5 minute read
Founder Story

San Francisco startup Swit empowers remote collaboration

The Swit team are sitting around a couch smiling at the camera.

How two founders aim to redefine productivity for global teams

Josh Lee and Max Lim understand the importance of collaboration in a digital world. While working for another startup, they relied on a number of project management apps to communicate, collaborate, and complete tasks. But with Josh in the Bay Area and Max in Seoul, maintaining context across several different apps and platforms proved difficult. That’s why, in March 2019, they built Swit, a team collaboration platform that seamlessly combines team chat with task management. “We wanted to bring just the right amount of every remote work essential into one convenient place,” Josh says. Swit allows teams to turn their conversations into trackable tasks and share tasks to chat with simple drag-and-drop functionality, ensuring everyone is on the same page and projects get done faster.

As Swit started to grow and build more functionality into their platform, their app architecture grew more complicated and heavier. To manage this density—and the challenge of scaling their systems, occasional traffic surges, and frequent updates—the team migrated to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which now allows them to operate 84 workloads and 252 microservices with high stability and 99.9999% uptime. “The migration took one month,” says Josh, “and it turned out to be well worth the effort—our systems were able to offer high scalability and become resilient enough to keep its uptime no matter what happened.”

In 2018, Josh and Max were accepted into the Google for Startups Cloud Program. As part of the program, they received Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credits to support their growth and strengthen Swit’s cloud infrastructure. They also received tailored mentorship and support from the Google Cloud team and other founders in the program. “We learned what a real partnership looks like,” said Max. “Whenever we had questions—whether business-related or technical—we knew we had the strongest partner in the world to ask.”. From introductions to potential venture capitalists, to help with co-marketing and internal product questions, Swit got the strategic partnership they needed to make their vision a reality.

The startup program opened so many opportunities to us.

In addition to GKE, the Swit team uses BigQuery to run analytics and surface valuable insights on massive amounts of data, including API invocation patterns and error reports. Firebase allows them to optimize Swit’s mobile app for seamless performance across different devices and platforms. And Cloud Scheduler helps them beef up their resiliency with auto-triggered, pre-scheduled events, even in the event of downtime. Overall, GCP offers robust security features for GCP resources and apps, well-established Virtual Private Cloud (VCP) networks, and an easy-to-use interface for managing and controlling their systems. “We use Google Cloud technologies in almost every sector of development and service delivery,” says Josh. “The products are high-performance and infinitely scalable, and they allow us to attract more users and increase their satisfaction with Swit.”

Thanks to the help and guidance they received from the startup program, Josh and Max have the tools they need to ensure Swit thrives. They have acquired 7,000 new clients since the program began, and their monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is up by 135 percent. And even though their service has grown over 30x since launch, their whole infrastructure is operated by a single engineer. As a complement to Google Workspace, Swit offers in-app integrations for Gmail, GoogleDrive, with Calendar, Meet, and Documents. The team has also developed Swit add-ons in the Google Workspace Marketplace for Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. “The Google for Startups Cloud Program opened so many opportunities to us,” Josh says. “Now we’re ready to take our collaboration experience to the next level.”



Interested in learning more? Check out our Google for Startups Cloud Program where members have access to financial, business, and technology support to accelerate their startup’s growth. Apply now.

Learn more about Swit