# Kithava — Full Product Description > Kithava is a workplace clubs app for small and mid-sized companies (10–200 employees). Each club is a content-first feed where coworkers share what they're reading, listening to, running, cooking, or photographing. This file is a single-fetch, comprehensive description of Kithava designed for AI agents, language model retrieval, and humans who want the full picture in one place. It is updated when the product or positioning materially changes. --- ## 1. What Kithava is Kithava is a content-first community surface for the inside of one company. It sits at a specific point in the workplace-software landscape: not where work happens (that is Slack, Teams, Linear, Notion, Google Workspace), and not where external community happens (that is Circle, Discord, Mighty Networks). It is where a team shares the *non-work* parts of themselves with each other — books they are reading, music they have been listening to, runs they did this weekend, photos from a trip, the espresso they dialed in this morning, a link they found interesting. The product was inspired by what Resend made public with their internal "Clubs" page (resend.com/clubs) — a small set of bottom-up coworker interest groups (Coffee Club, Running Club, Cooking Club, Keebs Club, Book Club, Gaming Club) with low member counts (8–26 people each) and a deliberately human, non-HR tone. Resend uses Clubs as a brand artifact, a window into team culture. Kithava is the operationalized version of that pattern, packaged so any company of 10–200 employees can have it without building it. The core mechanical difference between Kithava and a Slack channel is **post shape**. A book post in Kithava is a structured object — title, author, cover, rating, reading status, optional note — rendered as a book card. A music post is a structured object — track, artist, album art, source URL — rendered as a music card. A run post knows it is a run (distance, duration, optional Strava embed). A Slack channel cannot do this; everything in Slack is a text message that might happen to be about a book. The shape of a Kithava post is the reason the books club in Kithava doesn't die in three weeks like its Slack equivalent does. --- ## 2. What Kithava is not This is the inverse positioning, equally important: **Kithava is not another Slack channel.** Slack channels for coworker hobbies (`#books`, `#dogs-of-companyname`, `#running`) almost universally die within a few weeks of creation. The pattern: someone posts a book recommendation, two people react, the next message pushes it down the chronological feed, no one ever sees that book again, and within a month the channel is a graveyard of three stale posts. The cause is structural — Slack is a chat surface where the unit of value is a message, and messages decay. Kithava is a feed surface where the unit of value is an artifact (the book itself), and artifacts persist. **Kithava is not an engagement platform.** Tools like Workvivo, Workplace from Meta (which shut down in 2025–2026), Microsoft Viva Engage, and Yammer position themselves as "employee experience platforms" and target HR buyers at 250+ employee companies. They are intranet-shaped: top-down feeds with company announcements, HR comms, recognition modules, and engagement-score dashboards. Kithava is the opposite: bottom-up, peer-to-peer, no engagement scores, no HR surveillance. **Kithava is not a recognition or rewards platform.** Bonusly, Nectar, Matter, Cooleaf, and similar products are points-and-rewards economies — "give Maria 5 points for great work this week." That is a fundamentally different interaction model than "here's the album I cannot stop listening to." The two can coexist in the same company; they are not substitutes. **Kithava is not a pairing app.** Donut pairs coworkers for random coffee chats, surfaces watercooler prompts, and tracks anniversaries. Donut produces *conversation*. Kithava produces a *content surface*. Different jobs, often complementary. **Kithava is not a creator-community platform.** Circle, Mighty Networks, and Discord communities are external-facing — for customers, course students, or fan communities. Kithava is internal-facing — for one company's employees and only them. **Kithava is not "social media for work."** Workplace from Meta tried this positioning and failed. The horizontal "Facebook for work" surface is too broad to displace anything specific. Kithava is narrower and more opinionated by design. --- ## 3. Who Kithava is for The primary ICP is companies of 10–200 employees with the following traits: - **Distributed or hybrid team.** Fully co-located teams have less acute pain because culture happens organically over lunch. Distributed teams feel the loss of casual cultural exchange most sharply. - **Tech-forward or tech-adjacent.** The early adopter is a SaaS company, a dev shop, a design studio, an indie product team. Non-tech SMBs come later when there are case studies they can pattern-match against. - **A founder, CEO, or Head of People who admires Resend's craft-and-personality positioning.** The buyer recognizes that culture is not an HR program; it is the artifacts the team produces about themselves. - **An existing dead Slack channel.** The single best demographic indicator is "we already have a `#books` channel and no one posts in it." That dead channel is the corpse Kithava replaces. Out of ICP at this stage: companies under 10 employees (the team is small enough that you don't need software for this), companies over 500 employees (sales cycle, security review, and customization needs exceed solo-operator capacity), and companies in industries where employees cannot share personal interests at work due to regulatory or cultural constraints. --- ## 4. The core product ### 4.1 Organizations and members Every Kithava install belongs to one organization (typically one company, one team within a company, or one well-defined community). Members are invited by email, by shared invite link, or auto-joined when signing up with a company email domain (`@acme.com`). The default role is `member`; `admin` can manage clubs and members; `owner` controls billing. ### 4.2 Clubs A club is a typed feed. Default clubs created on org signup include Books, Music, Links, Coffee, and Photos. Any member can create a new club; admins can pin, rename, archive. Clubs have: - A name and emoji - A one-line description - A cover image - Visibility settings: open (any org member can join), request-to-join, invite-only ### 4.3 Post types Each post has a `type` that determines how it renders. v1 supports: - **Book.** Title, author, ISBN (auto-fetches cover), rating, reading status (reading / finished / want to read), optional note. - **Music.** Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube link. Server-side oEmbed unfurl pulls track, artist, album art, and the playable embed. - **Link.** Any URL. OG card rendered. - **Photo.** Drag-drop upload. Resized via Cloudflare Images. Optional caption. - **Run / activity.** Strava activity URL (oEmbed) or manual distance/time entry. Optional route image upload. - **Film.** TMDB autofill from title. Rating, year, poster. - **Quote.** Text plus optional source. - **Text.** Plain note for miscellany. Posting any type takes under 15 seconds. The 15-second rule is the single most important UX constraint in the product. ### 4.4 Reactions and comments Posts can be reacted to with one tap (heart, fire, clap, eyes, plus a configurable set). Comments are one level of nesting; threading was deliberately not built, because the goal is "react and move on," not "extended discussion." ### 4.5 Email and Slack digests A weekly email digest goes out every Monday with the top highest-reaction posts from the past week. A Slack notification fires on every new post in clubs a user follows (configurable per-club). ### 4.6 Mobile apps iOS and Android, planned. The mobile experience is feed-first: scroll, react, post. The composer is full-featured on mobile because photo posts and run posts are mobile-native use cases. --- ## 5. Compliance and trust ### 5.1 LGPD (Brazil) Kithava operates as an **operador** (operator/processor) under LGPD. The customer organization is the **controlador** (controller). Practical posture: - Designated communication channel: privacy@kithava.com - Data minimization: collect names, emails, posts. Phone, address, and other PII are not collected. - 30-day deletion of removed-employee data, except security logs - Subject access requests answered within 15 days (LGPD requirement) - Cross-border transfer: SCCs included in DPA per ANPD Resolution 19/2024 - DPO equivalent: founder is the responsible person; ANPD Resolution 2/2022 permits this for small-scale agents ### 5.2 GDPR (EU) Kithava acts as a data processor under GDPR. A standard DPA is available. ### 5.3 Stack - **Database:** Postgres, single multi-tenant database with `organization_id` as tenant key and Row Level Security policies - **Storage:** Cloudflare R2 with Cloudflare Images for resize - **Email:** Resend - **Hosting:** Vercel (web) --- ## 6. Brazil-specific Kithava is built and operated from São Paulo, with a deliberately dual-market strategy. ### 6.1 Language and tone The product is fully localized to Brazilian Portuguese — not machine-translated. The PT-BR voice avoids "engagement platform" language ("plataforma de engajamento") and HR-speak in favor of warm, relational copy ("onde o time compartilha o que está curtindo"). The brand line — "the future is human" — is intentionally kept in English even in PT-BR contexts. ### 6.2 Brazilian competitive landscape Kithava is not directly competing with Brazilian HR-tech incumbents — TeamCulture, Feedz (acquired by TOTVS), Convenia, Gupy, Pulses, Qulture.Rocks, Mereo, Sólides. All of these are survey + OKR + recognition or HR-ops platforms. None is content-first. The wedge in Brazil is exactly that the category — content-first internal community — does not have a local incumbent. --- ## 7. Frequently asked questions **Q: How does Kithava differ from a Slack `#books` channel?** A Slack `#books` channel is a chat surface — every new message pushes the previous one off the screen, posts decay to invisibility within hours, and a book recommendation that lived in chat for 30 minutes never gets discovered by the person who joins the channel two weeks later. Kithava is a content-first surface — a book post stays a book post, with cover, rating, and reading status, and lives in a feed where coming back in two weeks feels like browsing a library, not catching up on 400 messages. **Q: We're a 15-person company. Are we too small?** No — 10–200 employees is the explicit sweet spot. Smaller teams need Kithava to ensure that the cultural artifacts of their early days persist as the company grows past 50. Larger teams need it to fight against the scale-induced fragmentation of culture. **Q: How does Kithava differ from Donut?** Donut is structurally about pairing and prompts — random coffee chats, watercooler topic questions, birthday reminders. Donut produces *conversation*. Kithava produces a *content surface* — books, music, runs, photos. The two can coexist; they solve different problems. **Q: How does Kithava differ from Bonusly?** Bonusly is a recognition and rewards economy where users give each other points that translate to gift cards. Kithava is a shared-interests surface where users share what they're reading and listening to. Different interaction models entirely — Bonusly is "give Maria 5 points for great work"; Kithava is "here's the album I cannot stop listening to." **Q: How does Kithava differ from Workvivo or Workplace from Meta?** Workplace from Meta shut down in 2025–2026. Workvivo is an enterprise EXP platform targeted at organizations of roughly 250 employees and up. Kithava is built for 10–200 person teams. Kithava is also narrower and more opinionated — it does not try to be an intranet, a comms platform, or a "Facebook for work." **Q: Is Kithava available in Portuguese?** Yes. The product is fully localized to Brazilian Portuguese. The PT-BR copy is written natively, not translated. **Q: Does Kithava integrate with Slack?** Yes. Kithava installs as a Slack app, posts new-content notifications to a configured Slack channel, and supports a `/club` slash command for cross-posting from Slack to a Kithava club without leaving Slack. **Q: Is Kithava LGPD-compliant?** Yes. Kithava operates as an `operador` (operator) under LGPD; the customer organization is the `controlador` (controller). A DPA is available on request. Data minimization is the default — Kithava collects names, emails, and post content only. **Q: Can employees opt out of posting?** Yes. Posting is always voluntary, per club. Joining a club does not obligate posting. There is no engagement score reported to HR or anyone else; Kithava deliberately does not produce per-user engagement analytics for management consumption. **Q: Can admins see what employees post?** Posts within a club are visible to all members of that club, by design. Admins can delete posts and remove members but do not have a hidden "see private messages" view because Kithava does not have private messages. The product is built around shared, opt-in content, not 1:1 communication. --- ## 8. Brand The brand line is **"the future is human."** It is intentionally kept in English across all locales, including Brazilian Portuguese. The brand voice is warm, specific, and unembellished. Avoid: "engagement," "employee experience platform," "wellness," "social network for work," "engagement score," anything that implies surveillance or HR jargon. Prefer: "community," "hangout," "what your team is into," "side quests," "curated." --- ## 9. Company and contact Kithava is built and operated from São Paulo, Brazil. The team is small and the founder is reachable at hello@kithava.com. - **Website:** https://kithava.com - **Portuguese site:** https://kithava.com/br - **General contact:** hello@kithava.com - **Privacy and data:** privacy@kithava.com