[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello,...
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Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana,
ClickUp, etc.
Hey HN, Over the past two years, I've been building Upbase, an
all-in-one PM tool. I've tried so many project management tools
over the years (Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Teamwork, Wrike, Monday,
etc.) but they've all fallen short. Most of them are overly
complicated and painful to use. Some others, like Trello, are too
limited for my needs. Most importantly, most of these tools tend
to be focused on team collaboration and completely ignore personal
productivity. They are useful for organizing my work, but not
great at helping me stay focused to get things done. That's why I
decided to build Upbase. I try to make it clean and simple,
without all the bells and whistles. Apart from team collaboration,
I added many personal productivity features, including Weekly/Daily
planner, Time blocking, Pomodoro Timer, Daily Journal, etc. so I
don't need another to-do list app. Now I can use Upbase to
collaborate with my team AND manage your personal stuff at the same
time, without all the bloat. If these resonate with you, then give
Upbase a try. It has a Free Forever plan though. Let me know if
you have any feedback or questions!
Author : tonypham
Score : 472 points
Date : 2022-11-13 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (upbase.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (upbase.io)
| martini333 wrote:
| Reminds me of _Tasks by Planner and To Do_ by Microsoft
| pcurve wrote:
| unlimited storage for $49 one time fee? I'm guessing you'll be
| introducing new plans in the future?
| tonypham wrote:
| I can guarantee that there's no upsell whatsoever. Yeah, some
| users will use a lot of storage, and we'll end up losing money
| on them, but not all users - I guess.
| pcurve wrote:
| I mean, I think it's perfectly fine to charge recurring fee
| for saas products. Unlike desktop based app, you are
| providing value to your client by making it cloud based.
| trentnix wrote:
| As someone whose team just got bitten - again - by Jira
| descriptions being overwritten by an unwitting user with unsaved
| changes, I feel you. I just can't imagine why it isn't easy to
| recover a previous description and its formatting. Jira solves
| the larger collaboration problems, but blows it on the small
| stuff.
|
| I spent the next hour fuming and imagining how it would work if
| it was done _right_ (i.e. the way I thought it should work).
| Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.
|
| I soon sobered up, realizing I had neither time nor patience (or
| talent, maybe) to build it right.
|
| Respect to you for rolling your own.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing your experiences.
| bigtones wrote:
| It is very easy to recover a previous version of the
| description field in Jira. Jira keeps a full change log / audit
| log of every change to the description field and other fields.
| You can definitely roll back to an old version of the
| description field or see what changes were made and when by
| whom.
|
| https://www.tutorialspoint.com/jira/jira_view_change_history...
| systemicdanna wrote:
| This is one of those cases when Jira is suffering from its
| UI/IA mess. It has lots of good feature but the
| discoverability is horrendous, which leads to so much user
| (my) confusion.
| natovan wrote:
| Ah yes, the glorious Atom character input delay. Still, pretty
| interesting. I also found that Trello lacks some features and
| became too bloated over the years. NightReader plugin works well
| for darkmode, that's a plus. I will give your thing a try
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks. The dark mode is in progress now. It will be available
| in about 2 weeks.
| natovan wrote:
| Great. Also, I think I found an issue - timer works slower
| than it should. I started it with windows timer for 20
| minutes and when it stopped upbase timer still had 5 minutes
| to count down
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| There is another competitor, perhaps, which is any simple,
| agreed-upon way to share data. For example, a Google doc and a
| calendar. That also has downsides, but that's probably what I
| would try before Trello etc. Are you trying to attract those
| types of people?
| tonypham wrote:
| Yes, and I think these types of users will find our app useful.
| MoSattler wrote:
| Really love the look and feel. Did you use tailwindUI by any
| chance?
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks. We did use tailwindUI for the app.
| farmin wrote:
| Did you build this all by yourself? Looks like a great tool.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Looks like it's a team of 6 people according to their "Our
| Story" page.
|
| The "I built" in the title seems misleading, what's up there
| @OP ?
| Raed667 wrote:
| Like CEOs who say they build datacenters and international
| branches.
|
| I always read those as "I lead the team that built it"
| tonypham wrote:
| We have 3 developers to build the app.
| lakomen wrote:
| That's not an "I built it" story then.
|
| "I was dissatisfied with ... so I made other people build
| it"
| tonypham wrote:
| Apologize for the misleading words. The right ones should
| be "I built it with our team"
| ushakov wrote:
| Why not use "we built it" instead?
|
| You don't want to give your teammates a credit?
| vxNsr wrote:
| Why not give the benefit of doubt?
|
| Maybe the OP just followed the structure of every other
| showHN post?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| carstenhag wrote:
| Building something up does not only mean putting in the
| physical activity (laying down bricks or putting in
| characters into files).
| tonypham wrote:
| We're a team of 3. The app is too big to build it myself alone.
| farmin wrote:
| Thanks. I was about to freak out if you built and maintained
| all this as a 1 person team.
| ijidak wrote:
| Do you have an affiliate program? I would like to resell.
| tonypham wrote:
| Not yet at the moment. But we do plan to have one in the near
| future.
| prismatix wrote:
| Small note: on the clickup comparison item 4 you have a
| grammatical error. "Upbase have..." Rather than "Upbase has..."
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I think it's a US vs British English thing. Company names are
| plural in one and singular in the other.
| unsafecast wrote:
| This is more about the product though
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. Yes, it's an error.
| drc500free wrote:
| Firstly, congratulations on your launch!
|
| My personal opinion as a Product Manager is that there is no all-
| in-one tool, there never will be an all-in-one tool, and anyone
| promising an all-in-one tool has some significant blinders on
| around the job functions they have been exposed to.
|
| Sales will use Salesforce. Engineering will use JIRA. And Product
| will use some generic roadmap-first tool like Asana, Trello,
| Miro, Monday, or MS Project. Product will beg everyone to use
| their tool, but no one will because it's for looking at work, not
| executing on it.
|
| Product will not understand because we Product Managers don't
| actually DO things, we talk to people, organize ideas at a coarse
| level - and we have a simple tool that articulates the vision
| perfectly! Except it doesn't automatically integrate with the
| CI/CD pipeline, it doesn't automatically log the last touch with
| a high-priority prospect, it doesn't pass designs from the
| designer to the UX engineer. It doesn't actually DO anything. It
| becomes just another SaaS platform in our Okta stack that only
| the PMs look at - and it gets out of sync with the actual reality
| reflected in the other SaaS offerings.
|
| And the reason it doesn't do those things is because the people
| who built it thought that THEY were the ones who could build the
| all-in-one project management tool and all those sales people,
| engineers, designers, lawyers, and marketing writers would log in
| to theirs. Insert relevant XKCD about standards here. The truth
| is no PM tool will ever be the system of record for the actual
| work, but everyone is afraid that the complexity of integrating
| with others will turn them into JIRA.
|
| So we get these vaguely opinionated ways of moving around and
| arranging candy-colored cards, and those cards never quite show
| us the state of the project we are managing, so we have to bug
| people to "update their status in <Monday/Asana/Trello>" before
| the weekly meeting. Which they don't want to do because it
| delivers no value to THEM.
|
| Which is all a long-winded way of saying - please think about how
| a piece of work from each of those functions might be represented
| in your view, and how that integration would happen
| automatically.
| avip wrote:
| #facts. Great comment.
|
| How many times have we seen PMs trying to brute-force JIRA (et.
| al) into a project management tool using weird plugins that
| don't co-exist peacefully. This always fails, and PMs either
| retreat to their own trusted platforms (if you're lucky), or in
| severe cases start asking everybody for "excel summary" or some
| "one pager" to reveal that holy "project status".
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| This tracks closely to my experiences as well. Managers need to
| understand that managing upwards and laterally is equally as
| important as managing downwards. If your peers and bosses
| aren't fluent in your team's tool of choice, it is your
| responsibility to be the translation layer to a tool that works
| for them.
|
| This is the only way to truly achieve the type of transparency
| we're all searching for.
| leokennis wrote:
| That is super interesting. To build "the one tool" you'd then
| need to actually build five tools (one with tickets and commits
| and pipelines for engineers, one for sales etc.) and find a way
| to "translate" from one to the other.
|
| Like, how do you translate git commits and tests run to
| "project Y is now Z% done"?
| jimduk wrote:
| Did this in a shortlived startup 20 yrs ago. Other cofounder
| was the ideas guy. Pitch was to roll up granular, factual
| project achievements up into reporting data , and cascade
| objectives down. This avoids the red/amber/green fictional
| layer between PMs and sponsors.
|
| Learned two interesting things
|
| - if your tool mandates a philosophy or process, you
| massively shrink your market
|
| - real pms , sponsors and engineer s buffer their risk by
| selectively disclosing information. They don't want a
| permanent record of open, granular outcome information unless
| they are in a very mature company.
| drc500free wrote:
| JIRA pretty much exists on the promise that it can translate
| a git commit+test into "project Y is now Z% done." Everyone
| moans about how much it sucks, yet the last five products
| I've worked on have used it because behind the excessive
| complexity is a really powerful tool for managing teams and
| CI/CD. It sure isn't Product pushing for JIRA to be used,
| because the built-in roadmapping features are awful.
|
| I think you need to put a lot of work into making the JIRA
| and Salesforce integrations incredibly clean, not try to get
| the engineers and biz dev folks to log into a single portal.
| Look at each of those tools with an editor's eye and figure
| out what is going to survive into the PM's representation and
| what is un-necessary complexity.
|
| --------------------------------
|
| Going into specifics of how I tend to run this... Personally,
| I've found the VMOST[1] (Vision, Mission, Objective,
| Strategy, Tactic) stack to be the best way of linking vision
| to roadmap - as lightweight as feasible while providing
| structure. I rename the pieces to (Vision, Objective, Key
| Result, Focus Area, Initiative) which tend to be more
| understandable to most people. This gets bonus points for
| easily tying into the OKR planning process that many
| companies run now.
|
| That gives basically a 3-layer strategy pyramid:
|
| * Vision: What we think the best future would look like,
| where we help someone do something valuable. Maybe 3 years
| away.
|
| * OKRs: 3ish Objectives that we think will get us much closer
| to that Vision if we achieve them. For each of those, 3ish
| Key Results that are objective measures that let us know we
| have hit our Objectives or are at least going in the right
| direction at speed.
|
| * Work: 2ish Focus Areas for each Objective that are
| consensus hypotheses of directionally how we would achieve
| the Key Results. Then within each Focus Area, 3-5
| initiatives.
|
| Put in time order, these Initiatives form the Roadmap. The
| exact scale of what counts as an Initiative depends on the
| team and what we're doing, but some examples: A Feature or
| Epic. Getting a key partnership signed. Launching a marketing
| campaign. Opening an office.
|
| All of those need to be tracked in one place so that we know
| overall progress, track inter-function dependencies, and can
| have serious conversations about what's working and what
| isn't. It needs to be in one place so that I can ask "Is
| anyone doing literally anything that is not in this view? Why
| are you doing that thing?" The answer is usually either "SVP
| so-and-so said their thing was really important" or "we need
| to do that operationally so the current product doesn't fall
| apart." In which case I need to have a conversation with SVP
| so-and-so, and we need to explicitly decide that we are or
| are not ok with the current product falling apart, and
| incorporate support into the stack.
|
| I always do this manually using a Wiki like Confluence,
| because integrations don't work right and I'm not taking time
| away from people who actually do things to play bookkeeping
| games.
|
| [1] https://bad.tools/library/toolkits/vmost/
| maxfurman wrote:
| We do OK on this using the GitHub-Jira plugins. Put the
| ticket number in the commit message, and follow that commit
| progress towards the master branch, and you can get a
| (coarse) sense of "some progress has been made" and "this
| will be included in the next release." Of course if the
| initial PR is full of bugs and 3 or 4 follow up commits are
| needed...
| clairity wrote:
| first, it uses "PM" in the title, but note that upbase is a
| _project_ management tool, not a product one. project
| management tooling could be viewed as a subset of product, but
| in other ways, project management is a related, but separate
| discipline.
|
| second, if your product management processes deliver no value
| to your colleagues, then you may need to work on that, perhaps
| more as an organization than an individual pm. the product
| management process and tooling should absolutely deliver value
| to developers, designers, and other individual contributors.
| most pertinently, tracking velocity is for the team first and
| foremost, and secondarily for others. it's like keeping score
| in basketball--it's how the team knows how it's doing.
|
| third, it may be big and "enterprisey", but jira is just fine
| for product/project management. when folks complain about jira,
| ~99% of the time, it's a complaint about the process and people
| involved, but turned toward the tool because it's hard to
| criticize the offending party directly.
|
| i do agree that product management tooling is secondary to
| sales, marketing, finance, accounting, etc., and so must
| interface with those other systems for "truth" rather than
| being a system of record.
| [deleted]
| chaosbutters314 wrote:
| excel is all you need
| anonymous344 wrote:
| I dunno.. looks complicated, very much so. few years ago i made a
| big review of all trello alternatives and they were all too
| complicated to use and were lacking the copy of board & list (as
| an actually working method and not just copy the 1%) and also
| lacking of share a board with customer via secret link, but only
| with limited visibility not to see all the cards and their
| details..
|
| made trello still the best and most clean
| tonypham wrote:
| You can try it out yourself. Probably you'll find that it looks
| complicated but is actually very simple and easy to use :)
| TimMeade wrote:
| Interesting. We are very much in need of something like this.
|
| BUT; I setup both mobile and and desktop web. Seems like they are
| not syncing. Certainly not real time. Added to desktop and still
| not on mobile 3 minutes later even if i refresh. I logged into
| both with my goggle account. Are they even the same board?
|
| Deal breaker on the lack of realtime sync.
| TimMeade wrote:
| If i add on mobile and do a CNTL-R to refresh the entire page
| the item shows on desktop.
| tonypham wrote:
| On mobile, are you using the app or the browser? The app has
| real-time sync with the desktop web.
| TimMeade wrote:
| Mobile App IOS from app store. Sync did not work
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. We'll look into this.
| mmmbaconnn wrote:
| Dragging tasks from the board to the calendar and pomodoro are
| great features. I've been looking for an app like this for a long
| time. I will go for lifetime access. Congrats on a great idea
| executed well, and thanks.
| tonypham wrote:
| Glad that you like it. And thanks so much for your support.
| There are still a lot of exciting features coming in the
| upcoming months.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Does it support Markdown? That's what I find lacking in many of
| these PM tools - they either use some custom, complicated markup,
| or wysiwyg, which makes it hard to format text properly and copy
| and paste text.
| agd wrote:
| I'm a solo founder working on a project management tool which
| supports markdown. Take a look. :)
|
| https://macroapp.io
| ei8ths wrote:
| Currently use confluence at work, trying to find a
| replacement, this almost does it. Need a way during meeting
| notes to assign tasks in the document as part of the notes.
| We also review prior current tasks before we start the new
| meeting.
| hmcamp wrote:
| I like the idea behind this tool. All the best with the
| development.
| agd wrote:
| Thanks!
| return_to_monke wrote:
| Looks nice. do you have a mobile app?
| agd wrote:
| No mobile app right now. (Too much todo already ).
|
| The site is responsive, however the mobile UX could be
| improved for sure.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| ^ Spam
| tonypham wrote:
| Currently, only the Chat tool supports Markdown. But we do plan
| to have Markdown all over the place.
| muttantt wrote:
| "I built my own" -- makes it sound indie and hip.
|
| Turns out a team built this.
| esskay wrote:
| Immediately turned off by the AppSumo lifetime deal. Seems to be
| where projects go to draw in a bit of cash before they fail or
| get sold off.
|
| Lifetime deals on products that have a real recurring lifetime
| cost rarely work out, and are an immediate red flag, especially
| for a new project.
| omnimus wrote:
| Better uptime https://betterstack.com/better-uptime has done it
| and built amazing product using this initial money. It makes
| sense for small bootstrapped teams.
| tonypham wrote:
| Being on AppSumo helps us gain initial traction and feedback to
| improve the product at a faster pace, since we're not VC-
| backed.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Fair trade off, I think perfect world best practices are
| nice, and so is finding free money on the ground. Both pretty
| infrequent day to day.
| algo_trader wrote:
| As a seller, how does AppSumo work?
|
| Is it just a notice board (like product hunt) where you get
| some exposure? Or do you pay for it (other than offering a
| bargain discount..)?
| tonypham wrote:
| Listing on AppSumo is free. They have two options:
|
| - Select: You have to apply to be chosen, they do all the
| marketing for you and cut 70% of revenue);
|
| - Marketplace listing: You do everything yourself and keep
| 70% of the revenue.
| 7174n6 wrote:
| What calendars can you integrate? It's a no-go if it doesn't have
| Outlook calendar integration. App developers always assume
| everyone is OK using Google calendar. Functionality for only
| Google calendar alienates a large portion of the your prospective
| user pool who are "Google-Free".
| tonypham wrote:
| Due to popular demand, Google Calendar will be our first
| integration. After that, we'll consider adding more Calendars,
| like Outlook.
| chrisacky wrote:
| Can you consider the improtance of also integrating with
| Color Coding too when you do these?
|
| You seriously don't want to see my calendar each week. (Or
| maybe you do for understanding this pain point).. but having
| a personal planning tool understand the colors of my calendar
| events would be an immediate killer for me.
|
| I've tested abotu 15 different tools, and in the end found
| that there wans't any personal tools available. The closest I
| found was Sunsama. I currently use "Sortd" though for the
| email integration.
| priyadarshy wrote:
| Founder at Sunsama here.
|
| What would close the gap between "closest" and "perfect for
| you"?
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. I do not fully
| understand your point on "Color Coding" yet. Please get in
| touch via help@upbase.io and give me a bit more detail
| (plus some screenshots, if possible).
| oDot wrote:
| I am the author of https://Nestful.app (there's some overlap, but
| we do not seem to compete). I have built it after being through
| the same ordeal, and have come to the conclusion that the tool is
| not the main hurdle, especially at the level of Trello or Asana,
| which are very high quality tools.
|
| The lack of productivity comes from the methodology those tools
| implement. Their methodologies contributed a whole lot but by now
| we are used to that contribution, and so we must advance it.
|
| Nestful implements a methodology I call "spontaneous
| productivity". In which there is no planning. Nestful will tell
| you what is the next thing you need to do, and that is it.
| Currently you have to know the methodology very well and "do it
| by hand", but I am very close for a smooth UX.
|
| Either way, my point is that improving upon Trello or Asana is
| like honing a sharp sword. At some point, we need to switch to a
| gun.
| hahajk wrote:
| Like others have said, your comment here is very interesting
| and makes me want to learn more, but your (pleasantly minimal)
| homepage has no more information.
|
| Amplenote has a unique "idea/concept" they're designing for,
| and they spell it out in a series of very interesting blog
| posts [1]. I don't practice their "idea funnel" concept but
| their blog post made me interested enough to eventually
| subscribe to their service.
|
| It would be really cool to see a similar post for Nestful.
|
| [1]
| https://www.amplenote.com/blog/jots_unify_four_apps_ideas_in...
| oDot wrote:
| Great idea. Thank you
| clairity wrote:
| for perspective, i built a personal crm that told you who to
| engage next (via a dynamic contact list powered by interaction
| data streams). it failed[0] because this was not actually the
| biggest pain point of sales people (folks most likely to use
| and pay for such a tool), and it was too important a decision
| point for users to rely on it solely.
|
| a smart tool, it turns out, isn't all that useful, even though
| it has wow factor. it may even be enough of a wow to be an
| effective marketing tool, but an effective marketing tool is
| not an effective productivity tool.
|
| [0]: we found more success as a general sales team dashboard
| based on the underlying realtime data
| oDot wrote:
| Very useful insight, thank you for sharing
| xcambar wrote:
| Very interesting approach. Unfortunately, the landing page does
| not give (me) enough that I want to sign up.
|
| Some features, differentiators and screenshots would be a nice
| addition to the otherwise quite dry homepage.
| oDot wrote:
| Unfortunately, Nestful is not quite there yet. It's a product
| for extreme early adopters that think they can manage the
| methodology by hand.
|
| I hope in the coming few months to release the "ready-made"
| solution for that, at which point there will be what to show
| on the home page.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. Your methodology of "spontaneous
| productivity" is pretty interesting to me. Will take some time
| to check out your app. BTW, love your minimalist landing page.
| oDot wrote:
| I am positive it can be implement in a business oriented app
| to the same extent I am trying to implement it in a personal
| environment. And if it doesn't fit -- surely there are other
| methodologies that both advance the field and fit the
| product.
| sbarre wrote:
| After thinking about this, I would absolutely love an up-
| front opinionated "this is what you need to work on next"
| UI in all the productivity and management apps I have to
| use at work.
|
| Will keep an eye on your app going forward
| dotmanish wrote:
| Is there a way to see what your app does / how it does, without
| signing up with an e-mail?
| oDot wrote:
| Not yet, but fairly easy to explain, in its current state.
| Nestful is a todo list app that can display items in Kanban
| or List view, and in which each item is also a board itself
| (hence the product name). That is it (for now ;))
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Since you haven't provided any information besides "Try it,
| you'll love it", I tried it, and I'm sorry to say our
| relationship didn't work out. My Notepad++ is more useful. You
| comment in a thread on a PM tool, and your app seems like a
| scratchpad. For sure it fill find its users, but it's a far cry
| from Upbase and similar projects.
| oDot wrote:
| Notepad++ sets the bar extremely high
| Void_ wrote:
| Your landing page doesn't tell me much on mobile.
| tonypham wrote:
| We have mobile apps on both iOS and Android. Yes, we
| definitely need to improve our website. Don't have much time
| for it yet.
| alexose wrote:
| This seems cool, but I'd definitely focus on explaining the
| methodology a bit more. I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to
| be using it...
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks. We're not doing a great job on the website copy.
| Definitely will look into it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Tech stack?
| tonypham wrote:
| Mainly Golang and Vuejs.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Upbase looks great!
|
| "most of these tools tend to be focused on team collaboration and
| completely ignore personal productivity." - did you consider
| tools like Todoist and Nirvana which are more individual-focused?
| (Yet Todoist has project sharing and collaboration for teams as
| well).
|
| Also remember the best to-do list app will fall flat if you don't
| pair it with a good method and a lot of discipline - kudos for
| including some links to relevant materials in your web page.
| tonypham wrote:
| Yes, Todoist and Nirvana work great for personal task
| management, but not for teams. We want to build a tool for
| teams that empowers personal productivity.
| ArlenBales wrote:
| Nice design! Your features do resonate to me as a contractor
| because a lot of my clients know very little about computers and
| sharing them links to Trello, Slack, etc. often confounds them
| with technical debt. Having everything in one place for
| collaboration is ideal for those kind of customers.
|
| It's also a double-edged sword, because decentralization is safer
| for me if your company ever goes belly-up or you are acquired by
| a company that decides to change the product for the worst. On
| that note, I'm not seeing any options to download or export all
| my upbase data. Will that be on the roadmap? I don't think I can
| really commit to upbase until that safety net is at least on the
| roadmap.
| tonypham wrote:
| I got your point! Exporting data is on our roadmap, and it's
| one of the top priorities since a lot of users are asking for
| it. So you're not alone here.
| r2p2 wrote:
| Aaand it's in the cloud.
| easyorgmode wrote:
| If you prefer something offline and where the data is on your
| own computer I made EasyOrg [0]. It saves everything in text
| files in org-mode format. It's mainly for personal use. There
| is no support for collaboration. Syncing can be done to your
| other computers as you like, for example Syncthing, Dropbox,
| pCloud, git, NAS or whatever. Backup is also easy as it's the
| same as you hopefully already have today.
|
| [0] https://easyorgmode.com
| anonymous344 wrote:
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| _Be kind. Don 't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't
| cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer,
| including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tonypham wrote:
| It's just a quick overview of the app though. Making a great
| tutorial video takes time, and we don't have the resources to
| do that at the moment. But we definitely will. Thanks for your
| feedback.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Pretty impressive to have built this in two years!
|
| I'm a high-level PM and I'm not so sure why the tool is trying to
| do everything. I use a messaging app to talk to people. I use a
| todo app to track my personal and business commitments, and I use
| physical paper and timers to track my personal productivity
| (weekly plans, journals, timers, etc).
|
| The beauty of PM work is that you can mix and match the tools
| that make you more effective over time. Maybe that's software,
| maybe that's more analog tools.
|
| I think this is an excellent solution for teams that aren't
| established and small in nature though.
|
| I especially feel it will be extremely difficult to compete with
| the likes of where Notion and GitHub are headed with project
| management tooling.
| tonypham wrote:
| Yeah, the tool is specifically designed for solos and small
| teams with basic needs and simple workflows. Big teams will
| find it not powerful or flexible enough. Thanks for your
| feedback. I appreciate it.
| systemicdanna wrote:
| This positioning is confusing as most of the features are an
| overkill for a solo engineer/entrepreneur/etc.
|
| The free tier is not a perfect fit a solo person for the same
| reason.
|
| Wonder if it could be worth trying offering tiers based on
| your vision for different size teams. Eg a solo person gets a
| single user (no user management features), no chat, no any
| multi-user features.
| vcool07 wrote:
| Looks very good and really impressive if it was built all by your
| lonesome !!
|
| Not trying to be pessimistic, but doesn't notion give you all
| these already ? Or did I miss something here ?
| tonypham wrote:
| Upbase has a completely different way of structuring all the
| tools it has to offer. Each tool has its own place, separated
| from the others. And that creates clarity. In a nutshell, it's
| more organized and way easier to get started with than Notion.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Great to hear! I know a very meticulous person about to start
| an EV auto company and this looks like the perfect fit, and
| I'm 100 percent serious.
|
| It's a one man idea show with a web of potential add in SMEs
| on a limited basis but a large volume of subcontracting
| evaluation and go forward structures for supply chain.
|
| Hope he gets his head around this and finds it a fit. Thank
| you for sharing. Every tool in its right place helps the shop
| work efficiently!
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much.
| kodah wrote:
| Pretty cool! Congratulations on launching a useful product.
|
| As a side conversation, this project and how you described it
| made me think about why I have such issues with Jira. Jira is
| actually fucking useless _to me_. To the business, it 's
| indispensible because it captures the larger tasks that roll up
| to a larger business objective. However, for each of those larger
| tasks I have a series of conversations and cross-functional
| dependencies that must be negotiated. More basically, my minutiae
| is much more than the larger tasks can ever describe, and that
| minutiae is much too noisy for the business to track - which is
| why we cover it informally in stand ups.
|
| What I need is something offline that tracks my minutiae like
| stories where the larger tasks (that are currently stories to the
| business) get tracked like epics on my end.
|
| I say this from the perspective of working at a very large, top-
| level engineering firm.
| jonwest wrote:
| This is a huge ask, but would you mind elaborating on your
| workflow a bit? I really struggled with Jira at work, and I
| _think_ it was for similar reasons that you described.
|
| Are you saying that what is a story at work, and captured
| within a single "unit" within Jira (I don't want to use "task",
| because that's a separate thing in Jira) is more broad, but you
| benefit from having that story broken down further, and that's
| where you would use something like Upbase?
| kodah wrote:
| Yes. Most organizations I've worked in have an OKR, several
| epics from that OKR, and several stories from each epic. I
| tend to work on stories all across those epics, but even
| broken down stories can never be broken down enough for a
| single programmer. They're still broad because I'll need to
| gather requirements from external teams, get a permission
| here, or dive into a deployment workflow there in order to
| fully close the story. To the business, a story is the
| smallest unit of work, but to a human we have many steps in
| that unit of work.
|
| In a contrived example, if my OKR is to reduce the engineer
| attention in a given support process by 50%, my epic might be
| to create a framework for automating tasks via Slack. My
| stories then might be:
|
| - Spike: Investigate Slack API
|
| - Spike: Investigate programattic interfaces of Jenkins
|
| - Build bot framework
|
| - Build pluggable Jenkins module
|
| - Spike: determine deployment patterns for framework +
| modules
|
| To a business, these are bite-size as the chunks can be, but
| to me that may involve tracking threads in channels, doing
| POCs, and doing a lot of reading. All of those things may
| fall under a single story.
|
| In a laymen's sense, I need a Jira for my Jiras that the
| business doesn't need to track because those things largely
| don't matter to the whole.
| jonwest wrote:
| For me I think it depends on how your org is handling the
| source of truth for tasks and work. I know you can use
| checklists within stories and tasks to break things down
| without cluttering boards with new tickets, and capturing
| discussions within the ticket itself helps to
| compartmentalize things and avoid jumping around different
| tools.
|
| If a story is your smallest unit of work, does one
| developer own a story? Or are multiple people working on
| it? Intuitively it feels like if multiple people are
| working on a single story then it feels like that should
| (or at least could) be broken down into subtasks (or
| checklist items, if you didn't want to create new tickets)
| that could be split between developers, and keeping that
| context and discussion within that ticket, I would think,
| would be helpful for knowledge sharing and drawing from
| that discussion to feed into your longer term knowledge
| base docs.
|
| Just food for thought from someone who tool hops way too
| frequently with poor short term memory .
| tonypham wrote:
| Jira is powerful for Dev teams. But I've never heard anyone say
| that they love using Jira.
|
| For large teams with a complex process, I think the problem is
| the process itself, not the tool.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Similar take re: Jira at work. But for me personally, Jira is
| valuable in that it at least provides shorthand for a body of
| work. I manage my own deliverables (and my small team's, to a
| lesser extent) in Obsidian, in a work-dedicated private vault.
| Referencing Jira tickets ("WF-1234" or "CICD-9999") in my per-
| project devnotes is helpful for organization and providing
| centers of gravity for related | interdependent notes. YMMV but
| it's been working fairly well for me.
| FpUser wrote:
| I am looking at decent PM tool myself. To the point that I am
| entertaining the idea to do it myself as a side project. Reason I
| am not using any of available offering is simple: unless someone
| puts a gun to my head I never buy software that does not have
| perpetual license and that can not be hosted on my own premises.
|
| I found some piece of software that I can host and it gets me
| limping along but not very happy with it.
|
| I am more than willing to pay for license and for upgrades (when
| I feel I need those) but as much as possible I absolutely refuse
| to become a hostage of multiple different companies holding my
| data and extracting monthly rent.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Kudos to your effort! I think I will be next in line, over time,
| with similar post. Everything I've tried is just not working (in
| full). From now great experience, it seems team sizes need
| definitely different approaches and also it seems people building
| those tools don't really have much experience in what works and
| what doesn't across orgs and team sizes. To be honest, I strongly
| believe it's not possible to build one size fits all solution
| anyways for project management, and on the other hand I also
| believe a tool for project management should have ultra strong
| vision and less flexibility.. with a space then for different
| tools/methodologies for people to choose from instead of trying
| to have one tool that fits (not) all.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _it seems people building those tools don't really have much
| experience in what works and what doesn't across orgs and team
| sizes..._
|
| Try Linear.
|
| https://linear.app/method
|
| Opinionated, in a good way, and willing to slay sacred cows,
| such as replacing estimated sprints with you get done what you
| prioritized cycles, or milestones with roadmaps.
|
| (Now if I could just get them to replace "Projects" with
| something evergreen teams can work on, like "Capabilities".
| Fortunately all that has to change is the label.)
| Keyframe wrote:
| Thanks, I will most definitely check it out. I can already
| see it sings the song of my people:
|
| _Productivity software should be opinionated. It 's the only
| way the product can truly do the heavy lifting for you.
| Flexible software lets everyone invent their own workflows,
| which eventually creates chaos as teams scale._
|
| and
|
| _Teams at different sizes have different needs._
|
| the question now is if my opinion is overlapping, heh. These
| two quotes are definitely my experience, with one more which
| is fluidity in projects themselves from design, to 'tasks' to
| priority.
| s3000 wrote:
| Do you see a way to make migration easy?
|
| If the scope of a project changes, or to try various tools with
| an 'ultra strong vision' with real life data, it would be very
| helpful if the project data could be easily transferred. Is
| there a standard that most tools could support?
| tonypham wrote:
| We'll need to take a closer look to be able to answer your
| question, since we're not working on the migration yet.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks a lot for your feedback. Upbase is specifically designed
| for solos and small businesses, which don't need a lot of fancy
| features. I have a sense that most PM tools are built for large
| teams and enterprises, with too much bells and whistles.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Obsidian meets all my (personal productivity / PKM / Tools for
| Thought) needs for this kind of thing for now and the forseeable
| future. But I'm happy to share my thoughts as someone who's been
| fairly deep in this space for several years.
|
| If you're looking for broad adoption, I'd focus heavily on your
| interop and portability story: import and export. If it's easy to
| try with "bring your own extant content", and mitigated risk of
| lockin via robust export, the PKM / TFT community will be much
| more likely to engage. And the community per se is a huge factor
| in such tools' appeal and viabilty.
|
| Thanks for sharing, good on you for actually shipping, and good
| luck!
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. And yes, you're
| right. Not being able to import/export is a deal breaker for
| many people who are really interested in Upbase. We'll need to
| prioritize that.
| ionwake wrote:
| I was trying this and looks good, but I can not edit what time a
| task is done, when on week view, which makes it impossible to
| setup the time a task could be done at at a future date.
|
| Also if I create a task on a weekly planner view, it should I
| believe show up as a task which "needs to be done" . It seems to
| not exist, unless I am in weekly view.
|
| Because of this missing functionality or my ability to figure it
| out I cant use it - I think its a simple expectation my end
| though. Just offering feedback, looks great tho.
| tonypham wrote:
| You can open the due date picker to set the time, or go to the
| Daily Planner page and then drag and drop a task onto the right
| sidebar Calendar to set the start and end time.
|
| Weekly Planner and Daily Planner are the two main views, so you
| need to go to these pages to check for due tasks.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| My goodness there are so so SO many of these productivity apps.
| Even in the comments here, there are multiple people saying they
| too are building their own productivity tools. Someone should
| keep track them all on a kanban board so we know which ones are
| developing/released/acquired/abandoned :P
| [deleted]
| tonypham wrote:
| Lol. Upbase has a kanban board for this purpose :))
| chirau wrote:
| Is the lifetime membership for all the Pro features?
| tonypham wrote:
| Yes, you'll get access to unlimited feature updates with no
| additional charges whatsoever.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| Found a typo on your website on the ClickUp competitive page.
| "Upbase have global chat. ClickUp doesn't" should be "Upbase has
| global chat..."
| tonypham wrote:
| Noted. Thanks so much for your feedback.
| rrgok wrote:
| Would be great to have a self-hosted version for the lifetime
| plan
| tonypham wrote:
| Sorry, we don't have a self-hosted version now.
| belfalas wrote:
| Self-hosted and On-Premise are both great ways to get uptake
| (and money, eventually) so it's great to plan/architect ahead
| for it if you can. But be super careful about offering
| support for any On-Premise offering, it is effectively a new
| org you are adding to the company. This will be especially
| true if you land enterprise customers (e.g., "I didn't know
| you could do that with NTP!").
| OmarAssadi wrote:
| Would definitely consider paying for it; I had licenses for
| self-hosted JIRA, BitBucket, etc, ages ago before Atlassian
| announced the end of everything except the datacenter plans,
| which are just super not necessary/absurdly expensive for a
| small team of <10 people. And despite really preferring FOSS,
| I can accept using a significantly better proprietary
| service, but only if it's something I don't have to rely on
| you to keep stable and don't have to rely on you to keep my
| data secure.
|
| I am not sure whether the reasoning is mostly from a concern
| over IP theft perspective or piracy, but I would consider
| looking into whether you think you could sustain a self-
| hosted version in the future.
|
| I think legitimate competitors tend to be unwilling to take
| the risk reverse engineering things and directly stealing
| your product. And legitimate businesses also tend not to be
| willing to take the risk of being audited and getting caught
| using pirated software, ...or, actually, maybe.... story on
| that later ;-) [1]
|
| And I will probably lose you here, but I would also consider
| whether a FOSS model could work for you; there are a number
| of open-source/open-core/semi-opensource services that are
| seemingly viable commercial products. One example might be
| GitLab, and another would be Drone CI.
|
| Perhaps consider whether you could survive, and potentially
| be even more profitable, by doing something like offering the
| platform as a self-hosted, opensource service, ideally under
| something like the AGPL, and then require contributors to
| dual-license their contributions under the AGPL and an
| incredibly permissive license (e.g., ISC, BSD of some sort,
| MIT, Unlicense, etc -- pick whatever).
|
| This model would allow you guys do opensource the core for
| the paranoid among us while also preventing any realistic
| competitors from swooping in and yoinking your hard work for
| their own financial gain, since they'd likely not be willing
| to integrate AGPL code into their service.
|
| And by requiring contributions to be dual-licensed under an
| incredibly permissive license, this'd essentially grant you
| the same benefits of having contributions sign a properly
| evil CLA that demands all copyright be transferred to you,
| etc (e.g., an open-core like GitLab, where you could upsell
| people on proprietary enterprise features) without the need
| to drive away potential contributors by being extra evil.
|
| I think this may not even be that awful of an idea, in the
| sense that:
|
| - A. I think many proper companies that would be big spenders
| also would rather delegate all the responsibility to you
|
| - B. while I don't love opencore as opposed to truly fully
| FOSS, many do seem to be willing to pay
|
| - C. Ultra-broke indie devs, hacker types, etc, many who
| likely would not pay in the first place, and many of whom may
| not be willing to use non-FOSS stuff would still be
| increasing your mindshare, potentially contributing back, etc
| -- free advertising, essentially.
|
| As an example, I cannot count how many times I have heard
| users of opensource BitWarden praise it everywhere they get a
| chance, to the point to where I finally caved and decided to
| give it a try in order to get my parents to stop forgetting
| their passwords to everything.
|
| And when I did, I actually did not use the FOSS version,
| despite being the type personally who would have normally; I
| just didn't want to add yet another thing I needed to
| potentially help other people maintain, so it was worth
| paying.
|
| - D. Lastly, I think it is good PR and branding. Cloud
| services change all the time. It adds a nice bit of trust
| knowing that you can only screw up the service so badly
| before someone decides to just fork.
|
| Don't take this too harshly, please, because I actually do
| think the service looks really good, and I do admire and
| respect the fact such a small team put in the grind to manage
| to launch it. And I plan to go pay for the lifetime service
| once I finish up this message.
|
| But that said, man, being truthful, there are a lot of tiny
| software startups that offer pretty, polished cloud
| applications, and there are a lot of tiny startups that
| initially offer "unlimited" plans and "lifetime"
| subscriptions.
|
| Yet, maybe this is my overly cynical take, but here is what
| always happens:
|
| - either you simply decide eventually that it's not worth the
| money to retain these lifetime users anymore, so you tell
| tell them that their lifetime service isn't really lifetime,
| or you end up taking VC money, because, realistically, it's
| hard to say no, and then they make that same decision for
| you.
|
| - someone uploads 10tb of data to the unlimited service and
| then my unlimited account is suddenly "unlimited" in the same
| sense that my unlimited phone is unlimited -- I.e. it's not
| unlimited; either there ends up being an fair usage policy
| that makes me wish I'd have just paid for a couple of
| terabytes directly, or someone decides to add annoying rate-
| limits to prevent abuse.
|
| In that sense, as I look at the website, I see a lot of red
| flags. And I just hope they are not as red as they seem.
|
| As I think we both know, lifetime unlimited is not
| sustainable, so as you've said, you guys have chosen this
| model for the time being in order to avoid VC funding.
|
| If that is the case, then here's to hoping that you do end up
| treating all of the early funders right: some people will
| absolutely upload 2, 3, 5, 10TB worth of content to their
| unlimited plan.
|
| And yes it may suck paying to keep their stuff stored
| indefinitely despite no longer receiving money from them
| (cause it's a lifetime payment). But I think that is a fair
| trade-off to avoid the things that do suck about VC funding.
|
| As an example, while I'm aware that being selected for YC
| brings more than simply cash benefits, when we're talking
| about exchanging 10% of the company for $100k, well, dang, I
| think YC gets a very good deal there when things go well
| (e.g., Dropbox, etc).
|
| Similarly, if people are gonna dump the cost of a typical
| annual sub for Dropbox/whatever into your company that may
| not be around in a couple of years from now, then I would
| hope you reward them by deciding they are worth the $50-100 a
| year that it'll cost to maintain some of them in the future.
|
| (P.s. again, it is perhaps brutal criticism, and maybe it is
| a little overly cynical and unfair of me, but I don't mean
| any harm by it -- so pls don't feel a little bummed out, or I
| will be a guilty baby)
|
| [1]: except the one time a certain multi-billion dollar
| electronics company decided to launch their gaming computer
| brand, and proceeded to try and pirate the Steam OpenID
| integration for XenForo I was selling $15.00 one-off payment
| -- and had gall to ask for support of all things!!
| dsr_ wrote:
| We'll pay once, we'll pay yearly, we'll pay by the seat...
| but it has to be self-hosted, because we can't trust you not
| to spill our secrets.
| s3p wrote:
| OP knows, that's why he is suggesting it
| zoover2020 wrote:
| Wrong answer
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Every non-FOSS piece of software I've ever deployed slowly
| degrades over time as founders get greedy or need to recoup
| costs from investors. Plex is the canonical example. Linux is
| the canonical counterexample.
|
| Sorry, I've been burned enough times by this now that if your
| software is not FOSS, I'm not deploying it. Your take is not
| a good look.
|
| For an open source alternative, check out Focalboard [0].
| Note however it is backed by a for-profit company, but the
| code is open and can be compiled from source (so you can thus
| remove all telemetry and paid upsell nonsense).
|
| [0] https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard
| remram wrote:
| Their licensing terms are actually very confusing. I
| _think_ it 's just AGPL, just with extra language tacked on
| that changes nothing compared to AGPL, but I am really
| unsure.
|
| https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/1507
| ed_db wrote:
| Agreed
| brhsagain wrote:
| Is migration from Linear supported? Looks awesome but I don't
| want to manually copy over dozens of open tickets.
| tonypham wrote:
| It's still early days at the moment. So there is no import from
| other tools yet.
| rashidae wrote:
| When I saw "a project management suite for solos and small
| teams", it made me go back and re-consider it under a new
| perspective. Loved it.
|
| I will try it out soon! Good luck!
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks. And yes, we don't plan to make it for enterprises.
| Sateeshm wrote:
| This is really nice. What is the tech stack?
|
| One quick thing i noticed, When i enter new section name and
| press tab, it is ignored unlike if you press enter, at least in
| board view. I'd imagine pressing tab after input is typical user
| behaviour.
| tonypham wrote:
| We mainly use Golang for BE, Vuejs for FE.
|
| I got your point on section naming behavior. We'll optimize it
| in the upcoming days.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Will you open source it if it unfortunately fails, so users have
| an escape hatch ?
| tonypham wrote:
| At the moment, we don't have a plan for it yet.
| boomskats wrote:
| Finally, a tool that isn't Plan[0] with a daily planner that lets
| me schedule my TODO list into my calendar. I've been waiting for
| years.
|
| Will definitely check this out OP.
|
| [0]: https://getplan.co
| vsri wrote:
| Recovering marketer from the productivity space here. Your
| product looks great. Here's my two cents on the "positioning"
| dicussion happening: the copy on your "Our story" page reads like
| most other productivity apps out there. Sorry to be so blunt, but
| it's generic, buzzwordy, and you can swap your company name out
| for any other company.
|
| > That's why we decided to build XXXXX -- an all-in-one work
| management software that is simple to learn and easy to use.
|
| What's missing IMHO is this: why did you undertake the drudge of
| building this? All software creation is motivated by a
| disatisfaction with what's already out there, so what is the
| _unique point of view_ that motivated you and... it is hoped,
| will motivate an audience who shares that point of view. It 's
| not why you are better, cheaper, faster (those are terrible
| vectors for positioning btw) it's what makes you different.
|
| Are you anal-retentive about detail and hyper-connectedness
| (JIRA)? Are you psychedelic burners who want to bend a spartan UX
| into infinite directions (Asana)? Are you cutesy but robust
| (Trello)? Are you so hyper-opinionated about product management
| to the point of pedantry (Basecamp)? All these are perfectly
| cromulent points of view by the way. Marketing positioning is
| about articulating YOUR point of view, in order to activate the
| tribe that shares it.
|
| For more on this see Simon Sinek or Chris Lochead. This is my
| favorite topic in the world. Good luck with your product!
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for your invaluable feedback and suggestions.
| We're tech guys, not marketers, so we find positioning really
| challenging at the moment. Thanks again for taking the time to
| give us some GREAT advice.
| swyx wrote:
| as a founder, you are no longer allowed to say "we're tech
| guys, not marketers" anymore :) this is now your job. hope
| you take this great advice and stand out. vsri said it faster
| and better than i could so will just endorse - please dont
| say what you think you're supposed to say (leads to generic
| corporate bs) and say what you really think and give examples
| to "show, don't tell".
| tonypham wrote:
| Got it, swyx. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We'll take
| time to work on the copy.
| bluekite2000 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. Is there an email I can contact you
| for private questions?
| [deleted]
| hliyan wrote:
| Uses the same folder-list paradigm as ClickUp, which, as a long
| time JIRA user recently converted to ClickUp, I find to be a
| plus. The simplicity and responsiveness of the interface appears
| to be an improvement over ClickUp. However, one thing I love
| about ClickUp is its ability to quickly configure task statuses
| (which in JIRA, is the equivalent of programming a VCR). So if
| this product could add flexible task statuses, and also task
| tags, it might be a low cost contender to ClickUp.
|
| Edit: also, rather than folders > lists > sections, it might be
| worthwhile to introduce nested folders, which is a very popular
| feature request in ClickUp but that team never actually got
| around to adding it. Another thing: subtasks.
| hliyan wrote:
| Just figured out that sections map to statuses. Not a bad idea.
| hliyan wrote:
| Chat/message feature is great -- can avoid project-related
| slack messages.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for your feedback. We do plan to add custom
| fields in the upcoming months, and you can create custom task
| statuses from there. Tags in on our roadmap as well. We'll
| consider nested folders if there are enough demands. You can
| create subtasks now, but not nested subtasks yet.
| agsamek wrote:
| Congratulations for your contribution to PM, creating and sharing
| your toolbox. I wish I will be able to accomplish releasing such
| work for my process as well at some point in time.
|
| Building a team is always a turn-key project. Tools are a part of
| it.
|
| Time will tell if this is going to be a widely adopted framework
| or you are able to inspire several people with your ideas and
| some of them get adopted in other tools. Even if it only allowed
| you to better understand your ideas it is worth it. Once again -
| congratulations and continue inspiring others!
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I learned a lot along the
| way. I think the hardest part is having the courage to take the
| first step.
| thegagne wrote:
| Interested because it has all the basic features I want, and like
| the lifetime membership thing, but the mobile experience is
| unusable, and for that reason, I'm out. /sharktank
| tonypham wrote:
| On mobile, you should download the app, instead of logging in
| on the web browser, as it's not responsive on the browser yet.
| whatwherewhy wrote:
| Do you provide a downloadable APK? My phone doesn't have
| Google Play.
| tonypham wrote:
| No, it's not possible at the moment.
| zulban wrote:
| Great approach - build first for yourself but with others in
| mind.
|
| Don't listen to the flood of critics online. Instead find trusted
| friends and colleagues who have your best interests at heart when
| they give feedback. Best of luck.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I appreciate it.
| anilshanbhag wrote:
| Curious why are you selling your lifetime plan on AppSumo instead
| of on the website? Doesn't AppSumo take a fat cut.
| tonypham wrote:
| Yes, AppSumo does take a 30% cut. We'd like to tap into its
| large customer base, so we decided to run on AppSumo only.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| This is maybe shallow, but on the about page, could you put you
| and your co-founders pictures w/ a short description and maybe
| your twitter handles? For some reason I'm a sucker to pay for an
| indie service like this when I see who the people behind it are.
| I feel like me $6 to those founders goes a much farther way than
| to something like Trello.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your suggestion. I'll take it into consideration.
| clarkmcc wrote:
| FYI, ClickUp does have real-time chat which is I think the only
| feature you note on the compare page that Upbase has that ClickUp
| does not. Also, this might not be a popular opinion but this
| sales pitch just doesn't do it for me, "At first, it might seem
| great that you can do everything with [ClickUp], but after a
| while, you realize you don't need that many features."
|
| It would be nice to see a comparison with Linear.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. At the moment, ClickUp does have
| real-time chat in lists, not global chat, so you can't send
| one-on-one messages to someone yet. For some people that love
| simplicity and don't need the many features ClickUp has to
| offer, it's overwhelming. We have a lot of users switching from
| ClickUp for simplicity alone.
| dejan7e wrote:
| Looks cool, good luck!
| tonypham wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| I like checklists. That works for me. :)
| wyclif wrote:
| Heads up, under "What makes Upbase different", #1:
|
| _No more switching back and forth between a dozens of apps._
|
| There's a typo there; you just need to delete the "of" and edit
| "dozens" to the singular "dozen."
| tonypham wrote:
| Noted. Thanks for the feedback.
| croes wrote:
| Or remove the "a".
|
| Less editing.
| didip wrote:
| If there is 1 feature that all of these tools neglected, it's
| speed.
|
| They are way too slow loading huge Javascript libraries
| unnecessarily.
|
| By the way, what you are building looked almost exactly like
| Wrike.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Agree with you that speed is
| super important to have a great experience.
|
| If you test it out for some time, you'll see that it's much
| different from Wrike.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| The central issue with "simple" productivity tools is that
| everyone wants a different 10-40% of what Jira does. There's a
| reason most of us end up begrudgingly giving money to Atlassian.
| tonypham wrote:
| Yes, functional simplicity is tough.
| Multiplayer wrote:
| Congratulations on shipping and getting to revenue! This is
| terrific looking and you and your team have done some really nice
| work here. Just purchased.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much! It's still the early days, and we have a lot of
| things to do to make the app better.
| cloudking wrote:
| "Our story" page doesn't tell us anything about you, the
| founders, team etc. Before I give you access to my Google data,
| it would be nice to know who you are and your backgrounds.
| tonypham wrote:
| I assume that people want to hear about our story and why we
| decided to build "just-another-PM-tool", rather than who I am,
| since it's boring and makes no difference unless I'm a well-
| known founder.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I want to hear specifically who you are! I think that builds
| a connection between me and your product, its origins, and
| philosophy.
|
| Some restaurants do this pretty well, from small around-the-
| corner Italian places, to even places like Five Guys where
| they use their underdog story as a way to build connection.
| Of course they're not an underdog anymore though.
| cloudking wrote:
| It makes a difference in establishing trust with your
| potential customers, you're asking people to connect their
| Google account and give you money. Who are you? What is your
| background? Are you VC backed or bootstrapped? I know nothing
| about your company, why should I give you money? Please don't
| take this the wrong way, your product looks great! Just
| helping you with some constructive feedback.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| > Most of them are overly complicated and painful to use. Some
| others, like Trello, are too limited for my needs.
|
| I would argue this just means that, in this space, one size does
| not fit all. There are many productivity features, and everyone
| has a different set of features they want. If you're using a tool
| that is missing some features you want, you perceive it as
| limited. If you're using a tool that has a lot of features you
| don't care about, you perceive it as overly complex.
| tonypham wrote:
| Yeah, your point makes perfect sense, since people have
| different needs from each other.
| SeriousM wrote:
| It looks very helpful! I tried other tools before and the best so
| far was azure devops - but It's not for PMs. Jira is, well...
| jira (driven by a pm team that doesn't stop adding useless
| changes). Trello is just to simple for complex things. I guess
| upbase is exactly what it needs to have a small and good pm
| management. I will buy a lifetime license. A question thoug: will
| it support jottacloud for document storage? I don't like google
| drive because of google and my documents are better stored in
| norway.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback and support. Upbase doesn't support
| Jottacloud at the moment since there are very few requests for
| it.
| Havelock wrote:
| Looks good. What would be the difference from e.g. Basecamp?
| tonypham wrote:
| Basecamp is great for team collaboration, but not so great for
| task planning/management. It's mainly a team communication
| platform.
| system2 wrote:
| Per user per month = no thanks.
| mkl wrote:
| Or "Pay once and get full access for life":
| https://upbase.io/pricing#:~:text=Pay%20once%20and%20get%0Af...
| tommica wrote:
| Looks exciting, sent a link to my boss for his consideration.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| _trackno5 wrote:
| This looks great! I'm definitely trying it out.
|
| My only feedback for you is this: Charge more. You're
| undercutting yourself a lot by just charging $6 per user. At the
| very least double that to $12 and it would still be a great price
| for the value you're offering.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your suggestions. We're still early days, and the
| app needs a lot of improvement though. We'll definitely
| consider charging more in the future. Cheers,
| e-clinton wrote:
| Disagree with this. Companies like Microsoft, and Zoho provide
| these types of tools as part of a broader subscription. For
| $5/user, I can get email, MS Teams, cloud storage, a tool
| similar to this, plus tons more.
|
| Why would I pay $12/user just for this tool?
| bachmeier wrote:
| > My only feedback for you is this: Charge more.
|
| This advice just won't die in these Show HN discussions. Please
| show some evidence to support your assertion.
|
| > At the very least double that to $12
|
| Every tool listed in the post costs way less than $12/month.
| Those are established companies, selling to large businesses,
| and they probably have more information on pricing than a
| random HN commenter.
|
| A shallow "charge more" with nothing to support that advice
| does not add anything to these discussions.
| digitalengineer wrote:
| It's look very good and just what I need. I'm using a trial
| version right now, but can't seem to invite guests? (If I
| purchase a license I would like to invite clients). Edit: Below
| the 'read more' I found the answer "Invite guests/clients into
| lists to collaborate (upcoming)"
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for trying the app. Yes, the guests/clients feature is
| in progress now, and will be available in the upcoming weeks.
| hestefisk wrote:
| It's a cool tool, but you are in a highly commoditised market
| with intense competition. Your product has to be more than good
| to win people over. I use Jira in a project right now and it's a
| sea of tickets with no order or structure. So there may be a
| problem to solve if you can find a great workflow.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. We're aware that we're in a very
| saturated and competitive market, and the product needs to be
| GREAT, not just good.
| jonwest wrote:
| Is it possible to create links between documents? It doesn't seem
| to be a slash command or markdown syntax.
| tonypham wrote:
| Not yet, at the moment. The Docs feature is still pretty basic,
| and we plan to make a lot of improvements to it.
| heliostatic wrote:
| I just bought the lifetime license, because it looks useful and I
| hope you're successful. Reminds me a lot of the self hosted
| https://duetapp.com
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for your support! We'll try our best to make the
| app great!
| XCSme wrote:
| I like your self-hosted pricing model, I ended up with the
| same for my analytics platform[0] (Lifetime license + 12
| months updates and support) after many attempts.
|
| [0]: https://uxwizz.com/
| XCSme wrote:
| Oh wait, you are the creator of https://upbase.io, not
| https://duetapp.com, sorry for the confusion!
| cliffwarden wrote:
| Very polished, I'm impressed! It seems like everyone ends up
| recreating a PM or todo tool at some point. It makes me wonder if
| there could be a world where we have a standard protocol/api and
| then anyone can bring their own preferred interface?
| tonypham wrote:
| Then it would be awesome :)
| clintonb wrote:
| CSV
| layer8 wrote:
| That would imply that the data model and semantics are the
| same, but they usually aren't.
| ISL wrote:
| I think that world is coming. The representation of tasks,
| dependencies, hierarchies, calendars, and collaborations should
| be relatively universal.
|
| If there is a popular standard, it will remain popular. The
| trick is building up enough users that they begin to credibly
| demand an export to the protocol from big players like
| Atlassian.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| For todos you could just use an iCalendar file full of VTODOs
| [1]. It's a shame that the iCalendar standard is poorly and
| incompletely implemented even in calendar programs and almost
| always missing from organizer programs that are basically todo
| lists.
|
| [1] https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-6-2-to-do-
| compone...
| Closi wrote:
| In reality this looks far too basic to actually be a todo
| spec for a reasonable productivity app.
|
| ie basic functionality I personally look for that I don't
| think this would support would include:
|
| * Projects with hierarchies
|
| * Reminder dates
|
| * Tags and contexts
|
| * Multi-Step tasks
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Hierarchcies are handled by 3.2.15
| (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545), and I
| suspect that could be leveraged to handle multi-step tasks;
| reminder dates are handled by VALARM in 3.6.6 (https://data
| tracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545#section-3.6.6). Tags
| could be stored in comment properties (https://datatracker.
| ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.1....), but there's
| probably a better way already in the spec, which also
| includes support for extension by adding non-standard
| properties (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5545#s
| ection-3.8.8....).
| palata wrote:
| > if there could be a world where we have a standard...
|
| Probably not.
| bityard wrote:
| That's the great thing about standards, there's so many to
| choose from!
| duckmysick wrote:
| I feel it would be like SQL with multiple dialects. Some small
| set would be interoperable, but eventually things end up
| diverging.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Note taking has this behavior, see Obsidian, Roam, Notion etc
| and markup import/export. It sort of works but not really.
|
| We need ANSI pomodoros clearly :)
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I ran an open source project management system for years and I'll
| say: Good luck.
|
| In short, everyone has their own dreams, preferences,
| (perceived)needs, and workflows and they are usually unwilling to
| tweak their own approach and would rather have a tool that fits
| them. They may be right that their "needs" are truly needs
| instead of just preferences but either way, you end up with a
| swarm of nasty little variations that are meaningless for vast
| swathes of the space. That's why any list of "project management
| tools" has 100+ entries and is still incomplete.
|
| ~10 years back, I realized that most of the people who are open
| minded enough tweaked their own processes to flip to something
| like Trello (as I did a few years later). They're still
| unsatisfied - I wish Trello had intercard dependencies and per-
| checklist item due dates - but making due.
|
| Happy to offer more info and advice, feel free to ping me.
| [deleted]
| pydry wrote:
| This can probably be boiled down to a config language that can
| be used to express various needs and preferences.
|
| The problem is enumerating them all and consolidating the
| language such that it is neither more nor less expressive than
| necessary.
|
| Then we can truly dump JIRA once and for all.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experiences. Yeah I agree with you that
| it's hard to convince people to tweak their process, but the
| opposite is true. Hopefully, we can attract (enough) people who
| find Upbase a good fit, not the other way around.
| ar_lan wrote:
| So far paper and pen is still effectively the most malleable
| productivity environment that conforms to all my needs.
| jansan wrote:
| This stops working if you are in a team. I have one project
| that I work on by myself, and another that involves a small
| team. The first one is only pen and paper and some github
| issues, the other is using Github's project management
| features extensively and it would not work without something
| like this.
| ilyt wrote:
| My writing is far too ugly for that. Also no grep. But I
| thought about one of those e-paper notepads thingies...
| systemicdanna wrote:
| Only for personal use though. Any team of 2+ people will
| struggle to keep track of paper notes.
| tonypham wrote:
| I did use paper and pen before but finally ended up with
| digital apps.
| hemantv wrote:
| Have you looked at Sunsama?
|
| I have few ideas on how you can improve this with lots of
| integrations. I can be reached at fameoflight@gmail.com if you
| want to chat.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your support. I'll reach out to you in a few days to
| learn more about them.
| makach wrote:
| Wow! I love your work!
|
| You need to add 2FA to you authentication, security is a big
| deal. How do will I know that my project information is safe on
| your site? It has almost all the features would need for doing
| pm. I will definitively try it out!
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your kind words. We're still early days, and there
| is big room for improvement. I'm aware that security is a big
| deal, and we'll take it very seriously.
| dmje wrote:
| I'm excited to try this. I've done the same dance with PM tools
| over the years and had similar experiences to OP. I've always
| ended up back on Teamwork which is amazing but they do a hard
| sell and the price per head is prohibitive for people in my
| situation (2 person agency, no interest in "10 seat pricing").
| Will be good to check it out!
| omathum2 wrote:
| Hi there, I work on product and pricing for teamwork. I'm
| looking at how we can make plans better suited to smaller
| agencies. I'd love to chat if you'd be open to it.
| tonypham wrote:
| That's why a lot of these tools don't have a Solo plan. Because
| they are built for teams, not for individuals.
| acqbu wrote:
| Very nice, I'm impressed! Seriously considering purchasing
| lifetime access.
|
| Any plans to add dark mode?
|
| And why does it default to 'list view' every time I click on 'my
| tasks'? I want to see the board by default.
| tonypham wrote:
| The dark mode is in progress now, and it'll be available in
| about 2 weeks.
|
| The autosave view is on the roadmap and not available yet.
| Basically, the app will automatically save your last view.
| acqbu wrote:
| That's great, thanks for taking the time to reply to me.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I would think about your positioning some.
|
| You're marketing this as having "less complexity" which first of
| all, isn't going to appeal to people unless they've already used
| the other tools. But, if they had tried Trello, that's far from
| complex, as you say it doesn't have the features you think are
| needed, so you are more complex than that. It might be that
| you're excellent at UX but that needs some comparative examples
| to see how you have differentiated things.
|
| Instead, it might make sense to go more with all the features you
| need, nothing you don't angle. Note that I don't think this
| really differentiates too much from clickup which has personal
| productivity options, and as you get bigger you know customers
| are going to ask for more and more features, because that's what
| they do, and we also know that business accounts are the money
| makers in this market. It also runs counter to building an "all
| in one" tool. If you hope to replace chat, docs, collaboration,
| calendar, and journaling, that's a big change for people who
| stepped in just looking for task management.
|
| I did see that your prices are lower so you might try positioning
| based on lower prices than your competition, if you have
| carefully chosen those price points.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for your suggestions. And yes, you're right.
| Positioning is what we're trying to figure out at the moment.
| We'll consider your feedback very seriously. Thanks again for
| taking the time to give us some ideas. Cheers,
| jacurtis wrote:
| I really like the positioning of "a project management suite
| for solos and small teams". That to me is very appealing
| because these don't really exist very well. Most project
| management tools are designed for tons of people. You might
| be able to make them work for a solo or small team, but they
| tend to be focused on larger teams, because as mentioned
| previously, those tend to be the customers spending the most
| money and they ask for features and they get made. Before
| long every project management tool becomes a large team
| project management tool because of this.
|
| Positioning yourself as specifically designed for solo and
| small team project management to me is an underserved market.
| When I looked at your landing page, I scrolled down quickly
| thinking "cool another PM tool... just what the world needs".
| Then when I saw the line 3/4 of the way down that said
| "Specifically designed for solos, small teams and businesses"
| that caused me to perk up and go back to the top and look at
| the page from a different perspective that I was much more
| interested in.
|
| I see now looking at it again that you mention "personal
| productivity" which I now understand is your way of saying
| small and solos. But I just interpreted it as a PM tool that
| made you productive amongst your team. So it didn't really
| resonate to me.
|
| Anyway, the product is actually interesting. I'm going to
| check it out. I've been wanting a PM tool for solos. There
| are a couple out there, but they all suck. The best solution
| up to this point for solo project management that I have
| found is just using a generic solution like Notion or Trello
| and adapting it to my needs. So this is worth a shot IMHO.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your valuable feedback and suggestions. I
| greatly appreciate it.
|
| The one thing I'm concerned about regarding the positioning
| of "a project management suite for solos and small teams"
| is that people will question: "If my team grows bigger,
| does the app still work well for us? Or we have to find
| another solution?"
| cseleborg wrote:
| I wonder if it's worth worrying about that. There's
| plenty of freelancers who have no ambition of growing
| beyond a small team that helps them with the side stuff.
| Those are the freelancers who don't want to become
| entrepreneurs. I think they're an interesting enough
| market to target, and maybe it's OK if those who have
| dreams of growth don't feel addressed here?
|
| Come to think of it, it may actually be flattering to
| solos if you recognize them for what they are and don't
| treat them as not-yet-bigs, if that makes sense.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It makes a lot of
| sense. Cheers,
| airfoil wrote:
| I don't have a ton of value to add since the parent comment
| did a wonderful job of laying things out. I wanted to
| mention that I also perked up and paid closer attention
| when I saw that this was designed for solos and small
| teams. I'll definitely be giving a try. Thank you for
| sharing!
| justWells wrote:
| I work in B2B SaaS marketing as a PMM.
|
| I'd try something a little catchy'r on the home page.
|
| "Personalized project management for the entire team"
|
| Or something of that ilk
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your suggestions. I must admit that copywriting
| is freaking hard - much harder than designing and building
| products :))
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| DFM may be a nice lens to look at positioning this through IMO.
| It's thoughtfully designed around the larger workflow which
| more archaic (jab jab) tools don't understand or ignore.
| Honestly I love Trello but wouldn't give it the time of day in
| your positioning. Just emphasizing the depth of expertise and
| broad perspective on daily/weekly individual/team workflow that
| made your tool possible will, without saying it, be positioning
| you agains the anti-pm tool genre of pm tools (like Trello).
| Combine that with some talk about "delightful UX" (snark snark,
| you suck Jira!) and "modern, robust infrastructure with insane
| performance" (lol Asana you also suck!). Just thinking out loud
| but seriously positioning against Asana, Jira, Shortcut, etc
| should be as easy as saying, in other words, "brainless,
| terrible user experience, and buggy" (all of which are true
| _and everybody knows it_ ).
| blakesley wrote:
| DFM? Google searches for it aren't turning up anything
| relevant.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for your contribution. You made some really
| great points here. I'll take your ideas into consideration.
| Thanks again for your help.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| With UX and performance jabs you take care of clickup too.
| God it sucks.
| solardev wrote:
| I haven't used ClickUp much myself, but I've heard good
| things about it. Why does it suck for you?
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Down For Managing stuff?
| kristianc wrote:
| Related on positioning - all of the above is correct and also
| unless you're going hard for the SEO marketing / growth hacker
| angle I'd maybe reconsider AppSumo as a partner as I very much
| associate them with the SEO / website takeover modal / scuzzy
| dark pattern side of things. AppSumo will also bring in a very
| specific type of customer.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your suggestion. I'll consider it.
| charmitro wrote:
| If I may ask, do your have significant customer numbers? I'm
| asking this because I think all of the PM tools you mentioned are
| very popular.
| tonypham wrote:
| We're still very early days, and we're working hard on growing
| our customer base.
| Void_ wrote:
| Am I late to the party? www.focustask.app
|
| Unlike OP, this is meant as purely personal tool, kinda like
| Things.
|
| I made it for myself, and love using it.
| tonypham wrote:
| It looks cool
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| Looks nice, well done.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your kind words.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Can you share pages using a public link and can you use your own
| domain for it?
| tonypham wrote:
| Yes, you can share a page with a public link. White labeling is
| not available yet.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'll say this. Without being critical of this tool, over 30 years
| of involvement with software projects, I have found that good
| project management is a result of a good project manager, not the
| software tools he or she uses.
|
| A good project manager will do a good job even with index cards
| taped to the wall. A bad project manager will do a poor job even
| with the best software tools.
|
| People who have the aptitude and desire and organizational skills
| to be good project managers are rare. You need to seek them out,
| not keep looking for magic in software tools.
|
| If it's personal productivity you are after, you need to work on
| the skills that support that. I can't tell you how, because I'm
| pretty bad at it myself. Maybe look at some of the best-sellers
| such as _Getting Things Done_. But it won 't be easy if you don't
| naturally have the necessary organized mind and self motivation.
| Software won't give you that.
| [deleted]
| tonypham wrote:
| Agree with you on this: Skills first, tools later.
| Nevertheless, great tools do help. Great PM skills and the
| RIGHT tools would be the best combination.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Nearly bought the lifetime license,
|
| but a calendar without Google calendar integration? How is this
| supposed to work? (not asking to be mean but perhaps I'm missing
| something)
| tonypham wrote:
| Since we're still early days, the Google Calendar integration
| is still on our roadmap and not available yet. It's the most
| requested feature, so we will try to ship it as soon as we can.
| nelsonic wrote:
| Is this open source?
| tonypham wrote:
| No, it's not.
| mtgx wrote:
| alberth wrote:
| Would you mind sharing what the tech stacks is.
|
| (Granted it doesn't matter, use what you know best)
| silasb wrote:
| Agreed, I'd also like to know the high-level details of the
| stack.
| tonypham wrote:
| Mainly Golang (BE) and Vuejs (FE)
| osigurdson wrote:
| One thing I've always wanted in a tool like this is the ability
| to map out probabilities, i.e., we do A, then B but after that we
| do either C,D or E. Each one on these has an associated
| probability (C: 0.4, D: 0.5, E: 0.1) and an associated estimate
| (C: 10 +- 5 normal, D: 12 +- 3 uniform, E: 3 +-1 normal).
|
| The UI would look like a graph and like ms project it could
| include resource levelling in order to show bottlenecks.
|
| I know this probably sounds complicated but I think it maps to
| reality fairly well and thus actually simple (fighting reality is
| hard).
| westurner wrote:
| Gantt charts can be made in MS Project, Google Sheets,:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart
|
| Critical path method > Basic techniques:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method#Basic_tec...
| :
|
| > Components: _The essential technique for using CPM [8][9] is
| to construct a model of the project that includes the
| following:_
|
| > _(1) A list of all activities required to complete the
| project (typically categorized within a work breakdown
| structure), (2) The time (duration) that each activity will
| take to complete, (3) The dependencies between the activities
| and, (4) Logical end points such as milestones or deliverable
| items._
|
| > _Using these values, CPM calculates the *longest path* of
| planned activities to logical end points or to the end of the
| project, and *the earliest and latest that each activity can
| start and finish without making the project longer.* This
| process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on
| the longest path) and which have "total float" (i.e., can be
| delayed without making the project longer). In project
| management, a critical path is the sequence of project network
| activities which add up to the longest overall duration,
| regardless if that longest duration has float or not. This
| determines the *shortest time possible to complete the
| project.\ "*_
|
| Re: [Hilbert curve, Pyschedule, CSP,] Scheduling of [OS,
| Conference Room,] and other Resources
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31777451
| https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31777451
|
| Complexity and/or Time estimates can be stuffed into
| nonexclusive namespaced label names on GitHub/GitLab/Gitea:
| #ComplexityEstimate: C:1 C: Fibonacci[n] C:
| (A), J, Q, K, (A) #TimeEstimate: T:2d
| T:5m #Good First Issue
|
| GitLab EE and Gitea have time tracking on Issues and Pull
| Requests.
|
| Gitea has untyped Issue dependency edges, but there could
| probably easily be another column in the is-it-a through table
| for the many-to-many Issue edges table to support _typed edges
| with URIs_ i.e. JSONLD RDF.
|
| GitLab Free supports the "relates to" Linked Issue relation; EE
| also supports "blocks"/"is blocked by".
|
| Planning poker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker
|
| Agile estimation:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=agile+estimation
|
| "Agile Estimating and Planning" (2005) https://g.co/kgs/kDScM7
| yodon wrote:
| CPM sounds a lot like a PERT chart, which was invented in the
| 1950's to help design and build the Polaris nuclear
| submarines during the Cold War[0]. PERT has been part of
| Microsoft Project for decades, so it's readily available.
|
| When you really need it (like in the case of tens of
| thousands of people trying to build and ship a single project
| at lighting speed) PERT is an extremely powerful and
| effective project management methodology. If, on the other
| hand, your "project management division" is you, it's a
| dangerously seductive time sink that will consume huge
| amounts of your time building and tuning and gathering and
| updating data and information, for arbitrarily close to zero
| direct real benefit and huge net negative benefit. The
| increase in effectiveness you gain from all that modeling is,
| in software development projects, negligible and the cost of
| doing all that modeling is much higher than you think it will
| be if you've never done it (that's why we don't do waterfall
| planning in software - it's not that no one's thought of it,
| it's that it's not effective on projects of any real
| complexity). As with any approach to planning, PERT works
| best at a particular scale and project type, and it's
| typically a quite large scale non-software project.
|
| In my personal opinion, from a software development
| standpoint, the valuable part of building a PERT chart is
| doing the work and thinking required to draw a dependency map
| for your tasks. Drawing all those lines to show what has to
| be done before what is an incredibly effective tool for
| helping you flesh out and find dependencies (tasks) you
| hadn't realized needed to be on your list. Use something like
| MS Project to build that dependency diagram, then force
| yourself to stop using Project because it's too seductive at
| making you feel like the data is giving you power when it's
| really just consuming your brainpower ineffectively. Use
| dependency mapping to build a waterfall caliber understanding
| of what you need to build, then set it aside and use more
| appropriate agile style approaches to actually work through
| the project in an optimum manner (which often means not
| building it in exactly the way you mapped out originally).
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_rev
| ie...
| westurner wrote:
| WBS: Work Breakdown Structure:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure
|
| PERT -> see also ->
|
| "Project network"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_network :
|
| > _Other techniques:_ The condition for a valid project
| network is that it doesn't contain any circular
| references.*
|
| > _Project dependencies can also be depicted by a
| predecessor table. Although such a form is very
| inconvenient for human analysis, project management
| software often offers such a view for data entry._
|
| > _An alternative way of showing and analyzing the sequence
| of project work is the design structure matrix or
| dependency structure matrix._
|
| design structure matrix or dependency structure matrix:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_structure_matrix
|
| READMEs, Issues, Pull Requests, and Project Board Cards may
| contain Nested Markdown Task Lists with Issue (and actual
| Pull Request) # references: - [ ] Objective
| - [x] Task 1 +tag - [ ] #237 (GitHub fills in the
| Title and Open/Closed/Merged state and adds a *hover card*)
| - [x] Multiline Markdown list item indentation
| <URL|text|> - ID#: - Title:
| - Labels: [ ] - Description: | -
| htps://URL#yaml-yamlld - [x] Multiline Markdown
| list item indentation w/ --- YAML front matter delimiters
| --- - id: - title: -
| labels: [ ] --- - htps://URL#yaml-
| yamlld
|
| Time management > Setting priorities and goals > The
| Eisenhower Method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_manag
| ement#The_Eisenhower... : | |
| Important | Not important | Urgent | | Not
| Urgent |
|
| From "Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big,
| meaningful problems?"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412493 :
|
| > _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment ...
| "Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141_
| escot wrote:
| You could try TreeAge for mapping out probabilities:
| https://www.treeage.com/
|
| And just as a plug, I made https://www.knotend.com which is a
| keyboard-centric flowchart editor you can use to map
| dependencies. Im working in adding computation and probability
| like you say.
| tonypham wrote:
| Yeah, it does sound a bit complicated :))
|
| Powerful functionality always comes with the cost of UI/UX.
| We'll try to make our app simple and easy to use, so we try to
| avoid any complex features.
|
| Anyway, thanks so much for your feedback and ideas. I
| appreciate it.
| mhb wrote:
| And the probabilities could be a result of an intra-team
| prediction market. Half-joking.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I know, I know, it sounds very complicated. The actual end
| goal however is to show quantitatively why estimating too far
| out is generally unreliable as well as the associated
| combinatorial explosion of paths. The idea is basically to
| illustrate the actual reality of planning.
| belfalas wrote:
| Have you read "Righting Software" by Juval Lowy? You might
| really enjoy it based on your feedback above and here.
| There is a project design aspect that goes into this kind
| of planning (or at least reminds me of what you wrote).
| lambdatronics wrote:
| Interesting thought. One could do Monte Carlo simulations to
| estimate the probability distribution of time-to-finish. I
| considered something like this [0] to explain the empirical
| log-normal distribution of project completion times [1],
| although I hadn't thought about including sequencing &
| bottlenecks. Probabilistic programming [2] is the discipline
| concerned with solving this type of problem - some tooling
| might exist, although probably w/o a nice UI.
|
| [0]
| https://heteroskedasticblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/04/softwar...
|
| [1] https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-
| take-l...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming
| nickbauman wrote:
| I'm sure this has some amazing features that really help with
| project and personal productivity mgmt compared to other systems.
|
| But let me ask you a question. If I want to get your attention,
| which one of the following techniques will work best:
|
| 1) Write you a snailmail letter 2) Send you an email 3) Send you
| a text 4) Write it on a yellow post-it note on your refrigerator
|
| The answer is 4. Because it's the most difficult to ignore and
| leverages our ancient human physiology. It's not an accident that
| Kent Beck (Author of "Extreme Programming: Embrace Change") used
| post-it notes stuck to a wall that had every story written on it
| that mattered to the team within eyesight of every developer.
|
| The problem is that when we get together to put information into
| a Jira or a Trello or whatever, we're making THE TOOL happy. What
| matters is the state of the tool, not the state of the system
| you're working on.
| tonypham wrote:
| I think it depends. For simple notes/reminders/to-do lists,
| paper and pen are enough. But for bigger projects, you might
| need a tool. Choosing the right tool for your needs can make a
| significant impact on your progress. That's why there are so
| many PM tools on the market. Cheers,
| karmakaze wrote:
| I haven't tried the app yet and wanted to make sure it had one
| deal breaker feature: does it integrate with Github issues/PRs?
|
| When something goes wrong, I look at the code, recent changes to
| it, and the discussion that happened in writing that code.
|
| I'm not interested in anything that washes its hands of scope
| when the item is marked done. I want easy ways of getting back to
| all that data long after it's marked done.
| tonypham wrote:
| Github integration is not available at the moment, but we do
| plan to add it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
| [deleted]
| redhale wrote:
| Looks great!
|
| There seems to be a bug with dates (maybe timezones)? I'm in the
| central US, and just created a task with a date of today (Nov 13)
| -- it shows up as "Yesterday".
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks so much for your feedback. We'll check the timezone
| issue.
| herpderperator wrote:
| Found a typo on the landing page: "No more switching back and
| forth between a dozens of apps." Either drop the 'a' or put 'a
| dozen apps.'
| tonypham wrote:
| Got it. Thanks for your feedback.
| philippz wrote:
| Does it have offline support?
|
| This is the one thing I'm missing the most about Notion, Miro,
| Google Calendar, and all of this - offline support. In German
| trains, I'm offline, on flights, I'm often offline; while
| traveling, I'm often offline. Offline capabilities are often
| neglected.
| nisten wrote:
| It's rare to see offline support in a web app for a few
| reasons:
|
| LocalStorage is easy to use but too limited at 50Mb.
|
| WebSQL got deprecated by FireFox because of secuirty issues
| years ago ( albeit is still somewhat supported in Chrome ).
|
| The FileSystem API looked promising, and then google killed it.
|
| IndexedDb is the only option, it's slow on writes, therefore
| requiring major hacks like absurd-sql to be performant. It's
| also old, written before ES6, needs lots of boilerplate, but it
| does actually work. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...
|
| Even then however there is a limit of 2GB of persistent storage
| it can use, which is workable but still:
|
| Some versions of Safari are known to delete IndexedDB after 1
| week because of power savings. Chrome does not allow it unless
| you either accept notifications from that domain and/or pass a
| certain lighthouse score (these reasons are anectodal and not
| well-documented).
|
| So yeah it's a mess, and a bit sad considering it will take
| years to ratify a better standard for this, but not impossible
| to do. Also annoying to know that internally your browser is
| actually using sqlite under-the-hood anyway.
|
| Web based game engines (i.e. XREngine) are able to get by with
| IndexedDB i think, and apps like
| https://github.com/actualbudget/actual created by the author of
| absurd-sql are good codebases to follow as example.
|
| WebAssembly based sqlite is coming along nicely too.
| https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/tip/about.md.
|
| I am personally working on an offline-capable ML product using
| pyscript, svelte & indexedDb and it's been a painful ammount of
| fun so far.
| bityard wrote:
| In other words, native apps still have a place and will for
| the foreseeable future.
| leesalminen wrote:
| There was a post a couple weeks ago here about SQLite on WASM
| that looked very promising [0].
|
| I haven't tried it yet, but it's at the top of my list. I
| want to try and combine it with LiteFS for syncing back up to
| the server, replication, etc.
|
| Wondering if anyone has tried any of this out yet? There's
| the potential for a renaissance of offline-first support for
| devs.
|
| Edit: I see you mentioned it at the end, my bad
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374402
| postcoroner wrote:
| > 2GB of persistent storage
|
| 2 GB is a lot when you store plain json document data.
|
| > IndexedDb is the only option, it's slow on writes
|
| Only when you need a new transaction per write. Writing many
| documents in a single tx is not slow [1]
|
| > Safari are known to delete IndexedDB after 1 week
|
| This is not really a problem because if you have not used the
| app for one week, you can just replicate the data from the
| server again.
|
| > WebAssembly based sqlite is coming along nicely too
|
| WebAssembly cannot access the IndexedDB API. In my tests, all
| the wrappers that use webassembly are slower on writes the
| just using IndexedDB via javascript.
|
| The fastest you can go is by using a Memory-Synced wrapper
| around IndexedDB, like LokiJS does it or the RxDB memory
| plugin. [2]
|
| [1] https://rxdb.info/slow-indexeddb.html
|
| [2] https://rxdb.info/rx-storage-memory-synced.html
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > This is not really a problem because if you have not used
| the app for one week, you can just replicate the data from
| the server again.
|
| You can't if you haven't been able to push up the data for
| a week.
|
| But in that case, you'd just have to remember to 'use it'
| ever day or so.
|
| Had a use case a few years back for data collection app in
| remote African villages. There were definitely situations
| where a week without decent data access were possible, and
| 'offline' became a requirement.
| postcoroner wrote:
| Cool, but we are talking about a PM tool here, so what
| really matters is people having no/slow internet for a
| short period of time.
| nisten wrote:
| I had not looked into RxDB before thank you. By any chance
| you know how much their Premium plugin with IndexedDB
| support costs, their price is not listed.
| postcoroner wrote:
| You could use the dexie.js based storage [1] as a start.
| It is fast enough for most use cases and comes for free.
|
| [1] https://rxdb.info/rx-storage-dexie.html
| nisten wrote:
| It looks like dexie supports svelte, this is pretty
| awesome thank you. https://dexie.org/docs/Tutorial/Svelte
| belfalas wrote:
| _> LocalStorage is easy to use but too limited at 50Mb._
|
| Asking sincerely: to me it seems that 50Mb is quite a bit of
| storage if you are only persisting simple numbers/strings or
| small JSON documents?
| lukevp wrote:
| You could just wrap the web app in Capacitor for mobile and
| Electron for desktop, and easily use a SQLite db for
| unlimited persistence. If someone is interested in offline
| support, I don't think it is a dealbreaker to have to
| download an app. That's pretty common (eg Netflix, Spotify,
| hbo, any of the streaming services. The offline support only
| works in the app, not the web player).
| nisten wrote:
| Logically it's not a deal breaker (as Electron is quite
| mature) but practically there are a few problems:
|
| Users are downloading apps less and less and relying more
| on web links from apps they already have. So they mostly
| tend to end up on their browser anyway, and then workflow
| is disrupted while commuting and going in and out of
| signal.
|
| Other less important reasons to consider would be in my
| opinion:
|
| Electron is a bit too heavy on memory for users with 8GB
| and less of ram albeit it's gotten better lately.
|
| I can't use ublock-origin on chrome or private-relay on
| safari while using an electron app (in this case however I
| still benefit from adding a blocklist like
| https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ipv6zero/ to my
| /private/etc/hosts file on mac)
| systemicdanna wrote:
| My experience is different regarding Electron apps. Many
| of the Electron apps I use (Spotify, Slack, Notion) have
| a web UI option. I never use it and now just a handful of
| people who sometimes open Notion or Slack on web.
| dboreham wrote:
| > WebAssembly based sqlite is coming along nicely too.
|
| It uses OPS which could in theory be used by other kinds of
| database besides SQL.
|
| https://web.dev/file-system-access/#accessing-files-
| optimize...
| flakeoil wrote:
| > The FileSystem API looked promising, and then google killed
| it.
|
| The File System Access API [0] exists today. Unfortunately
| it's only Chrome based browsers, and not Firefox supporting
| this. Mayby you referred to an older "standard".
|
| [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
| systemicdanna wrote:
| I think we need to define better (or re-define) what offline
| support actually means. Even an ideal fantasy implementation
| of a PM app with offline support will have limitations unless
| you sync the entire company's space with all clients (users,
| files, docs, comments, tasks, roadmaps, etc).
|
| So IMO selling offline support as a feature has to come with
| a clear description of what it means.
| Zamicol wrote:
| Insightful comment! I've faced similar issues when wanting to
| store an arbitrary amount of data "locally", but usable via a
| web interface. Because of the various limitations you
| enumerated, our conclusion was to have a local web server,
| written in Go, that stores what we need on disk. Then the web
| application talks over a JSON HTTP API when storing and
| retrieving.
| kevsim wrote:
| Yeah, when we built our product (kitemaker.co) we introduced
| offline capabilities quite early because my co-founder often
| had very spotty wifi during train commutes. We ended up making
| all writes totally optimistic with data sync in the background.
| Has the nice performance benefit of the frontend never waiting
| for the server as well.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Offline is nice in theory, but not as useful in reality. For
| solo projects, I will skip all the fancy tools and just use
| org-mode (emacs), which is offline. For a company project, most
| people don't get to decide which tool to use. Besides, if you
| spend significant time in a project management tool, even if
| your title is project manager, there is something seriously
| wrong with the project already. In which case, the tools is not
| the problem you should be worried about.
| [deleted]
| steveharman wrote:
| Doesn't Notion have offline support these days?
|
| I just launched the Android app with all networking and mobile
| disabled, the app showed me all my pages etc and allowed me to
| enter new data.
| ildon wrote:
| Try akiflow.com, it has excellent offline support.
| tonypham wrote:
| Offline support is costly, and we do not have the resources for
| it yet. For businesses that have a lot of small customers,
| offline support is challenging.
| klabb3 wrote:
| To add why: the ecosystem is immature. I am building a
| decentralized app (the old way) but with an event sourced
| architecture (append-only list of JSON events/commands).
|
| The storage itself is trivial but for everything else
| (queries, syncing, conflicts, validation, permissions, schema
| changes) there's little support and I had to make my own
| stuff. It works for me, because because I only have 2-3
| entities but your app is much more complex, so I wouldn't
| recommend it even if you started from scratch.
|
| I will say that there's nothing that really stops offline
| aside from ecosystem support and maturity. All it really
| takes is a medium-big well maintained project that solves
| 80-90% of use cases. I think CRDTs are promising for the data
| layer because it simplifies the API surface (at the expense
| of complex implementation).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Really appreciated this no-no sense, straightforward reply.
|
| I agree, the reason offline support is often not that great
| is that the customers who are most likely to pay for your
| product are the least likely to have issues with online
| connectivity or to care about offline support, OP's edge
| cases notwithstanding.
|
| I even travel fairly often in the US and it's rare when I'm
| on a plane that doesn't have wifi.
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| Have you tried Obsidian with its Kanban plug-in? If so, I'd
| love to learn what you make of options like that?
| tonypham wrote:
| I haven't tried it yet. Will take the time to check it out.
| Thanks for your suggestions.
| [deleted]
| enra wrote:
| We built Linear(https://linear.app) to be offline first from
| the beginning. It's kind of hard to do later.
|
| It's architected in a way that client syncs the data, all the
| actions happen locally and then delta packets are synced back
| to the server. This also makes the app really fast because the
| client doesn't have to wait for the network to complete the
| action.
| rattray wrote:
| Thank you for building Linear the way you have! So snappy in
| so many ways.
|
| I think it could be interesting to see Linear add
| personal/private TODO support of some kind... like everyone
| gets a TODO list that is mostly a view of your linear tickets
| with each as a bullet point in a document (similar to when
| you mention them in a Notion checklist doc) but where you can
| also add other items which are just text (and/or entries in a
| personal/private linear space)
| systemicdanna wrote:
| Linear looks great! I love how focused it is on this specific
| problem area. I don't find all-in-one apps like OPs very
| useful. Can't replace all my tools like chat, docs, project
| management, etc at once.
|
| Will give Linear a try!
| voz_ wrote:
| Tell TA he's a wizard but his dependency graph causes
| deadlocks
| crsAbtEvrthng wrote:
| I love linear but your advertised "offline mode" is not what
| I would expect it to be. If I open the Mac app when I'm
| offline I just get a blank window and have no access to any
| of my data or a window telling me "Unknown Error loading your
| workspace data". So I have to login once and keep the app
| open before I go offline. If I close the app while being
| offline and reopen it without internet connection I won't
| have access to any of my data. This is sadly killing the app
| for me. Is this expected behaviour? Just a "read only" mode
| of the last state I had when last logged in would be enough
| for me.
| jonp888 wrote:
| Remember the Milk (https://www.rememberthemilk.com/) is a
| fairly advanced todo application which works identically
| offline and online.
|
| I believe they use Google Firebase Cloud to automatically
| synchronise data between all devices and platforms.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Looks great!
|
| I might have missed it but does it support flexible recurrence
| for tasks? E.g. "change furnace filters every 3 months" but not
| on a fixed schedule but 3 months from when I last completed the
| task?
| tonypham wrote:
| Yes, it does support custom repeat.
| vladstudio wrote:
| To me personally, your product description here at HN (on top of
| this page) is more to the point than the copy on the homepage!
| rglover wrote:
| I agree. That should be the "pitch" in the marketing copy.
| Something like "I got frustrated with Trello, Asana, etc. so I
| decided to fix it" and build the narrative from there.
|
| To the OP: this is extremely well done. Congrats on launching.
| Love the design and the packaging.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback. I must admit
| that we're not good at copywriting. I'm so happy that I
| received a lot of great ideas from the comments here.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. Probably on our website, we're trying
| to sound "smart" with fancy words. We'll work on the copy to
| make it more clear.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| And for me it's quite the contrary - the description on HN says
| nothing about how it actually works, it looks just like whining
| and flaming and bragging.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| This looks very cool, I will be signing up and testing it out!
| Quick question, how many hours per week would you say it took
| over the two years to reach this point? Full time or part time?
| Thanks.
| tonypham wrote:
| Thanks, mikeg8. About 40-50 hours per week. Fulltime. It takes
| a lot of time to build the infrastructure.
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