(2018-10-18) To Turn Docs Into Apps Coda Had To Rethink Productivity From Scratch

To turn docs into apps, Coda had to rethink productivity from scratch. (CollaborationWare) Coda does, however, have a clear vision of the sort of people it wants to please. When the service formally announced itself a year ago, Mehrotra wrote a blog post that referenced one user’s description of the service as “Minecraft for docs.” Like the block-building game phenom, Coda is less about what it does right out of the box than what people can build atop it; it’s a tapestry for ambitious creativity. The company calls its users “makers.”

For now, Coda remains a work in progress, widely used by beta testers but not due for general release until 2019.

It starts to get interesting when you use all its features to assemble something that looks like an app—one built precisely for the needs of your business.

“We think that the people most equipped to build their own tools are the people that are actually doing the work,” says Mehrotra.

integrating it with other services: “I work in all these other tools. How do I make sense of when I should use Coda, when I should use the other tools, how do they work together?” Coda is responding to such queries with Packs, an ambitious new series of features that tie the service together with other web-based tools. For starters, there are more than 15 Packs, including ones for GitHub, Gmail, Google Natural Language, Greenhouse, Intercom, Slack.com, Twilio, and others, with more on the way.

By connecting a company’s workaday tools in new ways, Coda has the potential to become a sort of collaborative glue

strikingly unhurried. Mehrotra and DeNeui founded their startup in June 2014.

The company officially unveiled itself in October 2017 and launched a wider—though closed—beta program. At that time, it also disclosed that it had raised $60 million in funding.

In early 2019, if Mehrotra’s current timetable holds up, Coda will reach general availability. Even then, the company won’t charge for the service while it ponders its eventual business model.