About Raycast
Putting every tool one keyboard shortcut away
Raycast puts a faster way to work behind a single keyboard shortcut. Its extendable launcher searches documents, issues, tasks, and messages, then lets people act without bouncing between tabs. Third-party developers add new capabilities through extensions. Founded by two former Facebook engineers in 2020, the UK company now has hundreds of thousands of daily users, a 26-person team across Europe, and a growing enterprise offering.
The challenge
Keeping a remote team aligned while staying close to tens of thousands of users
Raycast has never had an office. It began in 2020 with two people working in three countries and is now a 26-person team spread across Europe.
“We have to make sure everybody gets the information relevant to them without getting overwhelmed,” said Co-Founder Thomas Paul Mann.
Raycast also wanted to build a direct community around its product from scratch. It began with just a handful of people, including members of Raycast’s own team, and grew into tens of thousands of users who file bugs, request features, and tag engineers directly in crash reports. As its enterprise offering developed, customers and partners needed the same kind of direct access beyond a traditional support queue.
“For us, Slack is how we build our remote culture. The mix of work conversations and personal banter creates a strong bond across the team, even when we rarely see one another in person.”
How Raycast works better with Slack
One operating layer for the team, the community, and every company Raycast works with
Raycast adopted Slack when it had five employees and opened a second workspace for users six months later. The internal workspace keeps its remote team connected, the public workspace creates a direct link to tens of thousands of users, and Slack Connect extends the same way of working to customers and partners.
Channels and huddles give remote work a rhythm
Every team and project has a Slack channel, with bookmarks keeping the relevant dashboards, Linear projects, and briefs close to the conversation. Each employee has a direct line to both founders in their #founders-and-<employee name> channel, which is particularly helpful during onboarding.
Automated updates live in separate channels called #streams, keeping them visible without crowding human conversations. Nobody is expected to post in a stream, and many are muted. Bob shares time-off updates, Stripe posts payment events, and IFTTT routes mentions from X and Reddit into Slack. A public complaint can reach the engineers equipped to respond by the time their day begins.
Mann closely monitors these quieter signals. “I pay close attention to the Slack channels where our tools surface user feedback, even when it isn’t widely visible,” he said. “I respond myself.”
Huddles host nearly every internal call, from one-to-ones to project check-ins. Only the weekly all-hands stays on Zoom. When a huddle expands beyond its initial participants, AI captures the decisions in the channel thread. A release-planning canvas maps upcoming features, letting the release manager spot gaps, tag teammates, and shape the schedule in the thread instead of another meeting.
Slack workflows show up in the small rituals that keep Raycast moving. Every Thursday, one tags the design team and prompts members to add topics to a Notion agenda before “Pixel Rumble,” their weekly session. Another lets teammates request tool or repository access through a Slack form, specifying what they need and why, then routes it to the right person for approval.
Agents join the conversation like colleagues
Raycast’s AI assistant, Raybot, works inside the same channels. When an engineer mentions it in a crash-report thread, Raybot analyses the logs and returns a summary. Every Monday, it asks what the team built the previous week, gathers the replies, and creates the demo agenda.
Other tools follow the same pattern. Linear turns a message into an issue for the right project, while Cursor can turn user feedback into a code fix. Requests, context, and results remain visible in Slack.
“People adopted tagging agents because it feels natural, like tagging a colleague,” said Mann.
Mann uses Raycast Dictation to turn spoken thoughts into Slack messages, documents, and code. From the same workspace, he can dispatch pull requests and send targeted Slack messages without breaking focus. At the end of each day, Mann works towards Inbox Zero in Slack, reading through channels to catch up on what his 26-person team shared.
“Slack lets me protect my focus while keeping communication moving,” he said. “Then I can take in what I need to understand what’s happening across the team.”
A public workspace keeps Raycast close to its community
Raycast’s second Slack workspace gives tens of thousands of users a direct connection to the company. Announcements go out, bug reports and feature requests come back, and some issues move from report to deployed fix within a day.
The support team uses Plain to manage the volume without reading every channel manually. An automated stream shares new and updated extensions, while dedicated groups help Raycast coordinate ambassadors and meetups around the world. When the company redesigned its website, it asked community members how they described Raycast and used their answers to shape the copy.
Prospective hires go through the same workspace. For a multi-day work trial, candidates get access to a private channel where they experience what it’s like to work with the team, without touching internal systems.
The two-workspace structure creates a clear security boundary. The community remains open and accessible, while internal company knowledge stays in the private workspace.
Slack Connect shortens the distance to customers and partners
Raycast aims to share a Slack Connect channel with every company whose tools it uses and every enterprise customer it serves. Bugs that could sit in a support queue for days can be raised and answered within minutes, in either direction. “Shared channels help Raycast onboard customers faster, gather feature requests sooner, and build trust from the start,” said Mann.
Slack Connect supports broader partnerships, too. When Raycast held a London event with OpenAI and Notion, speakers, organisers, and suppliers coordinated the entire event in one cross-company group chat.
Those external connections still follow clear controls. As Raycast pursued SOC 2 certification, Slack’s existing security defaults helped limit disruption. Restricted channels keep sensitive discussions to named employees, while some shared channels retain only a limited message history.
“We onboard customers quicker, they can share feature requests sooner, and they get better support in Slack,” Mann said. “That connection may even help us unlock deals.”
“We wanted to be close to our customers and for them to feel close to us. In Slack, someone can send a bug report, get a reply within minutes, and see the fix the same day.”
What’s next
Scaling the Slack connections that keep Raycast close to its team, community, and customers
As Raycast expands its enterprise offering, more customers and partners will work with the company in shared Slack channels. The same model that supported Raycast’s growth from five to 26 people will carry it forward: Everyone is reachable, decisions stay visible, and context is easy to find.
Mann sees a broader lesson for growing companies. Consumer brands can use Slack to build direct relationships with their communities, while B2B teams can bring customers and partners closer through shared channels.
“If you’re building a remote company, think about how you want to create culture and which tools can reinforce it,” he said. “Slack is what we found fits us really well.”
