Youāre listening to Spotify while sending emails, and an annoying song starts playing. Only Spotify is buried underneath your various work-related windows: Chrome, Slack, Outlook, ClickUp, you name it. Your Mac no longer has a play/pause button, despite its flashy touch bar. It takes longer than youād care to admit to find Spotify and finally skip that damn song.
āWhen you think about your daily workflows, thereās so many little things that annoy you,ā said Thomas Paul Mann, co-founder of productivity tool Raycast. āYou have friction everywhere. We want to get rid of that.ā
Many of the hottest productivity startups are trying to be platforms, home to every possible workplace app and integration. Slack wants to be the ādigital HQ,ā Monday.com wants to be the āWork OSā and ClickUp wants to be āone app to replace them all.ā Raycast is the opposite. Itās a self-described āproductivity layer,ā and looks a bit like Appleās Spotlight search bar. You call Raycast up through a keyboard shortcut of your choice. Then you can search for applications or commands, like toggle play/pause on Spotify.
Raycast purposely limits some aspects of user experience to keep things simple. For example, while you can create an Asana task and add a short description in Raycast, you canāt use Raycast to update that description. Youāll need to open Asana to write a deeper, more fleshed-out description. Mann said he appreciates tools that concentrate on one use case.
āOftentimes we use just a fraction of a tool, and then a ton of the other stuff I donāt really need,ā Mann said. āWhen I think about a tool, I want to have it very focused on something particular and being really really good at that.ā
Mann and co-founder Petr Nikolaev launched Raycast in 2020. The two met while working as engineers on Spark Augmented Reality at Facebook, but after three years, decided they wanted to build something of their own. āAs engineers, we never really understood why software is slow and not nice to us,ā Mann said. What if they could build an app that let engineers access all their tools with just a few keyboard combinations? So they created Raycast. Today, it has more than 10,000 users.
Raycast is similar to connector tools Alfred and Command E, encouraging users to set up hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts for common commands. If youāre hardcore, youāll never need to use your mouse with Raycast. The goal is to build muscle memory and to make navigation around the computer seamless. You open Raycast with a āglobal hotkey,ā like command + space bar. Then you can search for applications and record hotkeys for the applications you use most frequently. Mann uses option + n to open Notion, and option + i to see his assigned issues in developer tool Linear.
Think of Raycast at the center of your computerās spiderweb, extending out to your various other applications. The app comes with ready-made extensions, like the ability to browse bookmarks, view calendar events or join a Zoom meeting. But Raycastās biggest asset is its engineer-heavy community. Mann and Nikoleav zeroed in on developers for its early user base because they can build extensions on Raycastās open API. Raycastās store has more than 250 extensions, including integrations with tools like 1Password and Google Translate.
Photo: Raycast
āWe knew at the very beginning that this is a tool for community and we need to have a platform where people can build extensions,ā Mann said. āThere are a lot of them which we might not even know about. The beauty in productivity is that it's very personal.ā
The personal plan is free, but the team is working on launching Raycast for Teams. It will cost teams $10 per user per month and will allow for shared extensions. Mann recently opened up early access in the toolās Slack community; 76 people have already indicated interest.
Raycastās Slack is very active, as users are prompted to join the minute they download the app. People can report bugs, offer suggestions for extensions and ask for coding advice. To ensure trust from Raycastās users, Mann is focused on responding to feedback and shipping out updates as quickly as possible. āWe donāt do marketing, we just tweet about it, and people share it with their friends and companies,ā Mann said.
Bruno Vegreville, CEO of Paris-based calendar app Hera, is a long-time Raycast user. His favorite features are āSet Slack Status,ā so he can update his status without visiting the app, and āSnippets,ā a library of notes he needs easy access to. His mailing list of investors, for example, is pasted in his Raycast Snippets.
Vegreville likes to play around with new tools, but heās wary about permanently adopting tools that might complicate his stack. āI try to not over-complexify,ā Vegreville said. āI feel like it's often one of the pitfalls of the productivity community, that we try to optimize everything.ā But Raycast fit in smoothly with his other tools. The interface is simple, and the application stays in the background, waiting to be called to attention with a quick keyboard combination.
Sometimes Raycast is so good at being an unobtrusive productivity layer, Vegreville forgets itās there. Itās not in your face when you open your computer, so itās easy to get absorbed in work, moving between other tools. This is one downside to Raycastās approach. āItās hard to build an identity and take space,ā Vegreville said. Raycast combats this, he says, by building a vibrant and active user community.
Raycast might not be for everybody ā especially if you have trouble remembering keyboard shortcuts. But Mannās okay with this; Raycast doesnāt need mass adoption right now. Instead, heās focused on keeping up with suggestions from Raycastās opinionated community.
āYouāre just surrounding yourself with them and observing so many little things you havenāt thought of before,ā Mann said. āThatās how Raycast got shaped.ā