Introducing Aboard Climate (Beta)

Most weeks, we use this newsletter to talk about AI, software, and the broader tech industry. This week, I’m going to talk more specifically about Aboard—and how we’re changing.

Where We’re Going

Aboard has been in a figure-things-out mode for a while now, but our future is coming into focus. To put it simply, Aboard is a software acceleration platform for organizations—businesses, not-for-profits, and community groups of all types. We have a set of tools, components, and approaches that let us stand up complex software in minutes, then iteratively tweak it. We do this with you, helping you along the way, instead of as a pure software service—and at a fraction of the cost of legacy enterprise software.

We launched a new website that talks about this in more depth. And our podcast, Reqless—about software in the age of AI—is already in this realm.

In some ways, this is a return to form. My co-founder Rich and I absolutely love software, but the reality is organizational problems are solved when humans interact, often in the same room. The hardest problems are solved by defining the problems, then building the tools to address the problems over the long, long term.

To that end: We’re getting a new office, in the heart of Manhattan, with great views, and we’re going to be hosting a lot of events, running the gamut from NGO do-gooder events to intense insurance and finance gatherings. We want to make sure that NYC gets to fully participate, in all of its NYCness, in this new software era. As with our last firm, all are welcome.

What’s Changing (or Not)

We’ve built software that people can pick up and use—and thousands of people currently use it. But the more we learned about how marketing “consumer” software works, the more we realized that we’d need to raise millions of dollars, then spend nearly all of it—not on building great software, but on advertising, handing the bulk of it to Google, Meta, and Microsoft in the hope that we could squeeze some long-term, paying users from the SaaS lemon.

Rich and I might be busted inside, but…we love enterprise software sales. We love going to places, learning about peoples’ challenges, and seeing how they work. We’ve already been to multiple states, walked factory floors, and have people who want to use Aboard long-term—and we see a great business in helping people—especially smaller and middle-market orgs who otherwise can’t get Salesforce or SAP to answer their calls—build really usable custom tools for their teams.

Your Bookmarks Are Safe

So what about the “old” Aboard, the bookmarking version?

We’ve decided to keep the bookmarking/research/workflow tools we’ve built going, as part of Aboard, and you can continue to use the product that way without charge. There’s not much else to say on that front. We expect those features to keep getting better over time. I can’t make any promises about forever—the world is an uncertain place—but that’s the plan for now (and data export is always right there if you need it, in “Settings.”) Having free software thousands of people use regularly is good marketing for our ability to build tools for any organization.

Meet Aboard Climate

To that end, we’re committed to doing more under the “Aboard Free” banner, so last week we launched another product: Aboard Climate. If, in the future, as has often been said, “all jobs are climate jobs,” then in the future all work software is climate software. Since we create work software, we thought we should get ahead of that.

To that end, we hosted a great, well-attended event with our partner Probable Futures during Climate Week in NYC, along with many other great orgs. Thanks to everyone who came out! The event focused on what can be done with data to help people adapt to the changing climate. Aboard Climate is our attempt to do that.

Aboard Climate is in Beta and has three components:

1. A “climate location” field on Aboard cards that, when given an address, puts climate risk data directly into the card, on a map. Clicking on that gives you more detailed information.
2. An Aboard workflow for managing the climate risk at warehouses. We needed to start somewhere, so we started with warehouses, which are often in flood- and heat-prone areas, with vulnerable employees.
3. A board that collects resources for warehouse managers—stuff like OSHA posters and readings.

The way it works:

• You tell us where your warehouses are.
• We plug those into Aboard and tell you about the climate and safety risks for each warehouse, using climate-risk models from Probable Futures.
• We walk the warehouses with you (humans! interacting!), and look for safety risks. 
• Each warehouse gets an Aboard workflow. You assign people to work on each safety issue.
• The staff gets ready for heat, precipitation, and other risks.
• You work on it over months, even years, and we check in from time to time.

We’re partnered with a green construction consultant named Maureen (coincidentally, my spouse). If you want to make your warehouse safer, get in touch. The same goes for schools, construction sites, hospitals—warehouses are where we’re testing, and we’re currently working with a few to help them become safer places to work. We’re not sure where this ends up, but we’ll keep trying.

Give Aboard Climate a spin (watch the video on that page to hear an inspiring voice-over from yours truly recorded about an hour before launch). Tell us what breaks—then we’ll adapt it. Whatever your big software needs, goals or challenges—climate or not—we welcome a chance to talk.