Ann Arbor-based Shuffleboard officially launches today, with a 40% discount for anyone looking for a remote team collaboration tool. The idea, from founder Sam Pierce Lolla? Make remote team collaboration more like in-person brainstorming. Shuffleboard alleges to cut down on Zoom fatigue, and also creates a process by which professional teams can glean feedback from clients or colleagues in a simple streamlined process. Lolla has years of professional experience working with professional teams to help them collaborate. The Shuffleboard tool is a natural extension of a lot of expertise and deep knowledge of team brainstorming process best practices.

Shuffleboard looks a bit like Trello, in that boards can contain multiple cards of information that can easily be rearranged. It's like a whiteboard, without the mess recording and distributing the info to team members. "This is a horizontal tool that could be applied to a lot of different kinds of organizations," Lolla told us from his remote launch central in Ann Arbor today. Lolla's vision is to promote the tool to professional teams or teachers who used to collaborate in person, at seasonal events, or use team brainstorming sessions for new ideas or project feedback. Shuffleboard has already been used by an architecture firm, for example, to illicit feedback from clients on a project.

What's unique about Shuffleboard beyond the broad potential applications of the tool is that Lolla documented the entire startup process on Youtube, to help other founders. He also wrote about many lessons learned in this Medium article, which you can check out if you'd like to learn a few startup founder lessons the easy way. Lolla tells Cronicle that what he learned along the way that might help other new founders the most is this: "There's a lot you can do to learn and design and build without co-founders," he says, "but without the support from your community giving you feedback, you have no chance of building something successful." Lolla gleaned feedback on his feedback tool along the way from Youtube interviews, usability interviews and tests, beta testers, and now paying clients. He says this process was invaluable.

"I want to extend a lot of love for the Ann Arbor tech community, without whom Shuffleboard also would not have been possible," Lolla tells us. And we believe him, as we've seen a lot of chatter on the new launch locally today among supporters in the tech community. If you would like to try the new collab tool Shuffleboard, you can gain access for free to try a basic version, or get 40% off the unlimited version during launch at $29/month. Check out a demo here.