google Meet calls, and sometimes WhatsApp. Setting up Slack only for standups felt unnecessary.

So we tried simpler options:

• Shared Google Doc → nobody updated it consistently
• Email thread → became messy very quickly
• WhatsApp group → updates got buried within hours

At some point I started wondering:

How are small remote teams actually handling async check-ins if they’re not using Slack?

Are people skipping standups completely?
Or is there a simpler tool that already solves this?

I asked a few other founders and small distributed teams, and surprisingly many of them had the same issue. They wanted lightweight async standups, but didn’t want another Slack-based tool.

So I made a very small landing page to test whether this is a real problem or just something happening in my circle.

If this sounds familiar, I’d genuinely love to hear how your team handles updates today. And if you want to see the idea or join the early list, feel free to comment or DM me.