Wikipedia will tell you that multiplexing is:

) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a 

A good metaphor is taking public transport. If every person who takes the subway or the bus were to buy their own car and try to drive from their start point to their end point, the roads would be absolutely clogged with traffic. Instead, we multiplex ourselves. We share underground carriages and trains and buses. As anyone who has ridden a London night bus can attest, it ain't always pretty, but it is highly efficient.

An interesting detail about multiplexing people is that you have to do extra work to accommodate the shared transportation method. If you had your own car, you could drive directly from Point A to Point B. But when you share a public transport method, you have to go to the train station or bus stop. You have to catch the right bus or train or whatever. You have to get off at the right stop. It's more efficient, but it also requires some additional logistics to do it.

Cord is a super useful addition to any SaaS tool. We add some sweet, sweet collaboration tooling. Real-time chat, presence, page annotations -- among many other useful features. These are the sort of features that make the best software tools in the world so good. Our sidebar integrates directly into the pages our users do their jobs in. Working in Google Analytics? Cord is there. Working in Hubspot? Cord is there, too. In fact, our sidebar adds chat and presence and all the rest to literally every tool your team uses. You get best-of-breed chat with your team, Slack integrations, all the rest -- for every single tool.

The bad news is that all those tools mean lots and 

 of browser tabs. It's not uncommon for our sidebar to be active on ten or more browser tabs, all open at the same time. The backbone of our chat experience is a real-time connection to one of our servers. So, ten browser tabs... ten socket connections because... well... maths. That's not good news at all.

Our users are working folks. They're on reasonably modern laptops or desktops. We 

 just do one socket connection per tab. In fact, for the first year of our evolution, that's exactly what we did. However, as our user base has grown and as the number of tools we support has expanded, the number of open socket connections has climbed and climbed and climbed. Going back to our public transport metaphor above, this is a lot like many people all starting their journey nearby to one another and ending their journey nearby to one another, but they're all still taking separate cars.

This clogs up our users' machines with redundant socket connections which eat up additional CPU and RAM and battery power. This also clogs up our servers with lots of connections that are all from the same person. Worst of all, because our users generally only use one browser tab at a time, all these socket connections are mostly doing absolutely nothing. Surely, we can we do better!

Yes, We Can! (And don't call me Shirley.)

When you have lots and lots of socket connections open on a single machine, all funnelling traffic to the exact same server, it creates a really exciting opportunity: Multiplexing!

Multiplexing and demultiplexing

We knew if we could find a smart way to send all the traffic from all these browser tabs through a single persistent socket connection, we could massively reduce the resource use on both sides of the network. This means less CPU and memory and battery usage for our users. It also means less server CPU power and RAM lost to redundant socket connections.

Sounds like a silver bullet, right? But how exactly do you merge the web traffic of many browser tabs together?

Because Cord interacts with our users' tools via a Chrome extension, we get a set of superpowers that go way beyond the limitations of a standard webpage. One of the coolest things about working with a Chrome extension is that we have the ability to establish a connection via the background script. 

Without spending too much time talking about Chrome extension architecture, a background script is a little JavaScript program that Chrome runs unseen (hence the "background") as part of your extension. It's always there as long as your extension is enabled. This creates a great opportunity to multiplex.

The first step in our multiplexing effort was to find a way to create one persistent socket connection. Creating that connection via the background script solves this one. With that connection established, we can use the 

 to send the traffic from every browser tab to our background script. Likewise, we can listen for incoming events from our background script and responding to incoming data in each browser tab. Two way traffic, achieved!

 for managing client-server GraphQL interactions. Most commonly, GraphQL queries and mutations are executed via one-off HTTP requests. To make our app as real-time as humanly possible, we've opted for sending data via a WebSocket connection. This reduces the latency on every client-server interaction. Instead of sending queries via simple GET or POST requests, we send and receive data via this persistent socket on each page. For the single-page case, this is pretty straightforward. Our React application knows what requests it has sent and it knows what 

A diagram of a single server sending traffic to multiple pages

The Apollo server model for simple, single-page cases

But what happens if we re-route all of those requests to the background? And when the background script gets new subscription data, how does it know what browser tab to send that new data to? Without some sort of orchestration, this would become a big mess.

To untangle the communication between all these browser tabs and pages and one single socket connection, we're leveraging a piece of Chrome extension infrastructure called a 

. These Ports create a connection between a Chrome page or tab and our Chrome extension itself. Using Ports, each page makes a persistent connection to the Chrome extension. Within the background script of our Chrome extension, we funnel all the messages from the Port connections into a single open WebSocket. This is the substance of the multiplex.

In this structure, instead of each tab/page making a persistent network connection to one of our servers, that page will make an in-memory connection between the CPU thread running the page and the CPU thread running our background script. On a machine with 10 open tabs, this means 10 lightweight background script connections entirely on that machine, rather than 10 open socket connections stretching across the whole internet including our servers.

This does require some careful housekeeping work to maintain. Communicating between the page and the background script can only be done with data. It would be much simpler to be able to pass a callback function to the background script and have it execute when there is new data, but that's not how the Chrome runtime API works. Instead, it's a lot like communicating across frame boundaries, which means you can only pass data back and forth.

To keep track of which requests come from which pages, we've implemented a really straightforward reverse mapping. The Chrome runtime API creates a unique identifier for each Port, which we store in a dictionary along with the related objects responsible for sending data back and forth. Using this reverse lookup, it becomes easy to map the response data from the WebSocket connection back to its origin Port. The mapping is also important because it gives the page/tab the ability stop active GraphQL subscriptions that the background script is maintaining on its behalf.

One of the most useful aspects of how we've implemented this architecture is that gracefully degrades when there is no Chrome extension present. The fallback behaviour is to go back to the socket-connection-per-page approach that we started with. Our application has an API boundary between the network layer and the user-facing React application (largely implemented via React Contexts). The application knows when it has a connection or not. It has no idea if that is an exclusive websocket connection or a Port to the Chrome Extension background script. This enables us to switch out the type of network connection we're using seamlessly. It's a big win on code maintenance and separation of concerns as well.

There is an as-yet unexplored extension to this work. This careful API boundary between the network interaction code and the UI gives us room to go even further with our implementation. In the absence of a browser extension, it's theoretically possible to implement a service worker that takes the place of the background script for multiplexing the network traffic. Implementing this would mean that even when we don't get our Chrome extension super powers, we can still create a high-quality, low-latency, efficient user experience.

If that sounds like work you'd like to dive into, you should give us a shout. We're hiring across the stack for people who want to build tools that make people work together better. 

Real-time collaboration demands real-time infrastructure. Doing web-based, real-time interactions efficiently is a hard problem, but we've found a solution that reduces the number of open connections by a factor of 10 or more. TL;DR: We're multiplexing many tabs' network interactions via a single persist websocket.

Multiplexing Websockets with Apollo

In our lives, we've gone from buying gigantic servers and moving, organizing, and sending files around to using cloud software, where the app and the data are one. We can already see the next huge shift to how software works on the horizon. As we’ve started to see, early adopters must replace incumbents – or protect their lead – before they become the Siebel CRM (a once undisputed king) that gave way to Salesforce and HubSpot.

Living through the last quarter century has been unique. We've enjoyed a rare opportunity to see a few platform shifts up close and get a deep sense of how these disruptions unfold. I vividly remember the last on-prem server I saw. In the startups I worked at 15-20 years ago, buying servers was a rite of passage before your first investment round. All companies had to have a “server room” (which sometimes was just a big, noisy box under my desk.)

All of a sudden in 2007, we started using S3 and EC2, Amazon’s earliest cloud offerings. And just like that – It was gone from the life of startups in no more than 2 years. This shift took years more for old incumbent companies – some of which still have on-prem servers to this day. But for startups, the swiftness of adoption was palpable.

This isn't the only shift cloud brought on from 2008 forward. All these startups built from scratch on the cloud had a new thing in common: There were no more files.

Some of us may not even remember saving files. We don’t even consider that our account software, games, CMss – they all had files somewhere that you had to remember to save, organize in folders and back up. The data that these tools work on is no longer your responsibility – it’s baked into the software itself.

Managing this data separately from the software was full of friction and overhead. Cloud made files redundant, to the advantage of both users not having to mess with it, always having the latest available to their entire org, easily located as they were integrated inside the app; and to the benefit of the vendors who had stickier products, easier deployments, less version/backwards compatibility hell, more measurability of use, etc. Data became inseparable from the apps.

That's what Sketch and Adobe must’ve felt as Figma became the dominant UX design app.

The next huge revolution in cloud-based, fileless SaaS

Here at Cord we think there's another huge revolution coming in cloud-based, fileless SaaS. It's the final frontier, the one thing that's still clunky and inefficient like carrying files around. And that's bringing in your team, partners and clients into the tool where you work.

Making tools multi-player and collaborative is so powerful that it's an irresistible force for both users and vendors. And it's already happened: That palpable, sudden switch is what Sketch and Adobe must’ve felt as Figma became the dominant UX design app in major part thanks to their collaboration.

It’s quite clear why: The thing we for the most part didn’t integrate into our software yet is the social layer. Collaboration – who you work with, what did they say and do in the app, what are they working on now – it all gets handled inefficiently in other software, with copying and pasting of links and screenshots to communicate in a way that’s unmapped to where you work on and increases your cognitive overhead when you try to remember where was there a discussion relating to this item. People prefer to collaborate in line when they are given an integrated, performant, expressive way to do so, as you can see in Google Docs or Figma. And vendors see this change coming, and the first to adopt a high quality collaboration solution will accrue the advantage from user adoption, seat expansion and retention as teams and organizations get enmeshed deeper in their tools.

Those who adapt quickly – thrive. The second – survive. The rest …

So what's a vendor to do? Building all of these capabilities by yourself is tough work, both from engineering and from a product and design perspective – just like continuing to buy and maintain servers under the desk for new startups, is complete folly. It’s a job better done well for customers and vendors by a specialist that invests in the research, the infra, brings in the specialist talent and spreads the costs of developing the cutting edge, best-in-class collaboration capability across many vendors that embed this.

 to reap the benefits of team-led growth inside your product.

Why is collaboration eating software?

Building apps – internal tools or otherwise – is 

 together with your teammates when code is involved is easier said than done. Taking screenshots, adding annotations, sending a flurry of Slack messages, and then adding Jira tickets is 


In this post, we’ll walk through how to use 

 (a fast way of building internal tools used by DoorDash, Warner Bros, Peloton and more) with 

. Cord lets you add comments, annotations, and guides directly in your favorite apps – so you can talk with your team in the apps you’re working in. Cord also 

 (Jira, Asana, Monday, etc.) so you can create and manage tickets without leaving your app.

Save time by building internal apps with Retool and Cord

Here’s a few suggestions for how teams use Retool and Cord to build better internal tools without all the back and forth.

Write onboarding guides directly in the app. 

Onboard new members of your team by creating annotations and comments with Cord. Attach relevant files to document how the internal tool works, right inside the tool. This is a lot easier than outdated walkthroughs lost in Confluence or Coda. Plus, teammates can @mention you if they have a question and you can chat directly in Retool– almost like sharing your screen on Zoom, without having to sit through another video call.

Create tasks that will automatically appear in Jira or Asana. 

Anytime you write a comment using Cord, whether it’s to 

 or change a dropdown to a search input, you can make it an Asana or Jira task so it fits right into your workflow (and it will actually get done!).

Write onboarding guides directly in the Retool app with Cord.

Create tasks that will automatically appear in Jira or Asana with Cord.

Your internal ops team can log edge cases and leave a record of the conversation. 

The users of your app can record edge cases and leave notes about what was decided inside Retool to increase efficiency and speed up onboarding for new team members who may run into the same issue.

Add Cord to your browser to start collaborating in Retool

Cord is a Chrome extension that you can activate on SaaS tool or website. Install Cord in a few quick 

2. Sign-in with Slack (Or, sign-up to be notified when we add Google and Microsoft Teams support)

3. Complete onboarding: Watch a 30 second video, install the extension from the Chrome store, and import relevant Slack messages by adding the Cord Slackbot

Complete Cord onboarding

5. Then, go directly to your Retool app and start annotating with your team!

Go directly to your Retool app and start annotating with your team!

If you don’t have a Retool account yet, you can sign up on 

Build together in Retool with Cord comments and annotations

People already realize the power of collaboration.

Just think of the tools you’re working with daily: SaaS products like Google Docs, Figma, and Pitch have already added collaboration elements to their platforms (hello, Anonymous Muskrat 👀). Software companies know people want it — that’s why they gradually add chat abilities to their products, but it’s usually at a cost.

SaaS products like Google Docs, Figma, and Pitch have already added collaboration elements to their platforms.

“This creates sub-par and inconsistent collaboration experience for the end-user,” said Nimrod. Notes go in separate inboxes, feedback gets lost, teammates cry in frustration.

The way we use multiple tools is way clunkier than it needs to be.

But as it stands, it’s unavoidable – you have to use them all to get your work done.

 working in Mailchimp may grab copy from Google Docs, designs from Figma, and feedback from Slack to create a campaign back in Mailchimp. We don’t need work to be this excessive.

You already use a lot of apps, and it’s time to connect them for a streamlined workflow. 

One inbox. One notification to check. Many sighs of relief.

“Switching costs” aren’t in your budget.

The average small business uses over 100 different apps

, and Matt shares that Capiche’s four-person team uses over a dozen tools.

Think of all the lost energy, time and brainpower it takes to switch from coding/designing/writing to chatting apps, then back to coding/designing/writing, at least a dozen times per day.

“Every time we switch, we’re losing seconds of our time." 

, you can stay in the context of what you’re working on to stay in deep work mode.

Cord’s long-term value = streamlined collaboration
Immediate relief = eliminating clunky interactions

Nimrod has an extensive engineering background, specifically surrounding chat, productivity, and community (aka peopleware). His tenure as a PM at Facebook inspired much of the vision for Cord.

When Facebook’s development teams kept running duplicate analyses, Nimrod knew the overlap was wasting valuable resources and time. They built a way for related data conversations to integrate across an expansive suite of internal tools.

“With Cord, we’re doing that more broadly,” he said.

And you don’t need a Facebook-sized organization (or budget) to use Cord. Even if you’re using a dozen different SaaS tools for your startup or scale-up, you feel as interconnected as the most productive companies in the Valley.

“You want to have a record of the conversation attached to the context for posterity and clarity. You can access this information when you need it versus looking in a different tool.” - Nimrod

Informational architecture is a lot like Animal Crossing.

Abby gives an unexpected metaphor for how we use tech: “The internet is spatial software—when you’re on the computer, you’re always walking around. We’re walking back and forth like in Animal Crossing.”

Work is the random interactions you have in those spaces, and you want to form memories in specific locations.

Animal Crossing

Cord contextualizes your conversation based on what “room” you’re in while you’re on a stroll. 

“We’re changing a fundamental habit, like how do we communicate and where do we go?” said Nimrod. It’s the same set of challenges Slack had to go through migrating people from email.

Check out Slack’s 2013 post that Nimrod mentioned, 

 about getting the internal team on board.

Cord has its company set up for deep work and minimal disruption. There are almost no standing meetings, and Cord is standard across all business functions. As “user zero” itself, the company has a wishlist of future feature releases.

Marketers and product managers are already seeing Cord as a faster way to give feedback to their teams.

“We’re early and just getting started,” said Nimrod. But the innovation is happening, and customers’ needs are paving the way for an even better product.

 that allows users to embed parts of the tool (e.g., Excel data) in the chat. “What if we could do that for our SaaS vendors?”

Enter the future of collaboration with Cord.

Nimrod Priell, CEO of Cord, joined by Abby Barsky, Head of Marketing and Partnerships, sat down virtually with Matt Guay to chat about the future of collaboration on Capiche’s 

The future of collaboration is here, but we need a mindset shift

"It's like having access to screenshots, Slack, Jira and our site without having to go to all 4." - Cord user 

Cord will simplify the way you work. Give feedback, leave documentation, and report issues quickly and easily with our two new features:

**NEW** Comment, annotate and create tasks on ANY website or web product

No code snippets. No special URLs. All you need is the 

Cord works wherever you do. Whether you're 

, start leaving comments and annotations, and creating Jira or Asana tasks on any page.

The ability to mark up any page, see your notifications, and chat with teammates is a click away. 

You can also disable the launch button for a set amount of time if you're going full heads-down. 

**NEW** Conversations (threaded messages) allow for multiple discussions on the same page

Similar to Slack, you can now create multiple conversations on the same page. That way, you can discuss different topics without cluttering the chat bar.

For example, you can discuss copy changes for an email campaign in one conversation, and design feedback in another, all while staying on the email campaign editor page.

To join an existing conversation on a particular page, click the conversation, see all the messages, and at the bottom you'll be able to reply or collapse the conversation.

You'll be notified of messages in the conversation if you've written a message there, been mentioned, or been assigned a task.

To start a new conversation, click the Aa and type your first message. 

 by selecting the drop down menu beside each message and selecting "Share to Slack" and the #channel you'd like to share it in. If you've taken any annotations, those will be included in a screenshot in the Slack message too.

 and decreases friction and distraction, so you can get back to doing your best work. 

 Slack like conversations, add Google Doc or Figma style comments and drop pins on ANY website or internal tool to work more effectively with your team.

Asynchronous communication just got easier. 

Download the full 2021 State of Project Management report

How do companies use task managers as part of their project management? This question was burning a hole in our to-do list for our tasks feature, so we did something about it. We knew that this in-depth research could help companies think about how they work in a new way. We surveyed over 50 respondents about their practices with task managers at work to get a deeper, more honest look behind the scenes.

Here are a few highlights from the results.

Survey says: The task-management industry needs a little task management.

The project management software industry is whopping 

 and is expected to hit nearly $6 billion by 2027. We think we know why.

What the survey results reveal is that task-management practices are all over the place. Most companies are juggling two or more tools, overlapping responsibilities, and making it harder for themselves to report and get actual work done (because 

our brains don’t love context switching

Teams can’t even handle standardization of one project management tool, let alone all the extras.


Teams are crafting quite the tech-stack cocktail.

64% of teams are using multiple task managers.

We saw a theme with engineering and development teams using Jira while the rest of the organization worked on other project management tools.

"Yes, different teams use different tools (brand team uses Jira, UX uses Asana, dev uses GitHub, etc.)"

"Monday and Jira overlap - Each also has stuff the other doesn't include. The long tail of tasks is spread evenly and chaotically."

The most popular task managers in our survey:

Honorable mentions (35%): Linear, ClickUp, 

Task assignment and prioritization have little uniformity across organizations.

The way people assign tasks is all over the place. Some have a project or product manager who give tasks, whereas others have an every-contributor-for-themself approach. And no one knows how to prioritize them.

"We're pretty fluid as a startup, so no real 'management' of tasks, tasks are added by anyone, discussed and prioritised."

"At the moment, engineers self-assign according to their area of expertise. The engineering lead should also help with assigning. However, the process is still a little broken as the engineering leader doesn't quite grasp prioritization, so it often is a task between the designer and product manager."

When prioritization doesn’t happen in the actual task manager, that’s when “touch bases” and “fleshing out” comes into play.

“Let’s take this offline” is where project management is really happening.

A lot of convos are happening around tasks in a separate arena than the project management tools. We’re coining the term “work-planning inception” because that’s what many companies are doing — creating tasks around the tasks.

use the comment functionality in the task manager

The new work norm: disjointed conversations, lost information, and notification overload.

Information overload is real, and it’s destroying productivity.

Poor task management = information overload (or not enough).


When employees receive hundreds of emails a day, they miss a huge chunk (up to a third). 

, satisfaction, burnout, and bad business.

Additional issues that come from messy task management:

Work planning inception (when managing your tasks becomes a task)

“I moved to Asana versus an Excel status sheet that I have a weekly meeting with the client and review, and it drives me crazy. It takes me an hour trying to update that, and it's always an hour before the call.”

Task managers aren’t inherently bad—we love them! According to a recent report from 

, project management software adoption is linked to high-performing projects.

The way teams use task managers is the problem. We know these 50 companies aren’t alone. 

How is your team using task managers? Do you fall into the new work-inception norm? Read the full report to see what trends you identify in your organization. You may find that your frustrations aren’t so unique after all.

And it's more complicated than you thought. Our State of Project Management in 2021 report is the most comprehensive data on what teams are doing with their task managers.

State of Project Management in 2021 Report Reveals How Companies Use Task Managers

Let's face it: you’re over toggling back and forth between Asana, Slack, and Google Docs for every. little. update. 

That’s exactly why email marketers are ditching distractions and collaborating right inside HubSpot using Cord.

Easily collaborate with teammates and manage approvals

Email pros are the best at “workflows,” but sometimes it’s their own that gets thrown off. More changes and more eyeballs = less efficiency in getting work done.

And it’s worse than ever. According to the 

Litmus “2020 State of Email Workflows”

 report, the pandemic made the approval process worse for email teams.

 Nearly 70% of companies changed their strategy, adding extra stakeholders to the approval process. This added more to the email marketer’s plate: 37% of teams reported spending over two hours on approvals alone in 2020, up from 20% in 2019.

How will Cord help clear your plate as an email marketer?

You forgot if you asked Darius from design about the preferred logo in Slack or Asana. Or maybe it was Google Docs? Gah. Email managers can invite their copy and design teams into HubSpot to spare the search for notes. Spend more time ensuring you have sleek graphics and powerful messaging.

 No more screenshots pasted in a deck, bad PDF saves, or “New Campaign Test_v.98” for email creative reviews. After so many back-and-forths with your manager, going past Review and pressing SEND looks so tempting. Get there faster with centralized feedback on drafts.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing your campaign land in people’s inboxes. You did it!

Cut distractions with do-it-all-in-HubSpot integrations

You’re setting up campaign workflows, marrying design and copy, and optimizing landing pages. HubSpot is your home base for it all, whether you like it or not.

 without getting sidetracked by the pings from your team’s project management tools. 

Integrating with tools like Asana and Slack, Cord ensures project management isn’t another chore.

Cord allows you to make intentional, not distracting, visits to Slack (you know, for when you need to get right to business without being thrown into a whirlwind of GIF wars). Selective notifications means you won’t miss your @mentions but you can stay working in HubSpot.

Email marketers love that Cord is unobtrusive but easily accessible via a sidebar on the right of your browser.

 to address feedback in real-time. You can even chat quickly back and forth. The best part? It integrates with apps you already use.

For example, let’s say you need the price of a product in a sales email. You can message @Laura: “Can you confirm with Sales that this is the correct price?” Then:

Assign this task for Laura in the sidebar, to which it then 

. Then, update any task’s status in less than a second with Cord.

 into HubSpot (coming soon!). No more switching tabs.

 with your conversation for other people to chime in. Cord sends a link to the campaign with replies in a thread so it won’t crowd up your channel.

Cord is a Chrome extension that adds Google Doc- like collaboration to your HubSpot tab. Here’s how to install it:

Go to Cord.com and click “Add Cord to Chrome for free”

Sign-in with Slack (don’t have Slack? You can sign-up to be notified when we add support for Google and Microsoft Teams)

Watch a 30-second onboarding video to learn how you can start using it immediately

Better email management and collaboration = you shining at your job. 

With Cord available for HubSpot, you can focus more on managing campaigns in the space you work best. What are you waiting for?

HubSpot is the orange inbound giant that releases a new feature just when we've mastered it. Sure, the platform has a better user experience than other email solutions. But just because it’s all-in-one doesn’t mean there’s only one person involved.

Work with your team directly in HubSpot with this add-on

ICYNT (In Case You’re Not Tom): On 4/20, Tom sent a hot take about how more efficient marketing ops is the answer to better B2B marketing departments.

Tom’s thesis resonated with us. As a B2B SaaS company in the workflow biz, we get the pain points of messy marketing ops and a changing how-work-gets-done landscape.

So Tom, not that you asked, but here’s our take.

Multiplexing Websockets with Apollo

Why is collaboration eating software?

Build together in Retool with Cord comments and annotations

The future of collaboration is here, but we need a mindset shift

Asynchronous communication just got easier.

State of Project Management in 2021 Report Reveals How Companies Use Task Managers

Work with your team directly in HubSpot with this add-on

Hey, Tom Hunt — We know how to make B2B marketing ops even better.

Heal your love-hate relationship with Mailchimp with this add-on

In flow and in context: How to unlock that 10x productivity for your team

How in-app collaboration is changing the way we work

Enabling Developer Velocity

Cord + Slack = Collaborative magic ✨

Add comments and annotate inside any tool you use at work, get updates in Slack

Part 2: Server Side Tech Picks

Part 1: Client Side Tech Picks