Status updates are critical – Thinkfuse is going away, but here are some alternatives

Building a company requires building a tribe (team, advisors, investors, users, partners…). To build a tribe, you need to provide frequent updates to make sure everyone stays informed, aligned and energized.   But, keeping these groups informed is a technical challenge. So, when I found the guys at ThinkFuse (during Techstars) I was overjoyed and joined them as a mentor right away. Now, 2 years later they have been acquired by Salesforce (awesome for them) but are now planning to shut down the service on July 25 (sad for us).

So, to replace them for my team, the companies I advise and lots of other people I recommend the service to, I am now trying out;

http://15five.com/ – seems like it has much of the Thinkfuse with templates, email summary updates…

https://idonethis.com/ – which is really simple and easy to set up.

www.weeklydebrief.com – Aydin (CEO of Thinkfuse) reccomended it to me.

A Quora question on the same subject here – http://www.quora.com/Thinkfuse/Now-that-Thinkfuse-is-selling-to-Salesforce-what-are-some-other-options-for-easy-organized-team-status-reports

If you have a very large list (like customers or users), you can use http://mailchimp.com/ (we did at Gist for our marketing), but this is overkill for smaller teams, investors, partners…

Also playing with a Google doc/Google Group solution for this as well.

The real key is to be able to add a group of people, create template-based status updates, (the system sends updates via email to the group), allow people to respond to the email with comments (preferably in-line with) and everyone can see a history of the updates and comments. Clearly a simple email distrbution list can work too, but has none of the nifty features of these other solutions.  Still looking for the right way to build the tribe.

Other ideas?