[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) - Fast alternative to ...
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Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) - Fast alternative to Jira, built for
remote teams
Hi HN! We're Kevin and Sigurd (SigKill9), the founders of Kitemaker
(https://kitemaker.co). We've been working on building a tool to
replace typical issue trackers for remote teams and we're excited
to share it with you. We made Kitemaker because in our previous
jobs, we were managing distributed teams and we always had a bunch
of challenges with the tools we used. It was really hard to find a
tool that the whole team was comfortable using. Designers were
never happy using GitHub Issues, engineers were never happy using
Trello, and no one was happy using Jira. We would often hear
grumbles from the team that we used these tools because they were
"good for the managers", but as the managers we were completely
unhappy with the tools too! We had to bug people just to get them
to go into the tool and update things. Even more of a bummer was
the fact that these tools didn't really help us solve the core
problems we had working in a distributed team. Things like the fact
that discussions often started before anything reached the issue
tracker, spread out across a maze of Google docs and slack
discussions that often resulted in (at best) a giant mess or (at
worst) critical people missing discussions. Or that engineering
would have a tough time keeping track of the never ending flow of
new designs from our designers. Or PRs that would be created and
rot while waiting for someone to review them. So we built
Kitemaker to try and scratch our own itch - to be a tool that can
help manage the development process from end to end and connect to
all of the other great tools teams use every day. One of our top
goals is to make Kitemaker a tool you actually want to use, whether
you're a developer, PM or designer. It's flexible without having a
lot of fiddly configuration. It's really snappy, you can do
everything without lifting your hands off off the keyboard
(Superhuman was a big influence for us), and our editor supports
markdown and a bunch of different elements (images, Loom videos,
Figma designs, code blocks, etc.). The editor is built with SlateJS
in case anyone's curious. Remote teams tend to rely a lot more on
written communication, so we made Kitemaker to be a place to gather
things that would otherwise be spread across documents and chat
threads. Our work items are rich documents where teams can document
their plans, break down their work into individual tasks, and have
discussions in Slack-like comment threads. Finally, we wanted to
hook into the other tools our teams used every day and connect
activities happening in those tools back to the work items in
Kitemaker. Our GitHub integration provides the same kind of
functionality that you get from using GitHub issues (GitLab is on
the way too!). Our Slack and Discord integrations make it easy to
link chat conversations to work items so you don't lose things in
your chat history, as well as providing access to a lot of
Kitemaker's functionality right from your chat app. We also have a
freshly-launched GraphQL API. It's early days but we'd love for
people to kick the tires and see how it feels. It has webhook
support via Diahooks (that was launched here on HN the other day).
The two of us have been working tirelessly on Kitemaker and we're
really excited to share it with all of you. Head over to
https://kitemaker.co to sign up and try it out. We're hanging out
here all day and would love to hear your feedback, questions and
cool ideas!
Author : kevsim
Score : 188 points
Date : 2021-03-22 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
| zersiax wrote:
| Just had a quick look at this, and I think a lot of accessibility
| wins could be made with relatively little work here. This is
| another thing most of the competition gets wrong, so if you guys
| are open to it i'd love to work with you to get that at a better
| state for, for example, screenreader users and people dependent
| on dictation software.
| kevsim wrote:
| This would be amazing! Please reach out to kevin@kitemaker.co
| sjg007 wrote:
| Do you have a demo video or demo I can try before signing up?
| kevsim wrote:
| Apart from the little video on the landing page, I made a
| voiced over demo video for our launch on product hunt the other
| day that shows off a lot of the core stuff:
| https://www.producthunt.com/posts/kitemaker-2
| sjg007 wrote:
| Thanks! I really like activity feed concept, certainly better
| than confluence digest emails I get daily.
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks very much! We've gotten some requests to "lift" the
| feed up to each level of the tool summarize what's been
| going on. Something we've thought about quite a bit but
| haven't had time to get to just yet.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Maybe you have this but a way to align with a master
| timeline or set of timelines would be great too. Master
| timeline would have a bunch of branches like git does.
| asah wrote:
| sorry if obvious: if you're going to compare with Jira, then my
| first question is "but does it scale?"
|
| Everybody hates Jira, but it scales to 100,000+ issues across
| dozens of teams. Even tiny teams (heh, any team that's live
| and/or has a PM) quickly generate 1000s of issues and JQL is
| *godlike* in sifting through this stuff. Engineers tell me about
| Trello and I say, "great place to start" knowing they'll come to
| the dark side soon enough.
|
| thoughts?
| sidlls wrote:
| Jira scales...poorly. It's slow and it's easy to misconfigure
| into a state that essentially requires a restart or creating a
| new project/team/similar.
|
| You might also be the first person I've seen use "godlike" to
| describe any feature of Jira.
|
| Basically you and I clearly have much different experiences
| with that tool.
| smt88 wrote:
| Jira seems not to scale to 1 user in 1 department (which is
| actually a regression from the way it was a few years ago), so
| I don't think this is the right question to ask.
| MGDN wrote:
| "Everybody hates Jira" - that's not fair.. there's a lot of
| people that haven't used it yet.
| kevsim wrote:
| That's a great question. Most of the companies using us today
| are small. They range from a single dev team to a small handful
| of dev teams. We're now starting to work with companies "one
| step up" from there that are coming with requirements about how
| to connect things across teams. Early days for this work, but
| we're trying to be really careful to keep this a tool that
| teams want to collaborate in and not a tool only a product
| manager would use.
|
| We definitely have come close to the scale you're discussing
| but I look forward to finding out! That said, we have had a
| number of smaller companies drop Jira for Kitemaker.
| vladsanchez wrote:
| You still have lots of challenges ahead, convergence is the
| biggest one (imo). Good job so far, Good Luck.
| SigKill9 wrote:
| Thanks! Yes, still early days, but trying our best to build
| something that will help many teams work better together :)
| mjaniczek wrote:
| This is exciting! As a person that has begun writing my own JIRA
| client (frustrated with JIRA Cloud performance compared to JIRA
| Server and frankly anything else), I welcome this alternative :)
|
| One little nitpick: something about the video on the homepage
| makes it look weird - very sharp (non-antialiased) while
| downscaled: https://i.imgur.com/bNWJAIE.png
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| And thanks for the feedback on the video. We'll check it out.
| Which browser/os are you using?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Same experience.
|
| macOS Catalina
|
| Firefox and Chrome
| Operyl wrote:
| Are there plans for self-hosted versions? That's pretty much the
| "if I will use it or not" question for me. Atlassian's killing of
| their self-hosted solutions for smaller companies is just really
| a shame.
| kevsim wrote:
| We've been waiting on this a bit to see if there's much demand
| for this and so far the answer has been "not much" but we're
| open to the idea. So the answer is "not right now".
|
| Good news I don't think it would be super tough for us since
| we're built using pretty boring tech (i.e. not a lot of
| dependencies on a particular cloud vendor), don't have a
| bajillion microservices, etc.
| nounaut wrote:
| Adding myself to the list. Also worth considering that this
| would be a requirement for basically any government entity.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I wonder why. Putting confidential data in the hands of some
| cloud vendor doesn't seem to be an option for any company I
| know in my country (which is why Jira will die out here).
| kevsim wrote:
| My hunch is it's somewhat related to the companies who have
| been using us thus far (other startups, mainly) and also
| that people are pretty used to it since many of our
| competitors don't offer a self hosted option.
|
| That being said, maybe it's an interesting way for us to
| stand out from the crowd.
| ralala wrote:
| I have not looked at kitemaker yet, but we are in the same
| situation. On premise Jira will have to be replaced by
| something else. Cloud is not option due to
| privacy/security/compliance reasons.
| creshal wrote:
| If we were to use it (which would need gitlab/mattermost
| integration as mentioned before), we'd very much depend on
| having a self hosted option.
| kevsim wrote:
| GitLab is our next planned integration and one of our
| current paying customers is using mattermost so it's
| something we're strongly considering.
|
| And this HN launch has given us a lot to think about in
| terms of self hosting!
| MadQA wrote:
| Extra vote for this, my company prefers to keep the data
| inhouse whenever possible
| wycy wrote:
| Just chiming in with a "me too". For my organization it's
| self-hosted or bust. We're looking to replace JIRA with
| something else right now.
| MGDN wrote:
| It's a damn shame the ticketing / collaboration world is still
| moving to the cloud. 100% don't want my company's data on
| someone else's server. I also 100% don't want to have to use
| Remedy ever again
| tibu wrote:
| Then what will I do with my Remedy programming knowledge?! (I
| don't cry it back) Funny thing is that when we changed from
| Remedy to another system we continued to use the Remedy name
| for the new system to avoid confusions by the end users.
| Actually we called it RemedyHD. :)
| bahmslap wrote:
| Our experience with Kitemaker comes from a small team starting a
| company with a blank canvas to shape our processes.
|
| We've been using Kitemaker for a couple of months now and are
| loving it. When we started we went with tools we knew from past
| lives like JIRA and ClickUp but given the freedom of our
| situation we wanted something better.
|
| I feel like when I go into the tool I am there to focus on the
| tasks I'm currently doing and what I need to do next. The _lack_
| of sprint reporting and fixed time frames is a great feature IMO.
|
| They also put out some thoughtful content
| (https://medium.com/kitemaker-blog) that we used to help shape
| our current agile practices. Looking forward to the features
| ahead!
| creshal wrote:
| Gitlab/Mattermost integrations would be nice to see.
| kevsim wrote:
| GitLab is our next planned integration.
|
| One of our paying customers uses Mattermost so we've started
| the process of peeking at their API to see what we're up
| against. Since we've already got Discord/Slack it probably
| won't be super tough. That being said, there were plenty of
| gotchas added Discord after we already had slack since their
| API was different enough to be a bit annoying at times.
| erikeimter wrote:
| We just started using Kitemaker for our development team a week
| ago and it is so much faster! We were using Notion before and it
| got slow with more and more tasks and people.
|
| It took us about half an hour to learn all the shortcuts, but
| that time has been worth it already.
| melenaos wrote:
| What is 100 active tasks? Is the size of the backlog + working on
| tasks?
| kevsim wrote:
| Exactly! 100 work items that haven't either been archived or
| deleted. For a small team this usually translates to more than
| a month of trying it out since teams tend to make slightly
| larger work items than they would issues in some other tools.
| oakmad wrote:
| I know the answer is probably not, however do you have plans for
| things like hipaa compliance? I'm struggling to find a great IM
| solution that is - perhaps self hosted as others have asked?
| kevsim wrote:
| No immediate plans, sorry. But we're definitely going to have a
| chat about self hosting since there seems to be some demand
| there.
| ivalm wrote:
| Got 500, hug of death?
| kevsim wrote:
| Ouch! Sorry about that. Still seeing it?
| SN76477 wrote:
| I like so much about Kitemaker. Thanks for your hard work.
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks! Really appreciate it
| benreesman wrote:
| Phabricator is (IMHO) in a class of its own as a code review tool
| but the tasks stuff is nothing to write home about.
|
| If you folks end up doing an integration my group would be
| excited to give it a try.
|
| Good luck with the venture!
| kevsim wrote:
| Very cool! We tried Phabricator years and years ago but haven't
| had much experience since then. GitLab is next on our list, but
| then we'll see what comes after that. We've gotten a few
| BitBucket requests.
|
| Any idea how popular Phabricator is these days?
| Operyl wrote:
| Not terribly too popular, but used by a few large companies
| still. We evaluated it for use at a non-profit I help
| run/volunteer with, but the task system was too subpar for
| our liking. Wikimedia uses it pretty heavily, though.
| benreesman wrote:
| Phabricator is used by a few big names like FB and Uber, and
| at startups that splintered off from those places, so a good
| number of teams but nowhere in the GitHub PR range.
|
| It's pretty opinionated around things like fewer bigger
| repos, rebase-by-default, trunk-only: basically the stuff
| that big shops use (because anything else is an NP-hard pain
| in the ass, literally, once you're dealing with feature flags
| or A/B testing or bandits or any of the stuff that you need
| if you've got a consumer-facing product with a lot of users).
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > Phabricator is (IMHO) in a class of its own as a code review
|
| Yeah I'm gonna have to heavily disagree with this. Arc is hot
| garbage, by default decimates your local history, treats
| everything as mutable. Phabricator leaves so _so_ much to be
| desired, I could rant for days. Gerrit is a much nicer review
| tool. Even Review Board is better.
| benreesman wrote:
| I agree that open-source Arcanist is the weak link, but it's
| mostly down to commands like 'arc diff' and 'arc land' having
| the wrong default flags. It's an unforced error and hurts
| adoption, but the right incantations aren't hard to alias.
|
| I'd be very interested in how Gerrit is better than
| Phabricator on the review side, I've used it a bit and formed
| the opposite opinion, but because I'm a Phabricator power
| user and a Gerrit novice it's likely I formed a biased
| opinion.
| jdhornby wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch.
|
| How does this compare with https://linear.app?
| kevsim wrote:
| We think Linear's a beautifully designed app that does Jira
| better than Jira for some teams.
|
| That being said, we're trying to be a bit different. Teams
| using us tend not to split things down into micro tasks, but
| instead leverage the document-like structure of our work items
| to bring the whole team into a single workspace, thinking about
| and working on features/initiatives together. I think we also
| think about integrations a bit differently, but I don't have a
| ton of experience with Linear's integrations.
|
| We're also a bit more crazy about hotkeys I think. Seriously,
| we're pretty obsessed ;-)
| e12e wrote:
| > We're also a bit more crazy about hotkeys I think.
| Seriously, we're pretty obsessed ;-)
|
| So, will there be vi(like) keybindings, or will we have to
| make our own via the graphql Api and something like
| neovim/ruby|lua? ;)
| enra wrote:
| CEO of Linear here. Happy to answer questions.
|
| We have quite bunch of startups and larger growth companies
| using us, anything from 3 to 500 engineers, with 100 or 20,000
| issues. Linear is modeled around our experiences building
| software at Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb etc, from early to late
| stage and what we see is a modern way to develop software.
|
| We have support for roadmaps, projects, cycles (sprints),
| custom views, multiple teams, backlogs, list/kanban, and robust
| search and filtering. Lot more about the features here:
| https://docs.linear.app/
|
| Linear is also offline first app so all the interactions are
| instant, which especially key for keyboard shortcuts.
| berelig wrote:
| For one it doesn't lag when I scroll through their landing page
| unlike linear.app
|
| 2015 MacBook Pro with Firefox
| leetrout wrote:
| Bummer. The actual linear application is ridiculously fast.
| enra wrote:
| Thanks! Seems like Firefox unfortunately not that good a
| supporting animations as Safari or Chrome. Need to take in to
| account when make updates on the homepage
| panosfilianos wrote:
| Kitemaker is super cool. I've had the pleasure of talking with
| Sigurd for the past year and it's always amazing to me the
| progress they demonstrate. Especially the editor is super cool
| and the UI slick.
|
| Waiting for the GitLab integration eagerly :) Congrats on the
| launch and getting to YC - much deserved!
| kevsim wrote:
| GitLab is our next planned integration so hopefully you won't
| need to wait much longer!
| mellavora wrote:
| Just set up an account. Looks slick.
|
| I'm on slow internet at the moment, and between when I entered my
| username and the box asking me to set up my organization, a popup
| flashed saying "that user name is taken" (disappeared 1/2 sec
| later).
|
| Might want to check your business logic throughout for effects of
| slow internet. Because sometimes a remote team member can be more
| remote than you expected.
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks for reporting this! We'll take a look.
|
| And thanks for trying it out. We really appreciate it.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I am not on a slow connection, but the popup showed up for a
| fraction of a second for me as well.
| MisterEsite wrote:
| Using it for the product development for I think 2 weeks now.
|
| At the beginning its a little unintuitive because you have to
| remember all the shortcuts to be faster than for example notion.
|
| But now, two weeks later I am way faster than before.
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks so much for using it. We really appreciate it.
|
| There's a little toggle down in the profile menu in the bottom
| left (or do cmd+k -> hotkey hints) if you want Kitemaker to
| give you more hints to help you learn the hotkeys. Basically it
| bugs you whenever you use the mouse!
| e12e wrote:
| This looks interesting (as does linear, which many have brought
| up).
|
| For kitemaker - you probably want a "pricing" on your menu - on
| mobile it wasn't obvious there was any pricing available (and
| we'll not be using a gratis service for something as essential as
| this).
|
| Is kitemaker (or linear) intended to also be customer facing?
| We'd love to switch out zendesk for bugtracking/support tickets,
| and improve our process vis-a-vis github/gitlab issues in one
| fell swoop... Is that part of the plan, or is it more of an
| internal process tool?
| thu wrote:
| May I ask why you want to switch out of zendesk ? I'm reluctant
| to use it where I am (we have so many badly integrated third
| party software already...) but some people are pushing a lot
| for it.
| e12e wrote:
| We have modest needs from a ticketing system, no desire for
| customer chat - just email to ticket workflow. Zendesk works,
| but is a bit oversized for our ticketing needs (and slightly
| overpriced, perhaps - but not by an order of magnitude, so to
| speak).
|
| We have a lot of history in our zendesk - and some of our
| customers are acquainted with the workflow.
|
| I would probably not introduce zendesk as a new tool, but I
| do not have a clear recommendation on what should replace it.
|
| At a previous work place we were quite happy with Trac - and
| I was a bit disappointed ttha Apache Bloodhound seemingly
| died off (it was in many ways an opinionated Trac
| setup/distribution).
|
| On the other hand, if the other choice was a monstrosity like
| jira, I'd probably prefer zendesk.
|
| I do think it's important to realise that support ticket
| (sub)systems are _not_ issue trackers /scrum tooling - and
| vice-versa. Not all tickets are issues, and many issues are
| not tickets.
|
| But if the two sub systems have some easy integration, that
| can still be beneficial. Just don't fool yourself into
| thinking that it can (should!) all be automated. Good support
| ticket handling provides real value both for customers and
| the development team.
|
| [ed: maybe fogbugz warrant consideration?]
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks for the tip on the pricing! We'll add it to our menu.
|
| At the moment we're quite focused on teams' internal
| development process and we're a very small team (though we'll
| be growing a bit soon). That being said, we're having a lot of
| discussions with teams on how we can make it even more useful.
| One area that comes up a lot is capturing user feedback/feature
| requests/etc. Another is support tickets. Let's see what comes
| next!
| pchal wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! My favorite task management tool -- We've
| been using it since early days for more than a year and very
| happy with it, especially with how responsive Sigurd and Kevin
| have been. It really gets out of the way when making work items
| and makes it easy to have team discussions around these. Highly
| recommended !
| bachmeier wrote:
| You're selling yourself as a fast alternative to Jira. There's
| already an established company doing that
| (https://clubhouse.io/). They also offer a free plan for teams of
| up to 10 users. You're obviously in business to make money, so
| good that you're focused on selling your product, but why would
| someone pay for Kitemaker rather than use Clubhouse for free?
| Edit: Yes, Kitemaker has a free plan, but it looks quite limited
| for real usage.
| kevsim wrote:
| Great question! Our pricing is definitely something we think
| about a lot, so feedback like this is super helpful. The free
| plan usually gives a small team more than a month to try it out
| since teams tend to larger (and thus fewer) work items than
| they might in another tool.
|
| We definitely think it's a huge market and it's undeniable that
| products like clubhouse will keep having success. But for us,
| we've set out to build something that changes how teams think
| about these types of tools. That's why we're pushing to get the
| whole team engaged and really make use of the document-like
| aspect of Kitemaker (which teams tend to use a bit differently
| than stories in clubhouse). It's early days still, but initial
| feedback has been really positive and quite a few teams are
| paying us already.
| bachmeier wrote:
| One suggestion in that case - many apps have comparisons on
| their landing page. Clubhouse has "vs Trello" and "vs Jira"
| on theirs. I found your discussion here on HN to be much more
| informative than your website. You might consider adding more
| information for the prospective customer wondering why to
| give you their money and data rather than going with the
| competition.
| kevsim wrote:
| That's actually a great suggestion. We'll add that!
| brightball wrote:
| There are plenty of companies doing that though. ClickUp is the
| best one I've tried to this point, but I'm interested to
| explore Kitemaker.
| smt88 wrote:
| ClickUp is astonishingly good. Our whole team (devs, sales,
| CEO, everyone) absolutely loves it.
|
| I have had two truly delightful, joyous SaaS experiences in
| the last few years: ClickUp and Retool.
| vz8 wrote:
| I tried clubhouse.io after seeing your note, and a few minutes
| into the demo (which was impressive) the site died (which was
| less impressive).
|
| And now "Unable to log in. We were unable to parse the server
| response. This could be a networking issue, so please try again
| later."
|
| Trying Kitemaker now and hoping the HN hug of death isn't
| approaching. First impressions: I appreciate the keyboard-
| shortcut-first UI.
| atombender wrote:
| Clubhouse seems to be having some issues today. That's rare,
| and I suspect you were unusually unlucky. I've used it for
| 3-4 years at two different companies, and never experienced
| any downtime before.
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks! Just so I'm clear - it is Kitemaker or Clubhouse
| you're having networking problems with?
| rjmunro wrote:
| Google "alternatives to Jira" and there are hundreds of
| articles with titles like "33 Best Jira Alternatives". It's a
| massively crowded market.
|
| I thought clubhouse was that audio chat thing, but it seems
| they don't own an actual domain name for their company.
| cloverich wrote:
| It is crowded but most aren't actually different in the way
| people need (ex: Asana). I think its still worthwhile to
| compare to Jira, because for many teams JIRA is either all
| they know or the de facto standard. Clubhouse is a better
| JIRA for many teams (simplified, good at multi-team project
| management) but Kitemaker is (IMHO) targeting more of a
| simplified JIRA + Confluence, which is (again, IMHO) ripe for
| exploration.
| kevsim wrote:
| It is also that and there was quite the rumble on Twitter a
| while back where the CEO of Clubhouse the issue tracker was
| getting hatred targeted at the CEO of Clubhouse the audio
| chat thing.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _I thought clubhouse was that audio chat thing_
|
| It is, but project management Clubhouse [0] has been around
| far longer than audio chat Clubhouse.
|
| [0] https://clubhouse.io/
| emayljames wrote:
| Clubhouse use letsencrypt (not professional for a business to
| do that, seriously), and why do they have a picture that
| pretends to be a clickable video. Not a good start.
| rocmcd wrote:
| Why shouldn't a professional business use Let's Encrypt?
| dahican wrote:
| What's wrong with letsencrypt?
| kevsim wrote:
| We use the certs automatically issued by GCP, which are also
| letsencrypt issued.
| cloverich wrote:
| Comparing Kitemaker to Clubhouse write may may get a bit
| further. I found Kitemaker after I realized the tight
| relationship between epics and documentation, and was stunned
| at how difficult it was to find a PM tool focused on fusing
| them. Clubhouse write seemed to be headed that direction, but
| was in beta forever and details were sparse. I began
| researching on my own to see if it would be worth building
| myself, stumbled upon Kitemaker (impressive) and ultimately
| used Notion instead (which is so-so for the purpose).
|
| A bit tangential, but I was surprised at how similar Kitemakers
| offering _sounded_ to Linear (https://linear.app/).
| eterps wrote:
| > after I realized the tight relationship between epics and
| documentation
|
| Could you elaborate a bit on that? I'm curious what you
| discovered in that regard.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I've switched my team over to Linear (https://linear.app), which
| is definitely a "faster Jira alternative built for remote teams"
| as well.
|
| I'm sure you're aware of Linear, how do you differentiate
| yourself? I'd be really interested to know. Huge congrats on the
| launch!
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| We're very aware of them, tried to capture it a bit here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542607
| Supermancho wrote:
| No hierarchy of tasks makes this about as (slightly less, no
| linking) useful as JIRA for practical purposes. There are a
| number of tools that do this kind of thing, so I'm struggling to
| figure the difference between kitemaker and say...Asana or Wrike.
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| What we find is that the document-ish interface of Kitemaker
| lends itself to people sizing their work items a bit bigger
| than they would in Jira or GitHub issues, and then breaking
| them down a bit with todos inside. We have a lot of
| improvements planned around our todos to make this even nicer.
|
| We also have themes (kinda like epics in Jira) for grouping
| larger initiatives together.
| jimmy2020 wrote:
| I am curious what technology did you use for drag & drop. Did you
| implement your own solution or depend on an external library?
| kevsim wrote:
| We're actually in between drag and drop libs at the moment. We
| currently use react-beautiful-dnd [0], but it has some major
| shortcomings and doesn't feel very well maintained. That being
| said, it's a pretty impressive lib that probably works for a
| lot of people as-is.
|
| We've got a branch where we've switched to dndkit [1] which I
| like a lot - really nice API with hooks for everything.
| However, it has some annoying bugs that mean we can't quite
| switch yet. That being said it seems like the one that's
| hanging us up the most is nearly fixed [2].
|
| 0: https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd
|
| 1: https://dndkit.com/
|
| 2: https://github.com/clauderic/dnd-kit/pull/140
| jimmy2020 wrote:
| You have so many layout shifts from just clicking on one
| element. I imagine, implementing react-beautiful-dnd will
| give you much better performance results.
| keithnz wrote:
| I always wonder why Jetbrains YouTrack never gets much mention,
| it's a really versatile system. Though the real area where it
| shines is where you have multiple projects to manage and teams of
| people who are spread across multiple projects.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Some feedback from a potential customer:
|
| The first thing I read on your homepage is: "A faster and more
| engaging way to empower your team."
|
| This means absolutely nothing to me - I have no idea what your
| product does. Something like "Faster issue tracking for remote
| teams." would be better.
|
| Hope this helps!
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| I've seen 2 different opinions from people when it comes to the
| copy. 1st is to tell what value you provide to your customers
| (Mario analogy
| https://twitter.com/GorvGoyl/status/1334116488349827072). or
| 2nd is to tell what exactly your product does (your audience
| will figure out value on their own).
| SahAssar wrote:
| "A faster and more engaging way to empower your team" does
| not tell you the equivalent of "shoot awesome fireballs", it
| contains a lot less info.
| vosper wrote:
| A bit of A/B testing could help figure this out?
| marcinzm wrote:
| >1st is to tell what value you provide to your customers
| (Mario analogy
| https://twitter.com/GorvGoyl/status/1334116488349827072)
|
| Their example is a product that is so universally well known
| that everyone will know what it does. So they do in fact
| explain what the product does in a single word right at the
| top: "Colgate". They don't need more. You do.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| this makes sense for household brands (slack, gmail etc)
| but what about the other businesses. So, I quickly checked
| landing pages (on phone) of some successful Saas products
| like asana, figma, basecamp, trello, notion and they all
| seem to provide value first (above the fold) and
| immediately after it they provide a screenshot of what
| their tool looks like. Good learning.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Interesting, thinking about it the audience is what
| matters. Someone landing on your webpage is already
| primed with what the product is. For example monday.com
| talks about value first. However the Google Search copy
| mentions what it does, the TV commercial mentions what it
| does, etc. So if you're on monday.com then you already
| know what the product does. Even if you heard it by word
| of mouth, you'd have been told context around what it is.
| j45 wrote:
| It might differ based on the target audience. Enterprise
| messaging can be quite different than SMB, or even for VCs
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks very much for the feedback. It's always a bit of a
| struggle with landing page copy and positioning. But super
| useful to hear when something doesn't resonate.
| craftinator wrote:
| If your page resonates, there's probably something wrong with
| your monitor. If you want engineers to be interested in your
| product, stick with concise and accurate descriptions, stay
| away from vague and meaningless business buzzwords and
| buzzphrases.
| kevsim wrote:
| That's fair enough. The language that's there originally
| came from the fact that we see many teams where engineers
| are left out of the loop when it comes to the early stages
| of planning initiatives/features. One of the benefits teams
| have told us they get from Kitemaker is getting the whole
| team involved earlier, rather than PMs doing too much of
| the planning themselves and then just splitting tasks out
| to engineers.
|
| But we'll revisit it!
| craftinator wrote:
| Thanks for the response! Take my opinion with a grain of
| salt, I'm quite curmudgeonly when it comes to marketing
| speak. I just know that, if I were looking for a product
| like yours, I would move on with my search as soon as I
| encountered more vacuous language than descriptive
| language; then would probably come back to it when I
| encountered the same problem with every other product
| page.
| grmmph wrote:
| one of the best jira alternatives out there. we use them and
| super happy with how this works and by Kevin and Sigurd
| responsivness to bugs and improvments.
| j45 wrote:
| Exciting to see alternatives popping up.
|
| I'd be curious to know the feature parity in percentage with Jira
| features. Jira is for better and worse.. deep and complex to
| handle a lot of depth and complexity.
| sverredanger wrote:
| Awesome product. Fast, smooth, and gets out of your way.
| the_squirrel wrote:
| Hi HN. My name is David and I am the founder of Superthread
| (https://superthread.com).
|
| Superthread is a lightning-fast Issue Tracker + Documentation
| Software that is delightful to use.
|
| We are going to be launching our Early Access version in the next
| few months and are looking for Early Access testers.
|
| About Superthread: Why I stated Superthread:
| https://youtu.be/sUvMzfvHdXk, Our tech stack:
| https://youtu.be/mqs_pYRR3_8, Why we are fully remote:
| https://youtu.be/wtmS39tdHb8
|
| My thoughts on programming: Part 1: https://youtu.be/1roI6-5U5Vg,
| Part 2: https://youtu.be/ESj83wVsggA, Part
| 3:https://youtu.be/TfNrNwpdaG0
|
| We are hiring and are eager to meet Golang and VUE devs.
| the-dude wrote:
| Do you feel this is appropiate? I am not getting this.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, it's not appropriate, and it's dead and gone in 14
| minutes.
| the_squirrel wrote:
| Super sorry this is my first post on HN. Which part is
| inappropriate?
| the-dude wrote:
| All of it. Wrong thread dude.
| the_squirrel wrote:
| OK, thanks.
| the_squirrel wrote:
| Out of interest, in such cases does the comment get
| deleted or can I delete it because I didn't know?
| DanBC wrote:
| Welcome to HN!
|
| If you have a product that people can try out you might
| want to submit it as a "ShowHN". Or if you have some
| detailed technical write ups you could submit those,
| along with stories from other sources.
|
| The FAQ and guidelines have some useful information.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to
| post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of
| the site should be for curiosity.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| Can I post a job ad?
|
| > Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN.
|
| > A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first
| weekday of each month (or Jan 2). Most job ads are
| welcome there. Only an account called whoishiring is
| allowed to submit the thread itself. This prevents a race
| to post it first.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Congrats on the launch.
|
| However, what is it with these sites today. With a default
| content blocker you hamburger menu does not work on mobile
| (Safari on iOS with Firefox Content Blocker).
|
| So I can't tell, but do you offer an on-premise solution?
| kevsim wrote:
| We'll checkout out our webflow setup to see if there's anything
| we can do there to prevent the burger menu from getting messed
| up. Thanks for the tip.
|
| We don't offer on prem currently but there's a discussion a few
| comment threads up.
| nicholascgilpin wrote:
| My team was looking for something like this. We ended up choosing
| Gitlab since we were already using their VCS.
|
| These organization products all look so complicated. I can't see
| the value add here vs Notion/Atlassian/etc. A feature list and
| example use cases would help.
| kevsim wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| We'll definitely add much more of a feature by feature
| comparison with some of our competitors.
|
| With regards to complexity, we have a principle that we try to
| hide as much complexity as possible from users until they need
| it. So rather than big forms with loads of dropdowns or a lot
| of boxes that need filling in, we try to keep the UI pretty
| sparse. We tuck things behind buttons or in the cmd+K menu so
| they're out of they way. Some examples of stuff that's not in
| the UI til you need it:
|
| * Added team members to work items
|
| * Setting effort/impact of work items
|
| * Adding a backlog to a space
|
| * Etc
|
| These are all things that some teams but not all teams need, so
| we don't want to give teams the feeling they're doing something
| wrong just because they're not using them.
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